CARLOS PERONA - ENKIDU

Carlos Perona is a twenty-eight year old Spaniard living in Maastricht (NE). He works in public administration and policy-related fields, has a Bachelor and Master's in International Relations, and a second Master's in Organizational Behaviour. To date he has also published a poem on the Society of Classical Poets website (exploring the myth of princess Europa), and has uploaded a few narrative pieces online (including: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7IsSu518-w).

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​Enkidu
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​“Gilgamesh stood on the great earth like an ox…until I discover whether that fellow is a man or a god, my mountain bound feet I will not turn home…”
-The Sumerian Poems of Gilgamesh, The Lord of the Living One’s Mountain, trans. Andrew George.

​Rose was a large woman of yeoman stock. She liked to talk but didn’t do it much these days. Her son didn’t speak a lot because he had become traumatized after losing his father. The realization that reason and a natural order to things do not always prevail had marked him, so she thought. The best of people carry a like trauma into adulthood. He was sitting in the kitchen quietly when Mr Risala knocked on the door and told Rose to pack the boy’s bag because he would be taking him. She turned from the front door and towards the end of the hall where Mr Risala was standing. Upstairs, Mr Risala was by her son’s room’s door, and then when she went in to pack he was there by the window too. Mr Risala was a strange man. She sighed and made up the luggage, then called the boy from the kitchen but he was already outside with Mr Risala waiting in his black car, so she took the bag out and Mr Risala was nice enough to put it in the trunk.
 
Rose’s son had said something about jesters on mountains of foam with a smoke of plastic about them while they watched television together the night before. She thought he meant famous people and important people and the powerful. The boy would talk like that, all poetic and ominous. He said a storm came and took their skin away. She though he meant some kind of reckoning, so she wasn’t too surprised to have the boy leave in this way. Mr Risala and his ilk had always been around, coming up from the Hill, as they called it, even before he was born, looking out, keeping abreast. The boy had come strangely and she always knew he would be taken away strangely, like everything, like life. She sighed. She hadn’t ever been a melancholy woman but was becoming one in what, she supposed, was now approaching old age.
 
Mr Risala drove quickly through the empty highway. He wore a light maroon sack suit that was a bit too thick for mid-July and which he left buttoned as he drove making for a strange fit around the shoulders, a ridding crease that didn’t really correspond to any natural line of the human body. On top of everything it was actually oversized so that it hid his hands on the wheel except for the fingers. A messy combover came unstuck from its gelatin suspension so that Mr Risala’s eyes were partly covered by tufts of his hair. He didn’t brush at them, though. It’s like he could see all the same. Like clothes and hair and even face were all a bit of a put-on. The boy noticed all this only subconsciously as he looked lazily outside at the back of a sign that read “Welcome to Urville” whose wooden bar standings were partially caked in moss that somehow retained moisture in the midst of the angry summer heat, and across the top of which a decorative horn hanged off a rusty chain. Rust and mud on iron and horn. Rust put there by the rain, mud by the wind. The boy heard the bells and grunts he had so often fallen asleep to there. Bells on cows and grunts from bulls. Bells and grunts. Bells, grunts and wind skating on country grass.
“You ever seen phosphorus cut the sky?”
“Sir?” Mr. Risala looked at the boy’s reflection in the rear-view mirror.
“I have, but I had different eyes then, and it wasn’t this sky.”
“So then...you’re from someplace else...”
“We got most of the planning done back then. Under the other sky.”
“Do you remember much?”
“No. I did, when I was fresher. But a lot of it is gone now. That wasn’t nice, you know? Appearing all over the place with the old woman.”
“Did I? I meant to walk behind her. It’s difficult to control sometimes. Hope I didn’t scare her too badly.”
“She’s used to that sort of thing. You and your co-workers have been coming around a while. Still, we owe them discretion.”
“Not we, sir. I’m human.”
“What's that?”
“What I mean is, I’m not from the other sky. I just...became this way. After years of service to the Hill I’ve become less, well, less physical, I guess. Lofty doctrines beget lofty bodies, as the president says.”
“From the other sky? Goodness! Do you suppose I’m an alien or something?”
“Well, that is to say, it seemed you were implying...There are many theories…”
“The other sky was right here, Risala! before...”
The boy looked forlorn for a few moments.
“She’ll be ok, won’t she? Your mother.”
“Our enemies will certainly come for her, but the Hill will provide protection.”
 
Back in the house Rose picked up a piece of paper on the kitchen counter with what looked like a child’s drawing on it. It was in the shape of an animal, not exactly clear what. A quadruped, anyway.
 
“Gil’s Brainchild?”
“Sure, I guess you could call us that.” Came a voice in her head, or hovering just above. “We came from your minds and, like children, in the end we will replace you.”
“What…? What are you?”
“I heard you thinking. It was loud. I made a body from your thoughts. Would you like to see?”
 
As Rose faced her second strange visitor of the day, Mr Risala broke a prolonged silence in the car:
“Sir, don’t suppose you have any inkling of where the other might be?”
“Other?”
“Your twin.”
“I don’t recall anything like that…”
“Yes. Possibly some indecision on your part when you entered the zygote manifested as a separate person. Oh, but you were a toddler when he disappeared, and though you have more or less retained your cognitive abilities, not much was said to you when the twin disappeared. A kidnapping I believe. Never solved. It’s why your parents – or, caretakers, rather – split up.”
The boy sat silent again, for a bit, “I see. It’s taken centuries for the Hill to piece me back together. It’s odd that something should go so wrong at the final hour.”
 
They arrived at a large, circular glass and silver colored modern building in a valley, the word HILL above its entry way (though, as the boy now saw, it wasn’t really on a hill at all, more like a flat plot of land all around). The gate was tall and made of metal, separated from the structure by a wide grass lawn. Mr Risala and the boy drove right up to the entrance. When they passed underneath it the boy noted a clumsy circularity as he saw that more or less straight segments of metal made up the façade. It was sleeker and more impressive from a distance.
 
They walked up several flights of stairs made of metal mesh until the office of a thin man with barbarous teeth and a muscular smile, hair too juvenile for his face and forward curving body, plain white shirt tightly strung at the back on account of his shoulders being angled inwardly, and generally endowed of the same light touch and dubious physicality as Mr Risala. He had some medical apparatuses set up by his desk to take blood samples and readings from the boy.
 
“Oh dear. Dear, dear. These aren’t right. Your readings should match those of your previous life.”
“They don’t?”
“No. I’m afraid you may be the wrong one. Of the two twins, I mean. Mind you, that doesn’t mean the other’s the right one. It may be that you both have only partial readings.”
 
Several days passed. The boy was well cared for at the facility. He was told that the thin man – who was apparently the president of the Hill complex, and who people would sometimes just call the Hill – would need some time to decide how to proceed given the set back they had encountered.
 
His actual name wasn’t really used, and when someone mentioned it, or some version of it, another employee boasting superior seniority would interject that that name was, in fact, an alias once used on a past mission, at a previous iteration of the Hill – for its purposes had to be kept secret and ditto its major figures, lest the false gods assail. The president’s true name, the interjecting agent would continue, was actually such and such. But this would often also get thrown out as possible original in some later interaction by whoever brought it up. Apparently, the fellow had used so many names that, as a joke, Hill agents had taken to calling him a.k.a. (also known as); President Aka.
 
The case of another, more explicitly mocking, title, this time designating the Hill complex itself, was different. It was temporary employees – drivers, receptionists, kitchen staff and such – that had long ago taken to colloquially dubbing it Complex Kitsch, and passing the title on to newcomers as a matter of tradition. Apparently, every generation of rotating staff took to it as an appropriate description of the, to their minds, garish, 60s hippie-inspired interior design.
 
The boy learnt these things while he waited, hanging out at the cantina and drab inner lawn. Finally, one day he was called back to the president’s office.
“Ah, come in, Gil. That’s the name they gave you, yes?”
“Yes.”
“You do, however, have most of your memories?”
“I have a good amount.”
“Well then, although you present as a ten-year-old tike I’ll address you as a fully-grown man, shall I?”
“I wish you would. I am older than you.”
“You, oh, ha, yes! Good.” The president laughed and looked over at the ubiquitous Mr Risala before continuing. “Now, the purpose of the cult those nice townsfolk that raised you are so devoted to – the point of setting up a religion with all the trappings and images of your ancient kingdom, including the secret rites, things only your family, the royals, would have known – was to draw out anyone whose ancestral memory linked them to you. In this way, scattered people with genetic traces of your family would come together, attracted by their resonance with those images, convert to the cult and, hopefully, breed. We estimate you, after many centuries of this, are about 90% of what you were back then. That means you should be able to do what the false gods engineered you for all that time ago, but also – crucially – undo it.”
“If I’m so nearly what I was, why are my readings off?”
“The problem isn’t with your body but with your soul. Your astral body is not a match for the older version of you.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“We have your past life’s mummy. Mummification is very good at leaving a stable resonance for the astral body, you see. That was partly the point of it. That and preserving enough material for cloning, I suppose. But we can’t do that. We’ve tried. You refused to incarnate unless it was to a naturally born body. Egg and sperm, placenta, the whole thing.”
“Why?”
“You don’t remember? I don’t know…you’re a romantic, I gather. Anyway, you do not match your mummy. We suspect the twin brother (a bizarre anomaly, made stranger by his being kidnapped when you were both – what? – a year old or so) is either a match himself or one half of an equation that balances with you. Now this is likely related to the false gods. We suspect they took him.”
“You said the false gods engineered me?”
“Oh, dear. You really don’t remember much. Yes. They made themselves a vessel. One that could see them. This whole world is weaved in the colors of the true and the false gods, you see. All of history and cosmology is one big contest between them. Every action, person, place, sequence of time, discrete event, animal and plant is painted in varying degrees of good and bad, order and chaos. The true gods have their creation and the false gods have theirs. This world is a mess of both. A fortunate accident we would preserve. You are able to perceive those colors, not the colors of humans, not the colors of the rainbow, but colors seen with invisible eyes. Seven, like the six colors of the rainbow plus white. When you found out what they really wanted, what the false gods were planning for humanity, you turned on them, and set up the Hill. A group that would fight them. But they found out and burnt your kingdom, scattered your people so no one would have the ability you had and have – the ability to learn their plan – ever again. No one would be able to discern the pattern of their actions. Except we kept the faith. We gathered you back together again.”
“So, the town I’ve been in, the family I was born to, Rose and the man who left, their religion is your creation?”
“Yes. All with the purpose of drawing traces of you out from the world. We didn’t know when we would get a near genetic match, of course. Everyone in that town has quite a bit of inheritance from your old self by now. We had to check newborns periodically. You’re as close as our charts tell us we’re likely to get. If we allow continued procreation you will only become diluted.”
“But why would having certain genes make me the same person?”
“It doesn’t, to be sure. But the universe never creates two perfectly identical things, otherwise they would just be the same thing. The closer entities get to being identical, though, the more they share, even invisibly, even of their thoughts. We are hoping this principle will help you find your brother. Quite apart from all that, however, we made contact with you centuries ago. Setting up the cult was your idea.”
“Contact, how?”
“Oh, I don’t quite know how those things work, myself. Seances were all the rage. The point is you told us you would take a new birth on the earth if we could get your old body together again, so to speak. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t remember that either. Birth occludes such things.”
“I’ve been dead for centuries…but, then, if the false ones decided to terminate whatever purpose I was to serve, if they determined that line was too dangerous to pursue, why steal my twin?”
“Perhaps they saw what we were doing and decided to try again, get a return on our investment. And perhaps…”
“What?”
“Well, perhaps they did something to cause the twin birth. Maybe they’ve been interfering…”
“What is their plan?”
“A terrible thing. All will be explained. I hope that in telling you your memory will surface. You will learn to hunt the traces of the false gods that haunt this world. But you must find out what the false gods want with your brother. You have to find him and find out what he is being used for. What their plan is. To this end, you will live as the priests of old, activate the true sight by abstinence from pollution. You will swear cleanliness for the duration of this lifetime. Following the habits of your past life should jog that memory.”
About this time, at the mention of hardships ahead, the boy got distracted. His mind was still young and his equally young eyes drifted towards the only bit of aesthetic excitation in the room: a beautiful parchment with embroidered writing and ebony frame hanging on a wall.
“Nice, eh? It’s an ancient prayer of our order. Some say you were the first to recite it. During your past life, after rebelling against the false gods.”
It read,
Protect us, oh thoughts of ours and of the elders,
against such a one as has seen the deep and terrible madness outside thought.
That was more or less the only time the boy felt himself bonding with the president. The latter was a devoted company man and, surely, a devotee of the Hill’s esoteric ideas, though that never translated into any kind of devotion towards, or even particular interest in, Gil himself. It was approximately the same with all the Hill’s agents. Gil was happy about that, though it sometimes surprised him, if he really took the time to dwell on it. The explanation he would come up with was that, really, if anything, he was a servant, not a master, and had caused these people a lot of trouble by initiating dissent against the false ones millennia ago.
 
On the question of whether he himself felt like an object of veneration, like a thing come out of a distant past clad in the vitality of a time when the earth was younger and wilder, the answer was that he did, at least in childhood, but then all children feel like that. Maybe he didn’t feel it as much anymore. There had never really been much in his manner to confirm his provenance. Not to say there hadn’t been anything. That other life had shun through. Once, Aka ruminated that it may be necessary to kill Gil’s twin or anyone else who really got in the way. If it came to this, Aka had gone on, maybe it would be better to use a knife, guns being too noisy. Gil had barely missed a beat in replying that knives are noisy, because people are. The human being is designed to make a sound such as anyone near it will know if he is cut into, and the human ear is designed to catch and react to that sound. Death is seldom quiet. Gil did not remember Aka’s face ever displaying anything like fear before or since. For whatever reason, he sometimes recalled the incident with pride, but also, inevitably, guilt. Yet the information he relayed hadn’t felt like a memory, at least not a specific once. Maybe – the thought came inexplicably – it was a memory of things to come.
 
Other than a flash of apprehension once on the president’s face, Gil was not the Hill’s star, nor did he really ever seek to be. Still, he sometimes thought over the subsequent years, affording more amenities, maybe better accommodations might have been in order.
 
Which isn’t to say he resented the traveling and the missions. There was a definite romance in it. Gil was trained to follow and discern the pattern of the false gods, crisscrossing the country. Up and down dry and watery hills and valleys, north and south and east and west. Towns with people with names from novels. He met Eugenes who add sugar to wine and Antonios who water down whiskey in places where everyone meets to drink beer. County after county of grape, barley and barrels. Grown men who don’t know what size socks they wear and grown women who don’t know how much their cars are worth because they take care of each other out there. He fell in love, over and over, over and in spite of himself, with the colors of the false gods. Ever repentant and ever flagellating, but ever in love with the crusty clay of country roads and escarpments so low they’re bungalows, yet somehow high, so high in humble dignity as to rub the sky. He stayed in hotels with silverfish in the walls, cigarette ash on the carpet, beautiful melancholy people in the parking lot deep into the night, pensioners tilling the reception, windows above Saturday morning streets paved in silver with Friday night tin cans. Places in rhythmic surrender to the leisure of seasons, yet where the natural state is intensity of action, and where the force that moves people towards brawling and drinking is not an aberration, but a promise.
 
And here and there he came upon un-mistakable signs from his other self. His long-lost twin brother was as busy crisscrossing as he was, no doubt weaving together the traces of the false gods into a destructive filigree of chains meant to enslave humanity forever.
 
During those long mission stints, Gil would feel his twin out there, but would try to turn away from the impression, to distract himself from possibly being seduced by it. He hadn’t always been so cautious. Before, he would try to connect with him across whatever distance separated them. As Aka had said, the more two things are alike, the more they are connected. He would face a window at night, look at his reflection, and pretend to be looking at his other self, through a glass, darkly. Another self, made of night and air, like the other gods. His twin must be living in a wholly different manner. No vows of abstinence and probably no fear of falling under the sway of an external power, or of failing. Allegiance to the vast out-there must feel like forgone victory. After all, Gil fought for this tiny island of humanity, but the other one was on the side of the infinite outside.  Self-assured, ally to the cold wind and its longings, beard like azure dust reflecting the electric storm to which it was always turned – for that beard would be white, like Gil’s had been since it first came in, a mark of his soul’s antiquity, or of the stresses of youth. Surely, however different, the other self would have suffered those anxieties. He would not have been spared the terrible weight of destiny, at least not in childhood, when every duty is so earnestly received. In this, at least, they were one. But not just in this. Gil hated the sight of women, loving it too much, and knew that, without the Hill, his other self would have hungrily come to know pleasures Gil never would. In desire, in hunger, they were one as well, though not in satiety, not ever.
 
The plan of his other self and the false gods, so far as Gil (with Aka’s help) could discern, was as follows:
 
Behind the scenes, unknown to the world, there are people who would, if properly guided by the Hill, save the species. They are the natural pillars of faith, as the president of the Hill would tell Gil through that wide smile of his. They are the scaffolds in the architecture of humanity that the false gods are knocking down. And if they all tumble and the roof gives out, the false gods will have a clear path to enter in, to sweep down from their remote sky and feed on mortal hearts. That roof, that solid marble shell, is the true sky beyond which are cosmic storms and horrors human minds cannot fathom. The solid roof is the true gods, after whom the deluge.
 
Thoughts are the most stable construction material from which that protective roof could have been built. They naturally circle back on themselves. Human thinking is circular. When you hold a thought in your mind it leads, and is led to, by a potentially infinite change. Such and such also known as such and such also known as such and such. Irrational – or as the archaic seers of humanity’s dark ages would put it, inspired – thinking is not really thinking at all, but proceeds from some flash of chaos, from lightning.
 
The true gods are the cream of human thought, the dense coagulant atop and between churning minds. The more self-reflexive, insistent, vigorous or, to the uninitiated, tortuous and compulsive a thought or series of thoughts is, the more it appears as a shade of the true gods, those protectors of human intellection against the irrationality of reality. Meanwhile, the false gods are like electrical currents or sudden changes in air pressure. They care for nothing, they rip human constructs apart.
 
Gil had to find traces of the false gods. They are strongest where the pillars of faith are, after all, they wouldn’t bother concentrating somewhere unless they saw an opportunity to do damage. He would remind those people of the true gods by drawing them into the forgotten truths, images and doctrines that the solid sky is made of. The casket that shields from death, from the outside storm, is a thick fabric of mental images that disappears if the greatest minds among us, the true poets, stop thinking them. Gil would make sure they kept thinking right. It isn’t hard, because it isn’t really a matter of debate or logical argument. It’s about fostering a mental fixation in people. The president of the Hill had given him all the training he needed. Just wash the minds of the true poets out there, wash them clean.
 
Gil would dream about the outside storm every other night and, he suspected, more often than that, but he couldn’t really recall his dreams too well. It frightened him, of course. The colors of the false gods must be all there is out there in the void. In his dreams those impossible shades were usually decoded by his brain as some kind of electric blue, like lightning, or electric copper, like a gold and orange tempest.
 
But there had to be more. There had to be, according to the president, a pattern to where these people were, these true poets, so that it could be predicted, so that Gil could anticipate and intercept his brother, finally find him, maybe break the conditioning the false gods and their lackeys had subjected him to all his life and win him for the true way.
 
Gil’s gift was that he could see the colors of the true and false gods. Those with the mark upon them were as if covered in a dew, a water droplet whose glisten was as rippling fire. It reflected others. They each reflected all the rest. He would look into them and see the next ones, the ones to be chased, and before leaving, would leave an image of the true gods – provided by Mr Risala – for them to speak through and try to fight the false.
 
“The great ceiling that protects us from the outer storm, indeed, the very true gods themselves, are made of human thought. If we spread the image of the true gods and get those whose imaginations are strongest to envision them, we fortify the sky against the false ones.” So taught the president.
 
These images were usually of animals, dogs, cats, snakes, more or less ambiguous forms. Whether it worked or not Gil didn’t know because there was never any time to go back and check.
 
Mr Risala would drive him from place to place. In nearly twenty years the black funerary car he drove broke down only once. It happened down a stone flanked highway where desert and moss mysteriously met at the seam of desert rocks and tight packed soil near a welcome sign off which hung a horn of plenty. A gust of air channeled itself into the bone producing an arresting wail, a sound of ceremony suddenly waking from its ancient recess.
“I was afraid of this.”
“Nothing to worry about for you. You can do that thing where you appear and disappear. I’m the one who’s gonna have to walk.”
“I have a feeling it won’t work going forward.”
“Why not?”
“The place we’re heading. You’re sure about it?”
“Yeah. I did what I always do. I find the clearest reflection in the last one. The clearest trace of the false gods. This is it.”
“Yeah…listen, this is where you were born. The town I took you from almost twenty years ago.”
“It…? I hadn’t realized.”
“No, well, I have a feeling the locals put a curse on me. I can’t enter the perimeter of the town. It’s like there’s a great big wall around it.”
“Why would they do that? Aren’t they followers of the Hill?”
“Heretics. You go on ahead. Avoid talking to them too much.”
 
Gil walked the remainder of the stretch of highway. As he passed the welcome sign with its rust and mud he thought about places like the one it announced, where rust cakes old machines and little girls make mud pies, and he loved the rust and the earth, loved it and laughed for the love of it, but didn’t notice doing so, as other thoughts caught him too soon.
 
Eventually he entered a suburb-like row of houses, if suburbs could sprawl and leave space for crops between dwellings.
“Gil? My goodness! Martha come see. It’s Gil!” Someone said from a porch.
“Gil?” came a woman’s voice from inside the house. “Sweet Rosy’s boy?”
“The same!”
“Hold on I’m coming, let me get my blouse on.”
“Oh, she’s got arthritis these days, takes her a spell, you know? But my goodness, fancy that! Rosy’s son in the flesh!”
“You recognize me?”
“Recognize you? I never forget a face, especially one over whose first communion I presided! Come over, let me look at you! Well now, you’re a man! What have you been up to? I never could get those government bureaucrats to tell me what happened to you after your dear mother went. I tried to track down what foster family they’d put you in but it was one administrative mote after another.” For his part, Gil recognized the man as well. He had often seen this face at his childhood home. It was the local preacher: an old-fashioned sort, executive contour classic haircut, suspenders underneath a beige summer suit under a hokey white leather cape with blue highlight, and earnest face with a short copper-ish beard.
“No, I…I never went into foster care. What do you mean? Did something happen to mom?”
“Oh, my boy…could it be that you don’t know? But, where did you go, then?”
“Sir, please, what happened to my mother.”
“Oh, Gil. She passed. A heart attack, it was. They found her on the kitchen floor. Had a drawing of yours with her. Her last thoughts were of you.”
“A drawing…? What of?”
“I don’t recall. An animal, maybe.”
“Like this?” Gil showed the minister one of Mr Risala’s images, one of the hieroglyphs the true gods speak through. He kept several on his person to give to the pillars should he discover one marked by the false gods.
“Yes, very similar! That brings me back…”
“The Hill was supposed to protect her.” Gil whispered to himself.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing, never mind. It was wonderful seeing you, sir. I have to go.”
“Gil, wait! Martha will be down soon. Have you eaten?”
 
But he walked away just as quickly as he could. The death of his mother was not something he could ever have fathomed. He took it on faith that the Hill was protecting her. For the first time he felt like a son, a human son, not a soldier come to do work with only a passing responsibility to the wellbeing of a woman whose lot in life it had happened to be to bring him into it. And with the first real pang of filial love came indignation, anger at what had happened. What a shame, he thought, that love should enter him flanked by rage.
 
The acreage around his childhood home was still in use. Neighbors had set up a regime of communal ownership over its land and animals. Gil walked through the sound of bells and grunts, surprised by memory. “Oh, that’s right, dad was a cattle farmer,” he smiled.
 
He hearkened to that old house. It was more painful than he could have imagined. Walking in took him almost an hour. By the time he made it to the kitchen where she had died, he was surrounded by visions. What he saw was as strange as the lack of surprise with which it hit him. This room shone in the colors of the gods. They had been here, and no other entity. Certainly not the false ones. The Hill had done this. Had all those marked by the false gods experienced the same fate? Were the images of the true gods portals of death he had been papering the world with?
 
He could make no sense of it but needed not to be alone. He went right back to the priest, still sat on the same porch, now with his wife – a woman of grey abundant hair in a light dress – and took them up on lunch.
 
“Yes, no, sorry. I suppose I should have been in contact, let you know how things went. But I was so young. I suppose they never told me she had died, to spare my feelings. It was relatives you see, that took me in.” He weaved some likely story.
“Poor woman.”
“She went through so much. After my dad left, and brother...”
“Gil, I don’t know what your adoptive folks thought they knew but…your father died.”
“Died?”
“Yes. He didn’t abandon you. The man was no fancy-chaser. Also a heart attack. Took him when you were very young. And there was no brother that I recall.”
Gil’s mind was more turbulent than he had ever experienced.
“A latter-day Cincinnatus,” the preacher went on, “left his plough on the field when the town needed him.”
“What happened?”
“Those awful folks from that big building off the highway with a sign that says Hill on it, science guys, they were prospecting, buttering up some of the peripheral property owners, trying to buy plots. Your father was a solid man, he commanded respect around here. Managed to convince people to shun those advances.”
“Did he die soon after that?”
“Yeah, actually. Wasn’t long after. Tell me, my boy. Did they raise you in the faith?”
“Yes. I was brought up on stories of the great struggle.”
“Yes. Good. And what is the great struggle, remind me, I’m an old man, memory’s failing.”
“You’re testing me.” Gil smiled at the pedagogic, even parental, conceit. It felt infinitely warm to him at that moment. “Well, there are those who know the holy accident of order and strive to preserve this island that is the world against the outer chaos, and there are those who delude themselves into believing reality itself is ordered, that the great beyond is other than a storm of death. The former built the roof of the earth, and invented – by focused attention and magic – the true gods who hover in the sky to protect us. Sentinels first forged by the elder priests of a bygone era. The others, the deluded, commune with the false gods beyond. The gods of storms ever raging. The outer chaos. They conspire to break the sky and let the chaos in.”
 The priest and his wife looked at each other with concerned expressions.
“Seems… somewhere along the line you got your theology backwards, young man…”
Gil was momentarily surprised by this. Then again, Mr Risala had called the townsfolk heretics, perhaps the Hill and the town were at odds even in the stories they told. Perhaps the religion the Hill had crafter had gotten twisted by the devout.
“Father, how did the church start?”
“Goes all the way back to when God created man and woman.”
“What do you know about the Hill?”
“Not much. Seemed like a bad batch of vagues and panderers to me. They used to do a lot of snooping around here. We finally had to tell them they weren’t welcome anymore. I banned them from coming around, though I still see them every now and then. Never did know what they were after.”
“There’s some kind of…well…protection against them, I think…”
“Yes. We aren’t sorcerers here. Just faithful folks. If there’s any protection working against them, it’s because they’re in with the wrong team, you see?”
“Witches.”
“What’s that Martha?”
“It’s in scripture, or Shakespeare.”
“And she’s a preacher’s wife, what do you think about that Gil? Not to worry, Shakespeare will do us fine, eh?” Again, that paternal conceit so comforting to Gil. The preacher’s wife went on, “The witches that do a number on poor Macbeth. The ones that put all those awful things in their cauldron. Bit of this, bit of that. They cut bodies up. They get Macbeth to kill folks. They appear and disappear all the time.”
“Mr Risala....”
“Yes.”
“What?” The preacher looked unsure.
“You’re a good man, sweetheart. You keep this community together. But a preacher’s wife keeps an eye out. Notices things.” She winked at her husband.
“Am I the cauldron?” The question welled up from Gil before he could filter it.
“Oh, no young man. No, no.” Martha reassured, “But folks who feel like they’ve got no shape to them – they don’t like it that others feel they do. They’ll want you thinking you are.”
In a haze he parted from the kind old couple and got some sleep.
 
He dreamt of the cosmic storm that night. At first, he was afraid, as he always was during such dreams. The storm had broken through the human sky. Gil had failed his mission and now nothing could stop it. It was like the sound of wild buffalo, their hoofs touching down hard on the dry packed earth and chasing after him. He found a crevice in the earth, an opening into caverns and tunnels which he ran to for shelter. He knew that if he went deep enough, down into the guts of the dying world, he would be safe. Eventually, after a lifetime of dream-time, he arrived at a vast reservoir of fresh water glistening of its own light. He was filthy with earth and fear, parched and dry to the marrow, so he leapt into the blue. Then, it was as though the entire body of liquid dislodged and fell through the very bottom of the world into empty space, and he found that it was no longer a pool, but an infinite rolling country of black, roaring clouds. He was in the storm! In the very midst of it! And in that midst was not chaos or rage alone. More disturbing than simple electric mayhem: the impossible outline of the human form, seated on a throne of blue lightning. Gil was presented, naked and falling – a sacrifice – to that irresistible lord, and saw its face was his face own.
 
Standing upon a vast and empty free-fall, hunched over under the weight of awe and fatigue, like an ox on all fours, feeling his limbs huge and heavy and each scattering to a corner of the earth, he bent his neck downward and gave voice: “Fleeing from wild animals, am I become a wild animal? Fleeing from the storm, is my mind become disordered and diffuse like rain? I do not run anymore from my mother and father and the place I was born, and I will not flee from you. Be my helper! Whatever you are, oh king of this living tempest, do not destroy me, but make me understand!”
 
Then, he asked it something he himself did not understand: “Why did I do this?” and after a pause of thunder that resounded painfully through his bones, “I am in the belly of the beast!”
The man-shaped power smiled, “Some monsters you can only fight after they’ve consumed you. Some monsters you can only slay from inside.” Gil still did not understand, but in the dream, he seemed to, and so he came near and sat on the same throne, and was not afraid.
 
The words he who saw the deep sounded unconsciously like a mantra until waking, originating in the dream’s fading moments when he thought to vaguely perceive storm clouds like angels swirling round and pointing at him, or at the other, older one on the throne, a throne coming down upon humanity with the storm, its massive frame installed like a colossal mountain at the very center, the very top of the world.
 
The next day Gil toured the town and surrounding wastes. Like some ancient and absurd king, knowing the failure in which all life ends, he had gone looking for safety from his own mortality in the underworld, and like some ancient and perplexed prophet he was met there by death – a death that sits on a throne, a death that wore his face, a death that is life, a life that cuts through life. But now everything was infinite with calm and light. Every form a stable lightning, the whole earth a vast and happy tempest.
 
He followed the sound of music to the broken-down rusty skeleton of some decades-dead industry, cranes and a water deposit, swimming with squinting eyes through a tide of copper colored desert-dust brought in by the wind until a think-walled open-ceiling warehouse where folks were dancing and playing the fiddle and harmonica and signing. Their voices were melancholy, reminiscent of Gaelic Psalm chanting or Arabic prayer. Gil sat by a corner and exchanged a few smiles with locals. They were hillbilly hesychasts flying on a Sufi trance of fiddle and banjo.
 
After about an hour a woman in her mid-twenties with wide eyes on a shining face with precise and delicate features approached and extended a hand which he grabbed and let lead him into a night of dance and drink. She was energetic and beautiful, hair in a French bob, simple, kind of gothic looking dress, amber-eyed and somehow sullen behind the smile. No, not behind it, with it. Sincerely smiling and sincerely sullen. The broken-hearted happiness of so many people in ruined towns like this. Maybe it isn’t broken-hearted, maybe it’s just open-hearted. Gil was wont to confuse those two.
 
They met again days later and got lunch. Her name was Ana. She made a living turning green olives into perfume. He overstayed his mission at the town by quite a lot, partly – maybe mainly – because of her. The Hill sent occasional reminders that he was to return. Mr. Risala even came to pick him up once, stopping short of the town proper, somewhere on the highway, but Gil would not go.
 
The Hill wasn’t happy he chose to stay at a hotel in the town itself rather than off the nearest highway. The latter was their usual modus operandi and it seemed particularly appropriate in this case given that other Hill agents could not enter Urville. After he failed to return in good time, the Hill stopped sending funds to pay for his stay, so Gil moved out and began squatting around the industrial area where he had first met Ana. He put together what was essentially fire wood and made a remarkably sturdy tent – or even cabin – for her to visit. It got to the point where she would come by most days after work. “Come in, Ana.” The words in Ana sounded in his mind as though they were one word after he had said them – Inanna –. Eventually he and Ara made love. It happened in due course, like those things do, and he was quite conscious of breaking his oath to abstain from carnal relations. The true gods had killed his mother, his father, lied about his having a brother, enslaved him to an apparently senseless mission. They were false. They were the enemy. Any oath by them and to them was void.
 
There are types for whom a greater participation in the world, and a deliberate, sometimes brutish taking up of what is aesthetic and active, as distinct from intellective or contemplative, actually represents a more spiritual mode. The flesh has to be asserted. That much of religion emphasizes the opposite has to do with most people’s disposition being towards the animal rather than the bloodlessly cerebral.
 
The next morning, they had breakfast at their usual place. He noticed something after that first night together. He hadn’t realized it before, but she was touched. She had the mark of the false ones on her. It was clearer than any he had seen before.
“Have you ever…seen me before?”
“You mean the way lovebirds feel they’ve known each other forever? Sure!”
“Heh…no. I mean have you seen me. Or…someone identical to me.”
“No…what are you talking about?”
If she had the mark, it would have been left there by his twin, he thought. Then he remembered: there was no twin. Everything he knew about the false gods and their colors was probably bogus.
“Never mind. Are you a believer?”
“You mean am I a member of the church?”
“Yeah.”
“I am.”
“What do you know about it? How it started and everything.”
“Well, the way I think about it is we encode the way things used to be. Will be.”
“Encode?”
“Like a flat image you can build a three-dimensional hologram from. We aren’t like the times of glory. But we have all the doctrines and symbols to make them from.”
“How will things get going?”
“That’s up to Heaven sending down its mandate. We wait to be activated. Like a tall rod waiting to catch lightning from a storm.”
 
At this a ragged image flung itself into the diner. For a moment Gil’s peripheral vision confused it for an animal. In fact, it was a disheveled Mr Risala. He looked around nervously before finding Gil and strode up to him with something like a limp, probably caused by intense discomfort.
“Risala? My goodness you look awful.”
“Gil! I can only stay a moment. It’s like I’m stretching the wall that keeps us out.”
“The curse.”
“Yes! The heretics have powerful magic. I can barely keep to one place. It’s like pins and needles.”
“Then maybe you should go.” Said Ana.
“I’m not addressing you, girl. And you should treat me with the respect my position demands.”
“Positions don’t demand respect, they command it. If they do.”
“Gil, why haven’t you come back? We’ve tried messaging you.”
“I know. I’m figuring some things out.”
“What’s to figure out, have you found the next mark or not?”
Ana tapped a finger on the table. Mr Risala reeled and disappeared.
“Fellow hasn’t the manners to carry guts to a bear…”
“What did you do?”
“He’s alright. Just outstayed his welcome. You work for him?”
“I…yes. Well, not him. I work for the Hill.”
“We don’t like them here. Church puts out a pulse to scramble their signal.”
“The curse. How does it work?”
“They’ve barely got bodies, those fellows. They’re mostly a trick of light. Appearing and disappearing. When the church found out it stopped letting them come around. But not you. You’ve got a body. You’re real muscle and blood.” She smiled flirtatiously. It didn’t seem the townsfolk knew that the Hill represented the true founders of the church.
“He called us heretics. Truth is it’s them, you know?” she said, anticipating his thoughts, “I had a cousin who worked as a clerk up there in their fancy building in the middle of nowhere. Said they stole church doctrine but messed it all up.”
“They would probably say that about you.”
“They would be wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’ve got no bodies. True religion’s all about marrow in bone, flesh stuffed with blood.”
“Is it? Isn’t religion about subtler things?”
“Nah. Religion’s about resurrection. You can’t die if you didn’t live, and you can’t resurrect if you didn’t die.”
It made sense from their perspective. Life here is muscular, it’s about tilling and building, copulating and raising children. All of religion is gleamed from the seasons and from parables designed to be understood by people who sow and reap and live under a big sky.
 
Gil decided he wanted to go to church, see it for himself. Ana and him walked in a park together, a square of grass in the middle of the town with a big Disney-like palace in the middle which was actually the church. It had a big round bulbous top and a rod coming out vertically towards the sky. The only other high points to speak of were those permanently parked construction cranes and a big barrel water deposit on the western extremity of town. Other than that, there wasn’t much of a skyline to distract the eye from the church if one were to observe the place from a distance. There were fields around the town that slopped down and they walked there too. Canola carpeting the earth, looping into oval pools, yellow and punctuated by blue bodies of water. They were near migration routes so that locals could set traps to catch wildfowl once a year.
 
Between the canola and hunting grounds and the central park with its church were houses and businesses, the actual stuff of daily life. Its architecture was designed for warm weather. Gil had seen the inside of the priest and his wife’s home with its breezy corridors and internal courtyards. Now, walking with Ana, he saw rolling fields of red clay tiles composing the slopping roofs on every house. They were villa-like homes, the sort one finds from southern Italy, up the Alps to Occitan and Aquitaine France, down the Pyrenees all the way to southern Spain and in the Americas therefrom. It’s a Roman style of architecture.
 
Few people drove around here so that there was little upset to listening and looking at red shades and the sound of labor and birds. Once, however, like the fun of a squawking gaggle of animals or the roar of rainy weather, Gil saw bikers rounding homes in a rare escapade off the highway to stop for supplies at the town. Every now and then when Gil and Mr Risala drove around, a pack of bikers like those would speed by. When they did, Gil felt pangs of longing for a violent satisfaction, an endorphin-bath in the sweet simplicity of war and freedom. Also Roman was the mean-looking eagle stitched to leather jackets worn by those marauding motorcyclists or illustrating the laminate stuck to vehicles by truckers and mobile home-owners, mostly well received by these and proximate townsfolk when they came by. Here, the farmer loves the nomad like the heart loves flowing blood.
 
Some of these musings might have come by way of Gil’s genetic memory picking up on things familiar from the remote past. Images that fed the classical world, images from a Bronze Age prototype of civilization and even earlier.
 
He had stopped looking out at his reflection upon night when when, one stormy evening, the sun not yet down, its calm rays caught in clouds turned to violent bolts and Gil knew himself so fully as that other, so much more himself, so much more alive than the life he was actually leading, that he concluded, or rather, the experience forced the unquestionable conclusion upon him, that if he continued reaching out to the other, he would become the other. So that was that.
 
As it turned out, there was a reason why those bikers had turned up. They were the first of many to come. By that weekend, the town was swelling with nomads and farmers from neighboring counties eager to attend its annual weekend-long rodeo.
 
Ana took Gil to the stands erected along what had seemed to him a forlorn patch of desert on the west of Urville, now the sight of a shining stadium whose smooth wood cast sunlight back up at a cloudy sky. Fog would catch that light, spreading and reflecting it. It seemed to Gil that they were inside a cloud, a spectral thrill accelerating them to their seats. Big posters advertising the event papered the outside of the structure, and one could see bulls being led in at a far corner.
 
There should be murals to these animals in every post-office of every town like this, thought Gil. Odes in paint to the bovine and the people who know it. That would make it good. People brusque in movement, rustic in manner. Thick-fingered figures made tall and holy, stretching into heaven like a cross between Benton and el Greco, rural Americana and something out of sixth century Spain.
 
The fog could not occlude the arena. An old, long red bearded, tassel rich, rimstone studded, knee high leather booted man came out, walked confident in his waddle to the middle of the open space, and began the ceremony.
“Is this the ox of Urville?” the crowd responded with a call of ritualized ruckus, some saying “that one, him there, not the rest! Boo the rest!” and, “no, you’re wrong, it’s so-and-so, he’s taking it home today!”
“Were this the ox of Urville,” the master of ceremonies resumed, theatrically unimpressed by the crowd before dropping his voice several octaves, “then this” a silence, an expectant gasp, “is you. Last. Rodeo.” And the crowd explodes, jubilant after reciting the last three words with the old man who quickly makes way for the bulls and riders – all would-be oxen of Urville for, as Ana explained to Gil, if no rider stays on all the bovines, the ox that threw every rider who tried is declared winner, but if a rider manages to stay on every ox then he wins and gets the title of ox of Urville.
“But what if more than one rider manages to stay on every bull?”
“Well, then, they keep going until someone falls. There’s no sharing the glory on this one.”
Gil had never tested his strength. There had been no chance for him to pit himself against any obstacle of the sort that might require grip and musculature but, likewise, he had done plenty of heavy lifting for the Hill over the years, as menial tasks to do with transporting belongings of agents were often required. He had also never really developed a sense of fear for these kinds of trials, the sort that often impede or distract physically impressive competitors. It was with more curiosity than anything else, therefore, that he threw his hat in the ring and signed up for the contest. Neither did anyone find it surprising, as they did not know the circumstances of his upbringing.
 
The inauguration of the ceremony was followed by an opportunity for late comers or undecideds to sign up, and for everyone else to settle in or get something to eat. After informing a supportive Ana of his intention, he walked down the bleacher-like escalated seats and wrote his name on a sheet on a row of tables before the fencing that marked off the arena proper, Cash’s ghost riders in the sky was blaring on the rodeo radio.
 
He waited around with the others and things got going about an hour later. Eventually, after a few competitors had jumped the fence, Gil heard them call out his name. He did what he had seen the others do. The first bull looked to Gil just as the rest would: with a face like death out from which the unrestrained power of life itself hollered at him. He got on the thing and surprised himself, considering the struggle he had perceived in the preceding riders, one of whom had gotten thrown off, it was a lot easier than expected. It wasn’t long before a ringing sound was heard and he was told to dismount. He had done it. He had stayed on. The second was more or less the same, but by the time it came to the third his body was wearing out. On the fourth, he thought his heart would give out a few times, and a few more on the fifth. Sixth felt good again, like he had got his second wind, and the seventh knocked that wind right out of him. He had fallen before they had rung their bell.
 
In the same spirit of experimentation with which he had entered the competition, Gil came up to the bovine victor and re-mounted the angry creature. A silence informed him – so he thought – that he had just committed some egregious gaff. In fact, it was not really considered an option, and though by the tournament’s rules Gil had been eliminated, the spectacle had left the audience impressed.
 
Afterwards, the old man with tassels and a beard came up to Gil, “Good job young man! Just wanted to congratulate you personally.”
“Thank you! I…is that you, father?”
“Why, yes it is.”
“I hadn’t recognized you!”
“Oh, it’s the beard, I always grow it before the rodeo. Tradition. Now I can shave it again, hey, maybe my wife will let me back in bed. Ha! That’s my yearly sacrifice!”
“Well, thank you anyway. Although I didn’t win.”
“Say, it occurs to me you might not know the story of the Ox of Urville.”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Hm. Religion is a seed and growth, much of it needs mediating through folklore, you know? Well, it happened when the church was going through earthly trials. From paradise to the old kingdom, from the old kingdom to this new land, the faithful were beleaguered. Their eyes shone and chests swelled with joy at the prosperity they found here, and they chewed the fat of this land, and they chewed it too much, and they ceased to bare their prosperity with moderation, until there was none left. The faithful passed from feast to starvation and prayed to be sparred. Then they heard a voice say to them, you have been as a bull raging in the land, but you make amends and your sin shall be turned sweet by repentance.
A storm began, and rain brought life to the land, and lightning struck fire to clear surrounding thickets and make it ready for human settlement, and thunder was heard, and from thunder a beast whose snarling it became, and the faithful saw the bull of Heaven.”
“The bull of heaven?”
“Sure, you know, one of the pets of paradise, like the sasquatch, or unicorns. Who taught you at Sunday school? Anyway, they saw it ride upon a rolling gale from the east, released by the chariot of tempest, a single beautiful bull of white hide, soon to be stained by a streak of its royal blue blood. They fought, defeated, ate and thanked it and the benevolent force that had sent it their way. Our fathers buried a sword, thereafter known as the blade of seven talents, between the yoke its horns and the slaughter point.”
“Strange name.”
“Old unit of weight, as well as a reference to the seven gifts of the bull. The hide made the streets, intestines the broad town square, the main share of its meat went to the orphans and widows, the carcass to the traders, from the hoofs they made carriages and the two horns became the east and west gates of the town. Fine oils, what little our bygone parents had, were poured on its horns, and they grew and shone, like a lamp for anointing the faithful and lighting this city. We placed one in the east, to light it at dusk, and another in the west, to light it at dawn, and the city shone with its own light.”
“Those things don’t make sense.”
“It’s metaphorical. Point is Urville got built thanks to that bull. Anyway, the beast returned, the same albino coat on the horizon on that same day for the next three years, by which time the town was well underway to being what it is now, or was in its better days, days which back then were still ahead. And with the beast, on each subsequent yearly apparition, the wild bull herds grew more and more numerous until the land was restored to how it was before our overkill. With the replenishing of the country, our repentance was consummated. After that, so goes the story, we started the rodeo to pit ourselves against that magic bull’s descendants, and remember it. Do you see? It died and came back. Ask me, that’s what you did. None has more right to call himself the ox of Urville than one who falls and gets back up. Well done young man.”
“Thank you again, sir.”
The preacher started walking off, then turned momentarily.
“Oh, and that uppity ox that threw you off and let you back on, that’s your daddy’s.”
“What?”
“Yep. Grandson to one of the bucks from your family’s farm. You probably got to touch him when you were a toddler.”
 
Gil felt himself a part of Urville after that. Nothing changed in his mind, but something deeper, something muscular, was relaxed. He felt like an organ in its body. At some point over the weeks he spent with Ana the traces of the false gods became a different and beautiful lush in his eyes, a great vegetable shine like azure and gold vines of plasma whose constant combustion took the shape of petals. The traces of the true gods, on the other hand, lost their substance as far as he could see. They were not beads reflecting each other like the false gods, but strings pointing to a single center. They were simpler. It was as though he now had been handicapped with a tin eye or myopia so far as they were concerned. It was not that the true gods were absent, but their energies looked to him like the false gods when asleep or shy. The true gods were not distinct from the false, just a blurry version of the latter, playing a game of hide and seek. But even if such a reconciling view of things should be accepted – that angels and devils are the same – shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the false gods be a somnambulist form of the true? His eyes were either terribly marred or else a formidable scale had fallen, for false looked true and true false.
 
It was now that Gil returned to the fold. He left in the evening, traveled by foot and public transportation, having no vehicle of his own, entering the Hill building without his usual chauffeur and escort, Mr Risala. He was quickly scheduled to meet the president, and there was some measure of fuss about his having finally come back. When he entered in the office, he saw something which had been hidden to him before. All those dark threads he had seen, here and there on this one and that one, the colors of the true gods, they were all here, all in the president, a messy knot. He was the center of that darkness, that density. It had been tied up in him. The man was a corpse or sleeping body. He consisted of only a small portion of mind and experience. A light in the head, focused and bright. The rest of his form was dim, was dead or dormant. This fit with the epiphany that the true gods – the gods of the Hill – were in fact an inoperant energy, an arrested flow.
“Well, I certainly hope you can justify your absence, Mr. –”
“I have it.”
There was a pause.
“Excuse me? You have what?” There was some real desire behind the pique in the president’s question.
“I know what they’re planning. I know what they want. The false gods.”
Another pause, followed by a moment’s erratic darting here and there came over the president.
“What? Where?”
“The town you took me from. The place I’ve been.”
“Take me.”
“Sir,” began Mr Risala, but was immediately interrupted.
“No, Mr Risala. You stay here. Just Gil and I on this one.”
Mr Risala, was clearly surprised but he did not respond except by a submissive nod.
Before they left Aka opened a desk drawer and grabbed a necklace with a plastic little horn on it. “I know. Hokey. But it helps me blend in with the farm types in case we run into any.”
Gil didn’t know exactly why but he found that twisting little shape vaguely gag-inducing. It was a withered, weak parody of the horns hanging from Urville’s welcome signs and, in its plastic gloss, of nature in general.
 
The president drove them, as Gil didn’t know how. He thought about that for the first time. The Hill had never taught him to drive. “Now, what are they up to, hm?”
“Before I answer that I should tell you I know everything. I know I have no brother. I know getting me to chase the ghost of a man who never lived was just a way to get me to figure out what my purpose is, to unlock a version of myself, the memory of the plan the enemy had for me, without letting me become that plan, without identifying with that version of myself. And all this lifelong no sex and no alcohol stuff. That was to keep me from remembering. My old self was a king, not a celibate, but if I had lived like him and really started remembering what it was like to be him, I might have gone back to the false gods. I get it and I don’t care. Not because I like you, sir. I don’t think that I do. But because I know you’re right. I know the enemy is wrong and you are right, and this needs to happen.”
Another pause, this time without jitters, was finally broken with a guffaw,
“Ah! Yes! My goodness, you are far more than I expected! All these years I thought I was observing a bloodless boy growing up into a bloodless man. But no, no it turns out there’s more to you, eh? Good. Let’s not like each other. Let’s just do what’s right.”
“The false gods wanted me to knock the pillars down, like you said. But there’s one last pillar. More like a corner stone. You know why we never got anywhere? Because there is no pattern. Not at our scale, not that we can discern. Every person, every special one, every pillar marked out by the sign of the enemy is like a bead. I can look inside them and see the other ones reflected in them like crystals, like many mirrors reflecting each other. So, one leads to others who lead to others. There’s always more leads to pursue than I actually track down. It isn’t as though there’s a center to it all. They are all the center. They all reflect the rest. But then I realized that some are clearer than others. I realized that’s the key. It isn’t like a web with a center. Its more about finding the one with greater clarity.”
“And that’s the corner stone.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“There’s a girl. I fell for her. She is the clearest I’ve ever seen. I thought it was her. But when I looked in, there was another.”
“Who is it?”
“Me. The last thing to go before the world falls. Me.”
“Of course…Your unique genetics…”
“No. That has nothing to do with it. The enemy places the mark on whoever they want. My genetics, the biological traits engineered into me in ancient times, the ones I bare, they are merely a means to control. And I will always be controlled so long as I’m in this body, because I am engineered to see the mark. They got me to break my vows. The traces of the true gods are as darkness to me. The false gods are as light. But I can give it away. I can give the mark to someone who can’t be controlled like me. Someone without these genes.”
“Me.”
“Yes. We have to make someone else the corner stone. The vessel for the true gods. If we do that, the false gods lose their anointed king. They might have power over me, but not over you.”
“How?”
“That’s what we’re going to figure out. We need to invite the storm, the outer powers. Just enough to use them to remove the mark from me and give it to you. They know me. They will come if I call. But I need to get up near the storm.”
“Well, the weather is looking pretty ominous.” Aka smiled, “The town, with the heretics, that’s where we will find the false gods, yes?”
“Yes. But Mr Risala can’t enter. There’s a curse, apparently. That’s what he called it. I can feel it too. A great big magnificent wall with a great big magnificent gate. Not sure how well you’ll do.”
“Don’t worry. I’m made of stronger stuff than Risala.”
“Well then, drive in and head west, there’s a scaffold they use to fasten the water deposit. I’ll climb it and call the false gods down. You wait for my signal.”
They passed the “Welcome to Urville” sign and the structure came into view, a silhouette in black grey on black blue. It was now deep night. Sure enough, Aka was made of stronger stuff, though he did struggle to stay in place.
 
As Gil scaled the platform, he thought and watched his thinking like a story, a story he had told himself so many times it would now rush through him with minimal prompting. He reached the top and began the operation. He had always wanted to solve this mess in a way that was consistent with his highest truth, the highest morality, the best of the saints. The storm began almost immediately. Even now, with his mind made up after so much recent doubt, it was frankly frightening. His legs shook at the thunder getting closer, and with it the lightning. He looked around. There was nothing as high as he was anywhere nearby. There was no way he wasn’t going to get struck. The point was to defeat the bad guys without becoming one. To end the game, not play it, not become part of it. To stay clean. Lightning came closer.
“Now! Get up here!”
Aka climbed the platform.
The highest truth, the highest morality, was to embrace all the lower ones. To submit to the necessity, the intractable unavoidable need to get dirty. To become one of the bad guys. Submission to what is called for, to what needs to be done. Submission and action were his new morality. His new truth. A knife he had taken from the diner when he was with Ana, and whose metal might be helping attract lightning, was wrapped tightly in Gil’s palm and fingers. He waited for Aka to get close and put a hand on his shoulder, then lunged the metal into Aka’s chest. It wasn’t Gil’s weapon that attracted heaven’s electricity. Aka planned on ending Gil in the act of receiving his anointing, and to this end had brought his own blade, which he lifted just as Gil stabbed him. Perhaps it was the stabbing, or else the lightning strike that first stopped Aka’s heart. The shades of the false gods, ghosts living in Aka, were sent scurrying, revealing themselves in a form Gil had not seen before, as sentient organisms made of thin smoke or shadow. They hadn’t been preserving the true poets, the pillars, they had been killing them. They hadn’t been preserving him from temptation but from true memory: the memory that he never turned on the gods, on the storm, that truth is not made by men to protect themselves but rages outside them, and might inside. It was a lot like breaking his oath of celibacy and abstinence from intoxicants. To kill a man responsible for so much death was precisely the sort of moral oxymoron he had eschewed his whole life. But it was done. The man wasn’t dead yet, but soon would be. Nothing could be done now. The Hill had fallen. The false gods had lost their priest, the true gods had their sacrifice, if they wanted one. But they didn’t. They only wanted in. The false gods were the roof around the earth, blocking the tempest. The true gods were the storm. The single, ever-encompassing, storm.
 
Maybe Aka wasn’t dying. Maybe, thought Gil, in cases of such thorough degradation, a special mercy is done, and the soul of a person leaves its body years before that body’s death. Maybe Aka had long been the puppet of false gods, with no humanity left inside, no one left to suffer the pains of being the marionette of death.
 
Gil wept for what could have been, for a different story in which he did not become a murderer to do right. The sky cleared. Early morning began parting the clouds. That story was for someone else, his story was like that of most men in most ages. A story of doing right by doing wrong, or just doing wrong. But there was a deep truth to it. The possibility of conflict, death and ugliness. The reality of it had to be accepted, participated in, or else whatever terms one came to, whatever pact with reality, with truth, would be somehow partial, a self-deception. The greatest and most pacific saint had to include war and righteous violence in his past lives, or else he was not a saint, was not a route to the encompassing of all reality, which every full and complete person must be.
 
Starting for the ladder, a point in the sky nodded at Gil. He watched its steady light, a wandering, pale copper, star, pastel orange in the vault of gold on high. Phosphorus, the morning star, cut the sky, the far mysteries of night still piercing through the closer sky of day, the morning heaven gives to one that overcomes, the eye one leaves in the depths after coming up, the part that stays and remembers, the stark dawn witnessed after a vigil through the night. 
 
Gil climbed down and met Ana for lunch. Walking to the diner he heard bells and grunts. Bells on cows and grunts from bulls. Bells, grunts and wind skating on country grass. He never heard from Risala or any Hill agents again. They packed up shop and closed the building thereafter. The weather got stormier every year.