Falling Idols

Illusion. She wasn’t really there.

“If it wasn’t for the Kyyth, you’d all still be in trees. Pats on the head and full plates don’t move you very far. If they did, dogs would be building cities and reaching for the stars. No, the only thing that really moves you forward is your own agony. Trying to outrun it. So. Who are you going to believe — me or him?”

Behind her the inferno roared, tightening his skin and drying out his eyes, yet he stared into its seething core, at the shapes hinted at beyond its flaming veil. The shells of buildings, the slag of ambition.

“Did he tell you what our name means?” she asked.

A nod. “Bridge. He told Gabrielle it meant bridge.”

Her lipless mouth compressed into a slitted line. “That’s his own folklore. But if you want to know? Once upon a time there lived a civilization that nobody’s found yet. I won’t tell you where, but you’d recognize the name of the river. They owed much of their existence to their beasts of burden. But the only way to drive those simple animals forward was by using a whip. Or if you prefer their word for it, a kyyth. And if that was the name they gave us, what of it? Nothing since has been more accurate. Nothing since has described us better.”

If he couldn’t take Memuneh at his word, why take Scarlett at hers? She seemed to smell his doubt through the smoke, while he looked past her into the fiery aftermath of the great blast and wondered what had been created here today.

“You’re close, you’re so close,” she said, then stepped up to kiss him with that lipless mouth and a feathery hot tickle of her tongue. “Remember…”

And in that moment’s intimacy, like so many other times when their membranes touched, it was as though something seeped from her and her world into him, another spark of recognition

—he felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest—

and she stepped away and let him buckle to the ground with the full bloody flavor of it, telling him that’s right, embrace it all over again, and all of the others since. Savor the pain of each and every death and feel their lashes up and down his back, and now Gabrielle’s too, his love for her the last thing holding him to a world that he no longer had to bother with. Go ahead. Let it hurt. Let it cut. Let it burn.

She leaned over him and stared down.

“You were the first ugly, hairy little thing that ever stood on two legs and shook your fist and refused to die,” she said. “So you didn’t. Body after body — you never gave up, did you?”

He rubbed a fistful of dirt and ashes into his hair because they were the only things that seemed real now. The only things that he wanted to feel, solid and worthless, but genuine.

“Say cursum perficio, Austin. You did it. But I can’t whip you along any further. These last steps? You’ll have to take them on your own.”

She helped him up and he stood, dust sifting from his skull, and with watering eyes he looked at what lay ahead. Flames washed over it like rapids over rocks worn smooth, but it did not burn. He could see it now — mansion and castle and forest and field. All one. All waiting. Elizium, empty and his.

“It’s time to go take your place, and wait,” she said. “That was the plan.”

“Wait for…?”

“The rest.” She caressed his cheek and nodded. Tapped him on the forehead. “Where do you think God went, anyway?”

From the distant sky, the deep beat of a helicopter’s rotors; from the far road, whirling blue lights and sirens in mourning.

Cursum perficio.

I win the race.

With dirt for a crown and smoke for a laurel, I win the race.

She squeezed his hand. “There isn’t much time now. I can walk with you. But I can’t force you.”

No. He was falling from the train. He was bleeding in the tunnel. He was murdering a coyote to give a voice to demons. He was anywhere but here.

“You’re lying,” he said. “All of you. You’ve lied all along.”

“One way to find out.” She raised her free arm to show him the way, through flame and wreckage and molten tar. “It’s only flesh, Austin. Turn loose. You don’t need it anymore.”

The first step was tentative; the next, a little less so. And so on. And so on. His hair caught fire in a rush like warm breath, then his clothing. The flames feasted deeper, but it only hurt for a moment, until he remembered how to make the sensation stop.

He began to remember everything then, all over again, from quasars to quarks. He knew the instincts of atoms and the majestic loneliness of stars. They were strewn above and below, and how they shined. He would start with the nearest, and if she wasn’t there, he would move along to the next, and the next, and the next until he found her, because still, it would never be Paradise without her.

Let me tell you about eternity.

He remembered everything.

He laughed.

Endnotes: Paradise Burned

“If God did not exist,” Voltaire said, “it would be necessary to invent Him.”

Except it isn’t so much that we invent Him as that we just can’t seem to stop re-inventing Him. Or Her. Or It.