Counternarratives (39 page)

The time had come.

I hear that you want to tell me what you are going to do to me but you
want to draw it out on the one hand, but you are also ready to get back to all the
things you had planned for today, beyond this. I hear that you are going to kill me,
and take great pleasure in it.

I would never take pleasure in such things, certainly not with you, you
know better than that, but you need to listen more closely. The man who listens to
the wind hears nothing of life. Prophet, have you not been listening to me? To my
words. To all these years? Or only to your own internal, empty silence?

Yes, this terrible silence.

Have you really forgotten me so fully? Purged the text of your memory?
Prophet of Society you would recall that I took and still take little pleasure in
the sorts of things you did, not in building airports or hospitals or reducing them
to rubble. Not in appointing generals to march my armies or ministers to oversee the
economy or human welfare or the mint. Not in bludgeoning them with my own fists when
I have tired of the extent of their looting, even though I ordered it. Not in
flushing towers of bureaucrats or rats, of democratic activists or patriotic
neo-fascists. Not in standing beside yet another pale monarch or prime minister or
even our browner ones, their many thousand-dollar suits or dresses or traditional
garb smelling of the enslaved child workers and women who assembled them. Not lying
with my wives in any of our hundred beds knowing that not even they would dare think
of slitting my throat for fear of what would happen to them if such a thought
entered their heads, nor with any of the whores in the most sumptuous hotels in
foreign capitals, nor any of the others here or anywhere else in any of the
countless beds I requisition for a night or a week or a month, depending upon my
moods and whims, the circumstances. Not in giving speeches or proclamations or
orders, not issuing decrees, ultimatums or threats. Neither in condemnation nor
clemency. Not in rites or ceremonies, not before our gods or God, not before Christ
or Allah or any other, not in our languages or in Arabic or English or Chinese or
any other tongues. Not in the countryside or the savannahs, nor atop our highest
peaks nor in the sea's mouth, not in the cities the colonizers left nor the ones you
built nor the ones I willed into being. Not in pets or children or noise or silence.
Not in telling the truth or in lying, both among your many arts, though I sometimes
must. Not in a single one of these actions, or most others, including not taking
pleasure in a single thing at all.

No. You used to enjoy our time together.

Yes, but those days are irretrievable, as you should have heard grasped
by this point by my words, my tone, my weariness. It's an audience, really, not a
conversation. You're not listening. I do take pleasure, however, in one thing.

Yes, something. Though wealth isn't
it—

Once I thought, following your lead, O Prophet of Wealth, that I would
take the greatest pleasure in riches. Vaults of treasure, buried deep in blast-proof
bunkers, a mile into the ocean floor, vaults behind virtual walls of zeros and ones
only the most brilliant of the geniuses I hired could penetrate. I thought I would
feel pleasure bathing in money, sleeping in money, clothing myself in money, eating
vomiting crapping fucking money. I followed your lead and had jewelry fashioned out
of rhodium for every appendage, the entire interior of a tower in silver, a new
arena for my birthday and it and everyone in it painted in gold leaf. Anyone there
quickly grasped the appeal of the golden calf. To warn off anyone else it's now an
abyss.

Yes. I once erected a massive obelisk wrought of platinum studded with
red diamonds, jadeite, garnets, red beryl emeralds, black opals, all of them. It
became a shrine.

Don't you think your dildo paid off our foreign debt? I give money away,
some of it, why do you think the people love me so much? 100% of the vote, every
election. It mints itself faster than we can spend it, look at how the vultures from
every continent are circling our ports, such are the bounties the earth saw fit to
bequeath us.

No. And it isn't power
—

Power, that aphrodisiac as someone once said, I don't take pleasure in
it either. Prophet of Power, that you were. Such a point of idiocy and a truism that
money equals power, or some such thing, money buys power, power buys money, always
the two shall meet and screw and someone ends up as the surplus in the equation. I
can crap on the floor and order someone to lick it up. I can have an entire block of
apartments leveled and raised anew in the span of a few days. I can throw every book
in every library into a furnace and order that new ones be written to fill the
shelves. I respect power, especially the power that hides in things, that resides in
things over which we have no control, the power that surges up out of the pages of
one of those books you torched, the ones some intrepid fool rescued, the power in
one of those mountains looming over us that decides it is going to batter everything
around it with its sublime volcanic breath. The power in atoms whirling about
towards a bang that brought the earth into being and that will clear us all from
this human plane. Would that a man should become a god, or what's literature, or
politics, or physics, or the military for? Yes, but I don't take any great pleasure
in it at all.

No. Though you wield it better than a prince. Or a king. Or queen, of
the chessboard or the savannah. Better than I did. The king of the savannahs, the
greatest lion of this nation that ever lived.

Yes that's how they refer to me. The Lion devoured the Prophet, though
they're still hunting for you in Switzerland and Tehran.

Yes, voracious, eaten whole.

What gives me pleasure is . . . can you guess it?

No . . . I don't . . . I can't say. Not
money, not power, not sex, not religion, not, not death. I . . .
can't.

What do you hear?

I hear you leaning back, your face calming as you peer in my direction,
your back arching as it settles into position, you briefly touching a crucifix,
though you are not a Christian and haven't been one in a long while, that talisman
that nevertheless rests uneasily in the valley of your chest as a kind of
reassurance that you have stumped me and this is going to end horribly.

You've almost gone deaf, then. Listen.

No . . . please. Not laughter or weeping, not seeing me
laugh or weep. Not even knowing that you have stumped me completely and there is
nothing I can do. Not even screaming. No. I can't hear the answer. Please don't. I
can't.

You can't? I don't want that smell to reach my nostrils. Try harder.
Open one of those books in your head; turn on one of those screens. Listen,
Prophet.

Yes. No. I can't. Not the fact that you even if I outwitted you now, as
well as every single degenerate member of your cabinet, your military, your family,
I would not leave here. I . . . can't. Don't, have mercy.

That smell is reaching my nose. Crossing the space between us. Listen,
Prophet, listen. The roaring, isn't it fearsome? Pure poetry and science, beyond
symbols or words.

No. You know how this will turn out, and are trying to will me to save
myself, because you know I won't. I can't. Don't, though I give up.

I can smell the abyss your ears have become, your existence. Some
prophet. That was your third chance, your time is up. Fearlessness. I take pleasure
in that, tremendous pleasure. Unimaginable pleasure. Do you hear me growing hard at
the very mention of the word? Do you hear my salivary glands filling, the sweat
rushing into my pits, the adrenalin quickening my heartbeat? Fearlessness. Do you
hear the dopamine surging through my brain as I think the word? A volcano surging
through me. A terrible, sublime roar. I don't even have to say it, from it an entire
world flows. That is what I thought we both had back then, chest to chest in that
clearing. I remember how in our school that professor of ours called an extreme
version of this mindset the greatest danger known to humankind, and I immediately
looked at you, though at your core you were all fear. Fear, fear, fear. You were
never fearless, though you had me fooled. The coups, the progressive changes, the
preemptive attacks, the coronation, the wars. All fear's handiwork.

The reason I wanted to speak with you was just this. I am no longer
afraid.

It was always fear. I can smell you trembling into the void. It's
nauseating. What did you think was the true source of anyone's sovereignty? Did you
take nothing from all the people you plastered on every wall? Yaa Asantewa and
Anacaona, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, the Bolshevik and the Long Marcher
and the rest of them, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, the sage who defied Kennedy,
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara and
Nelson Mandela? Those eyes staring back at you? Did you really not listen to the
stories you told everyone else, Prophet, the stories they told you in response? Did
you not take anything from our ancestors who survived the depredations of the gods,
and later the encroachers from every corner of the continent? Of course they were
frightened but were fearless nevertheless. Some more than others, all more than
you.

No. Listen to me. I am no longer afraid.

Did you not learn anything from the brazen creatures who seized our
mothers and fathers, who bought and sold them here and across the sea, who fought
them here and over there and did not back down? The ones to whom you signed over so
much of our matrimony and patrimony? Their puny bodies that melt in the sun, all
their sicknesses of the flesh and mind and soul, yet they keep arriving. Their
words, their ideas, their abstractions, the ones you love so much, gave them an
armor of fearlessness. I, however, scare them out of their sleep, not infrequently.
They never know what time it is with me. Did you not take anything from every single
soul that dared to challenge you at penalty of things worse than mere death? What do
you think allowed any of them, me, to survive you?

I screamed my throat onto the cement floor to tell you this, I'm not
afraid.

The prison of hope, you used to say, which was easy for one who
controlled the future. Did you not hear the clue? I gave you several. You with your
statistics and plots, you who could place yourself inside the heads of others like
the Trojans, or a medium. A walking antenna. You touched one of the keys aloud but
could not open the door. Why else would I have worn that cross around my neck,
invoke Christ of all people? What use is a prophet without his powers? Should I have
roped it around your neck? Stuffed it your mouth? Rammed it in
your. . . .

Listen to me, I know what's coming. I accept it, I am not afraid.

You requested me for this? My time, for this? All that hollering for an
entire season, for this? I must admit, you still have the power to make me even more
cynical. The Prophet of Cynicism has created a Deliverer.

Why not parade me before my people, Deliverer, send me back to them, and
let me die in shame at their feet? I won't fear them.

What people? You have no people anymore. Can't you smell it?

Bury me in the desert, Deliverer, cast me into the ocean near my home,
you can broadcast it on your station, on the Internet. I won't fear it.

You have no home. No home, no state, no brothers, no sisters, no people,
no lineage, not a thing. Truthfully, I could smell it all the way on the other side
of the world, years ago.

Listen, you could force my allies out there to reveal themselves and to
eat my beating heart, mount me on a steeple, but do it in the middle of the
capital's main square. I fear nothing now.

Absurdities, who ever heard of such things? You have no allies, I was
your last one. You are nothing and you have nothing. You are not even the ghost of a
recollection any more. In the air, diving in the sea's depths, I could smell it, and
can smell it now, it's almost unbearable.

Rendition me, send me to one of their special ops sites, let them lock
me up in Guantánamo. Nail me in a coffin and mail it to the Hague. Have them fly in
the drones. Wash your hands of me and cast me into theirs. I have nothing to
fear.

I must be going. I'm a man of few words but I have a speech to give. I'm
nauseated by the stench, and have been for too long.

Ransom me, you could buy whole blocks in Paris, London, Miami with my
head. I'm not afraid.
I—

A speech on a theme you spoke on many times. Everybody is a monster, but
only the monsters know it. Cautionary tales for cautionary times. Absolutely nothing
like it, this odor, not even death. It's enough by itself to kill.

I appeal to you, vanguard of our nation's resistance, I appeal to you at
this grave hour. The monsters no longer have to send their superjet fighters,
stealth bombers, hypersonic technology vehicles, and flocks of drones to rein down
bombs upon us, to stamp out our freedom like a boot heel on a single
bloom. . . .

. . . .

I hear you rising from your seat. Standing. Shaking your head as if
under water, as if this alone could reset the clock. No longer smiling, your face
muscles wiring into a grimace, your brow slashed with a frown. You are choking back
the retch. Your eyes are boring in my direction, at what's left of me, propped up
here.

. . . .

Your eyes fixed on this still breathing lump in the darkness, I hear you
pushing the chair back with your calves, you want space, I hear you pushing the
chair back even further and you turn and move it to my left so that it is out of the
way. I hear you unbuttoning your shirt with your intact hand, which you have learned
to use as if it were the dominant one, the other, a prosthesis, dangles at your
side, above the prosthetic foot, proving I should have cut off both sides when I
could. I hear your shirttails falling over your belt, your pants.