Crematorium for Phoenixes (9 page)

They were straining in their minds and
looking for the blind, forgotten memories, the moments of
happiness. Instead, in their heads only the scenes of harsh naval
discipline popped up along with the image of comrades lying on the
seabed of the Berber Coast. They had other companions all the way
in the islands of the Caribbean, who had been decimated by disease.
It comes as no surprise then that the feasts in the evening that
they had earned by hard labor were busted.

In their consciousness floated the insoluble
matter of eternal mystery that is slugged between a Sphinx’s paws
while waiting for an answer to the question: “Why?”

They were working, manipulating the machines
up and down through the hatch and seeking decisions, but they found
only silence.

The Leviathan floated along, breaking the
iron-gray, jagged waves that churned from the moving molecules of
water just to fall into them again like a boat in a picture by
Hokusai.

They stabbed the northern storm and were
tossed by its physical strength. The vessel navigated in the
Atlantic, embraced the titanium whose name it carried ashore on
four continents.

Among this breath of water-cooled air from
the atoms, connected to the universe itself by the horizon, it was
quite possible to imagine that the inhabits would be gigantic
squids howling like a dragon or a basilisk raised over tens of
meters above sea level—very cold snow monsters that dragged the
helpless into the abyss of their mansions.

That chilled wildness intensified the pain
and tossed a heavy hand as pushy as a drunk intruder.

There was no one to extract them out of
these waters. They were met only with the inconvenient, the
pressure of pushed piano keys played in the deep extraction of loud
sounds that resembled whale songs.

Thus, the distributed locations each emitted
a different water acoustics, and the men drove the boat while
trailing a torn iceberg adrift over the North Atlantic.

In their minds, like sprayed and sparkled
crepes that embroidered the consciousness, waterfalls formed one
single question: “Why?”

Despite the events that had happened deep in
the city, they had rehashed it over and over again. Still, no one
had found a solution that revealed itself in a spinneret of letters
to display a brilliant insight before them.

Any exchange of thoughts, sporadic
greetings, or vague transaction of words felt inadequate.

The technical condition of the Leviathan was
assured, measured by the bubbly gimbal mechanism.

“What a story, huh?” Amos Oz said, standing
on the raised platform—the bridge of the ship.

“Stupid and talentless. Perhaps those are
inevitable ingredients contained in every minute of a tragedy,”
replied Victor Drake, tinkering with the concave displays.

Amos Oz looked around and went in search of
a puffer. Plowing furrows in the water, he sniffed and said again,
“You know, I’ve served as almost all positions in mankind—wherever
my fate has offered me bread. I seen a lot. From the whaled ships
departing the shelter of Nantucket while glaring into chunky snow,
to the fields of copra and pearls of Ceylon. And I’ve seen sailors
thrown to death, those who caught scurvy or dysentery.

“And I swallowed, like every other man, year
after year, the morsels of sloppiness that life presents to us,
stuck with hooks and loops in a trap.

“And once the greed for the several
doubloons had thrown me into the Gulf of Guinea, where I agreed to
hire in a blackbirding ship,” he said and after a long silence
added, “There is no worse thing than the muffled curse in this
world, Victor. It tightens and tightens like a noose, stifling any
hope.

“So this is the way I felt listening afoul
to those unfortunate ones who had been kidnapped from their homes
as slaves. And that’s the way I feel now—a man whose nature is not
only ashamed, it has been strangled by reality.”

“You’re right, Amos,” answered Victor. “How
could you say that we have some premeditated plan, such as one who
strikes with smartness by giving meaning to every obstacle, like a
ladder whose view is worth every step?

“Life with His paintings doesn’t work in
such a way. You know that much better now.

“He often takes everything about us,
including and finally, us.

“But you know, no matter how diligent the
sadness is, it cannot destroy everything.

“And when I traveled with the battered van
selling books, in which everything is much more meaningful, I was
not happy because I knew where there are hidden treasures. No, I
was happy, because I gave a kid a sheet of imagination in which he
could find such things.

“Because in this world, dreamers are a lot
more than we can imagine.

“To increase it within one person, hmm, this
is something worth fighting for,” he finished, pulling a few
handles through which the conductors rumbled. The swings of the
propellers increased, and the submarine started to bear down like
an arrow through the icy waters.

So it was that the vessel changed its
direction. Now it was headed southwest, leaving the shiny chrome
glacial waters of the white North Atlantic. A lot of hours had to
pass before the ocean released its embrace, but the friction eased
their way, and I will say that they did get past it. After that,
warm water, heated by the Gulf Stream, was in front of them.

The Caribbean Sea glittered like burning
acetylene mixed with immortal grass-green hues. Like a coveted pie,
it stretched out and heated the souls of these men that had been
chilled by the thousands of miles.

Even so, swimming in the swirling, patterned
tops, as dense as gasoline in water, the Leviathan headed to the
Yucatan; it approached like a tucked sickle, mowing in the sea-blue
waves.

Chapter
Fourteen

The spinning motor rotor pushed the frozen
air, squeezing it through the fins like the arrows of a ticking
clock.

The Behemoth strained its surface,
shimmering like a scaly fish or thousands of budding diamonds while
brick-red fallow hung like curly hair to the Earth underneath.

In the bridge by the oriel windows, bent
into a horseshoe globular basket, were Tammuz, Sharukin, and the
rest of the crew. They watched as the view stretched out before
them.

Behind them, the space mechanisms operated;
they were clicking and periodically altered their evidence. They
blazed as if the rubberized buttons were made from twinkling
stars.

The Behemoth flowed in the air streams
through rivers and great heights, leaving Crete as migratory birds
remained in the horizon.

Nobody talked. The sea was pleated like
links and links of beads were floating and poking glimpses into the
water.

They had seen a lot, but they still had a
lot more to do in the earthly directions that would keep them
intertwined forever.

The desire of these banished people overlaid
their compulsive cravings and dreams for home. They worried as if
in their minds something had been caught, like a bug stuck in the
nets of a spider.

They sighed as one, leaning on the railing
of their lives, and looked into the abyss that swallowed all living
creatures without any issues; the abyss would digest them in its
corrosive gastric fluid.

Being at the Earth’s focal point, at the
junction, the bridge between continents, this fellowship wondered
where and what to keep.

They set the machine, pressed the keys, and
pulled the throttle, watching the flight and feeling in their heart
the weeping wound that drops of salt-bitter sadness that evil had
left to its taste.

The men were amending their course, walking
forward and backward. They were busy with something unimportant.
Through the thumbnails in the vestibule, Sharukin said in his
sorrowful voice, which only somebody cleansed of sin who has once
again experienced it, intentionally or unintentionally, would
understand, “What was that all about? To get rid of all the evil in
which we are struck, we had to sink him and twist ourselves with
hanging ropes?”

“Sometimes, besieged by darkness, it is our
only option,” Tammuz said, staring at the plastic, imitation cherry
wood panels.

“Oh, fuck off with those arrogant words. I
remember my childhood spent near the willows of the rivers of
Babylon. I remember the military expedition that made me an orphan
and all the crimes committed out of hunger, revenge, greed, and
finally from apathy. I think that it’s time to show us the rumpled
white threads of that seemingly sewed story.”

Tammuz breathed, and kept on breathing, as
if trying to create rings of smoke. Perhaps he was just trying to
put order in his words, which had faded away in his throat as
nothing more than dull stagnation, created pain.

“Each of us is a time traveler, but not many
can say that they have literally done it. Well, I’m one of them. I
come from a broken canvas, gaping and frayed. It is a glazed place
with concrete cities where some of the residents were eating food
from the galvanized steel trash cans.

“Like anybody else, I wanted to do something
special with my life, to stand out, in that way that only the truly
great achieve. But wishes are castles in the air that often rise
only to collapse and be buried as a part of us. Because we are all
waiting in a green, oil-painted hospital on the benches of
bitterness. Yet we are still walking forward, picking up the pieces
of the puzzle of life that rush from its everyday changes. I did
this with a body whose cells were resurrected after symptoms played
hide and seek with death. It turned out that I was the most
appropriate participant for a program that originated on paper, and
we all know how smooth everything appears when written done. We
were baptized and promised the most expensive thing in the world—a
‘New Beginning.’ Or, more simply put, the ability to travel in time
to give or prevent everything that would encourage or threaten
humanity. So as Buddhists have said, ‘Nothing happens and nothing
will be.’

“The people have become the gods or the
aliens that came down from the heavens and so it was that the
largest living project ever had been created. For instance, the
myths and legends in your Sumer, Sharukin, for the divine
children—Anunnaki—were created. Those are the things that
eventually eradicated the paths of time. I was gifted to take
foreign memories. Every day I ask myself while staring into mine
and others’ past, why is the candle of hope being extinguished like
a falling star in the sea?

“I do not know, my friend.

“Sometimes faith is the particle, that great
wisdom that we can carry in this world.

“And with it, and with God’s help, I say,
‘Forward!’”

As if fragrant oil had been poured on the
heads of group and chilled them, the men felt merged with those
life-giving forces. It seemed like they were being sucked from
their bodies.

They caressed the console’s appliances; they
shook them and the zeppelin, as docile as bird turned and twisted
as if its axis were spinning like an umbrella. They were now headed
to the south.

The Libyan Sea began to mesh with the Cretan
as sickle stars come from a Van Gogh painting pulled into
chrome-brilliant whirlpools and splashing across millions of stages
in their width.

It’s that dimension of the warm, dry, desert
winds that brings to mind a sense of timeless lost in the sand.

Thus the blue spilled into the molten,
red-yellow glass, suddenly ended, and an ocher-white, mixed like
clay appeared while the sands of the desert spread like cosmic dust
from horizon to horizon.

There hidden as oyster pearls, melted in the
hot heavenly slope, separated by thousands and thousands of
breadths of distance, flashed Alexandria, Carthage, Dougga, El
Dzhem, and Timbuktu.

They were piled like star systems separating
life on Earth and life in space.

Here, the songs floated like strings of
armadas, stretched in the flour-like sand sea. They can only be
compared with two longing hearts that have finally merged in the
partitions of everyday life.

Man knew that wilderness is the cradle of
the human soul over which God himself has sung, telling a shroud of
miracles and hope, which had been appointed to humanity.

Perhaps, apart from Him, we need just the
nomadic mat to go back to those lost cities in the jungle, hiding
in the catacombs ingots of treasures, children’s dreams, and the
great gift that He has given us.

In exactly that way, crossing the celestial
diapers like a dolphin or otter and cleansed in the streaming rays,
approached the Behemoth.

Therefore, with the mastership of
transmitted narrative, we will cut their progress and we will
continue on to several days ahead, exactly as they reached the
shores of Africa.

So after a few breaths of air, just as it
takes a fabulous gin to clap hands and carry mountains, rivers, and
seas, the Behemoth is now already in front of the Nile delta with
its wrapped and stratified roots or veins. It is an area flooded
with life-giving green square kilometers and square fields that
disappear deeper and deeper into the view.

Chapter
Fifteen

The dense tropical vegetation tapped to the
rhythm of the song of dozens of different species of birds with
bright plumage.

Under the halo of the green and flowing down
through tawny trunks were islands of lushness. They had been
created greener and were associated with the bracelets of boulders.
Here and there, camouflaged in the jungle, fields of sugar cane,
sweet potatoes, and pineapples were shaded by palms that grew
askew. They grew in front of the eye, charming man with a rich
harvest—a cornucopia—that could only be compared to the reverie of
the island in one of the stories of Arabian Nights.