The Western Lands (15 page)

"What are
you
looking at?"

And the old gods will eke out a wretched, degraded existence as folklore for the tourists.

"Ju-ju doll, meester? Shrunked-down head? Pointy bone? Velly feelthy! Velly stlong!"

The One God can wait. The One God is
Time.
And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke. And what makes an old joke old and dead? Verbal repetition.

So who made all the beautiful creatures, the cats and lemurs and minks, the tiny delicate antelopes, the deadly blue krait, the trees and lakes, the seas and mountains? Those who can
create.
No scientist could think it up. They have turned their backs on creation.

Ju-ju doll, meester? 

Fill with nails 

Got good Ju-ju 

Never fails

Shrunked-down head? 

Hair will grow 

Pointy bone? 

Velly feelthy 

Velly stlong

It is of course assumed by Western savants that the Egyptian animal Gods are the fantasies of a primitive and backward people, who did not have the advantage of the glorious gains of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution in which a standardized human product overthrows himself and replaces his own kind with machines (they are so much more efficient).

However, all fantasy has a basis in fact. I venture to suggest that at some time and place the animal Gods actually existed, and that their existence gave rise to belief in them. At this point the monolithic One God concept set out to crush a biologic revolution that could have broken down the lines established between the species, thus precipitating unimaginable chaos, horror, joy and terror, unknown fears and ecstasies, wild vertigos of extreme experience, immeasurable gain and loss, hideous dead ends.

They who have not at birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us?

The Hawk cults, blue eyes harsh and pitiless as the sun; the Owl cults, with huge yellow night eyes and wrenching needle talons; flying weasels and reptiles. . . .

But the One God has time and weight. Heavy as the pyramids, immeasurably impacted, the One God can wait. The Many Gods may have no more time than the butterfly, fragile and sad as a boat of dead leaves, or the transparent bats who emerge once every seven years to fill the air with impossible riots of perfume.

Consider the One God Universe: OGU. The spirit recoils in horror from such a deadly impasse. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. Because He can do everything, He can do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition. He knows everything, so there is nothing for him to learn. He can't go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere, like cowshit in Calcutta.

The OGU is a pre-recorded universe of which He is the recorder. It's a flat, thermodynamic universe, since it has no friction by definition. So He invents friction and conflict, pain, fear, sickness, famine, war, old age and Death.

His OGU is running down like an old clock. Takes more and more to make fewer and fewer Energy Units of Sek, as we call it in the trade.

The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerfuL all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil and death, does not arise.

"What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."

"Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."

"Can't you give us immortality?"

"I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds."

We have notice of knives, rebirth and singing. All human thought flattened to a dry husk behind a divided pen. He walks in the glyphs and flattens man and nature onto stone and papyrus, eliminating, except in stone and bronze, the dimension of depth. We were not ignorant of perspective. We deliberately ignored it. A flat world was ours and everything in it had a name once and all the names were ours once. With perspective, names escape from the paper and scatter into the minds of men so they can never be held down again.

The means of suicide haunts their position. We are not averse to a king had a name and had once stone statues to be sure secret in the usual sense and bronze perspective . . . rage of animated dust that growls like a dog . . . barks and snarls of black granite serene crystal converse in sunlight . . . relive in boats a slough to the sky dotted with rafts, the smoke of cooking fire in dawn mist. All human thought flattened there in present time . . . flashes of innocence . . . birth and singing in the marshes.

God of the Long Chance, the impossible odds, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knockout, blind Samson pulling down the temple, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, God of perilous journeys, Helper in the voyage between death and rebirth, the road to the Western Lands.

To be reborn at all makes your condition almost hopeless. He is the God of Almost, the God of If Only, the God of Miracles, and he demands more of his followers than any other god. Do not evoke him unless you are ready to take the impossible chances, the longest odds. Chance demands total courage and dedication. He has no time for welchers and pikers and vacillators.

He is the God of the Second Chance and the Last Chance, God of single combat, of the knife fighter, the swordsman, the gunfighter, God of the explorer, the first traveler on unknown roads, the first to use an untried craft or weapon, to take a blind step in the dark, to stand alone where no man has ever stood before . . . God of Mutation and Change, God of hope in hopeless conditions, he brings a smell of the sea, of vast open places, a smell of courage and purpose ... a smell of silence confronting the outcome.

The Great Awakening arose from the horror of a dead, soulless universe. All the old answers have failed: the Church, the State. All the hundreds of cults with their answers, all seen as lies in the inexorably gentle white light of the White Cat, lies with nothing but terror and emptiness behind the lies.

It started in the sensational press,
The Enquirer, People, The World:
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN.

One of those life-after-death flutters in every issue: some housewife got a tip on the stock market from her dead husband. However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions for reaching the Land of the Dead. The message falls on summer golf courses waiting for rain, on the parched deserts of mid-America, dead hopeless wastes of despair, a glimmer of light and hope on a darkening earth. The great mushroom-shaped cloud always closer.

Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anyone ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.

The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet, awash in seas of silence. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death.

Governments fall from sheer indifference. Authority figures, deprived of the vampiric energy they suck off their constituents, are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers. And what is behind the computers? Remote control. Of course. Don't intend to be there when this shithouse goes up. Nothing here now but the recordings. Shut them off, they are as radioactive as an old joke.

Look at the prison you are in, we are all in. This is a penal colony that is now a Death Camp. Place of the Second and Final Death.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.

Neferti lived at this time in the Trains beside a river. This was in what used to be the Kansas City yards, a maze of switchbacks and passenger cars and freight trains. New tracks are constantly being built and the cars shifted around by various motors and pulley devices. More or less a thousand people live here.

Train whistles outside. We amuse each other with train whistle arrangements passed through echo chambers, ruined warehouses, broken windows, empty railroad stations, cheap hotel rooms, lonely sidings, misty, muffled foghorns, the cries of lost cats, farm ponds at twilight, croaking frogs, fireflies, music across the golf course. Some with old steam engines make trips to Denver and St. Louis. Others on abandoned, rusty, weed-grown switchbacks aren't going anywhere, and there is some sense in that.

Now these young fellers so hellbent to get to the Western Lands wouldn't know if they was there already. Gotta keep moving and moving and moving . . . where? The faster you move, the more it looks the same. Corn and grass grow between the cars, many of them covered with vines.

Neferti parts some rose vines and enters the dining car. Boys in white suits and blackface rush forward.

"Good evening, white boss man, got catfish boiled alive in asparagus piss . . . it's piquant."

They pull off their masks and sit down wearily.

"I wonder if we could ever get this thing moving?"

"You want moving trains, they got 'em. Got an itch for St. Louis, the Valley maybe? Go to the House of David and watch the girls eat shit? Dayumn! Makes you feel good all over. Or find yourself a drowned whore, cured two weeks in the River des Peres, and roll and snort and wallow in her? Peoria and Panta-pon Rose's cathouse? Denver and Salt Chunk Mary?"

The boys are frying catfish on an alcohol stove. So why not just set here and look. Look at that old river down yonder.

The boys serve each other martinis.

"Here you are, Jones." He hands him a shiny dime.

"You sure is a fair white man, boss, a fine old whitey. When I die I want to be buried right on top of you with your prick up my ass."

"Your attitude is commendable, Jones. How does 'Head Porter' sound to you?"

"Like the music of the queers ... I mean the spheres, boss."

But this waiter—white-man act is wearing thin and we know it. Just let these things run on and on until they stop. Your death is always with you. You don't have to run around looking for it.

He looks out across the river at the setting sun.

"Where are my smudge pots, Nigger? I want a smoky sunset."

"Got used up as smoke bombs in the Last Riot."

The Last Riot was a confrontation between the old tired way, Church and State, rule of the unfit for the unfit, biologic suicide. When the smoke cleared away, wasn't much left . . . just empty buildings and Sekhu, human remains.

Neferti strolls down to the market after dinner. The merchandise is laid out in houseboats and stalls along the river.

He picks up a revolving blowgun. Six darts can be loaded into a cylinder, which revolves by hand and blows them out one after the other. The gun is two feet in length and looks like a flute. He buys two extra cylinders, darts and a selection of poisons: blue-ringed octopus, sea snake, stonefish, cyanide. He chooses a functional model of ebony, the cylinder of aluminum.

Single-shot tubes, no thicker than a pen, made of ebony, teak, bone and ivory. They fit into a Scribe's kit, the little ink pots containing the poisons to be blended as a painter blends his colors. A smooth-bore revolver, each bullet shooting six nail-size darts that spread out a foot wide at ten feet. You can't miss, and you can take out a roomful of assholes or a pursuing crowd, falling all over each other.

Rested from his sojourn in the trains, cleansed by emptiness, Neferti is ready now to resume the endless journey over the hills and far away. His clothes are an intricate arrangement of pockets to accomodate tools, drugs and weapons.

He has studied, at the Sleight-of-Hand Academy. Disguised as a nude dancing boy, he once pulled a hog castrator from the crotch of a rival sheik, who subsequently pined away and died of shame. With his painted eyes, his lithe, slim figure and his deadly hands, he looks more like a beautiful evil woman than a man—which is to say he has incorporated his female component into a deadly concentration of incandescent purpose.

Neferti moves on, his purchases discreetly distributed about his person. He wears a light backpack. In his hands is a cane of whip steel, with a crook at the end. He can hook an ankle or a throat, an extension of his arms to touch, to move aside. There is reason for caution here—from the corner of his eye, he catches the deadly silent rush of an assailant from a down-slanting side street. Neferti whirls and gives him cyanide darts right across his chest. The man turns blue in the air, and his knife clatters ahead of him as he falls.

As he walks along, a boy pads in beside him.

"What you look for, meester?"

"Clothes, young man, rather special clothes."

"You mean maybe clothes from El Hombre Invisible?" "Precisely."

"It is expensive, meester, you will see. I will guide you to my commission."

"Neferti! You honor my humble shop."

The old man stands up, in all his courtly insolence. "But how could I"—he rubs his hands—"be of service to you?"

"I have need of a cloak."

The old man's face goes blank and cold.

"What you ask is illegal."

"Is not anything of value illegal?"

The old man's face relaxes into contented depravity.

"Of course, one must always take the Big Picture. . . . Yes, I have what you need. See for yourself."

They move into a vault. Suspended on elaborate frameworks to simulate the client, in this case lithe and thin and six feet in height, are the Cloaks of Darkness and Invisibility. Like thick black velvet, gathering always more darkness, they can suck the light out of a room or a street.

Neferti slips into a tight sweater. He fingers a djellaba of a blue-black color. There are boots from ankle to hip.

"The clothes of darkness,
señor.
Yes, come in many sizes. Here is a cloak to be worn at dusk and dawn, gray-black as you see, always the thick velvet feel, with gray-white velvet in the morning light, the black velvet lingering in corners like a fog of underexposed film, a path of darkness. Capes . . . yes, to be whipped about one, throwing swirls of darkness, and slim-fitting invisibles, tight pants, turtleneck and Russian hat. It's terribly dashing. But the old-time capes are still popular, how you can
swish
them around . . . a great swish of velvety darkness knocks the stupid words out of a redneck mouth with his bloody teeth."

Neferti adjusts the cloak about his shoulders. Soft and light as air, it settles around his body, molding to every contour. The hat is like a wig, fitting across the forehead and down the back of the neck below the cloak, and the ankle-high boots walk on layers and cushions of darkness.

He steps out into the areade of the market. It is late afternoon. Many of the stalls are empty. The palpable silence of an empty market, the heavy absence of many voices, all manner of men on their way to buy and sell, all absent, not even the shrug of negation or a ripple of water.

Those who have been raised in the market can distinguish what manner of merchant is there by the particular silence in his empty stall or shop or the accustomed place under the colonnades where he spreads out his wares. For a man is delineated more clearly by what he is not than by what he is, as if cut from stone by the mason's chisel. A moving tunnel of silence left by the water seller, a cool silence that is not thirst.

Here is the silence of a loud-mouthed cripple selling worthless merchandise. A faint whiff of incense, a calm, a dispersal, and the little people have cleaned up after him. The compound silence of the partisans of silence. Many turn aside, for few can breathe here in the absence of words.

Neferti is careful to hug the shadows, lest someone see a patch of darkness where there is no shadow. Under the arcades there are always shadows, and besides, the market is empty, or almost empty.

He passes a small café with benches along the side where men sit drinking mint tea and passing around kief pipes . . . laughter behind him.

He comes now to an open space of rubble and sand, where the merchandise is unloaded. A smell of horses and manure, oxen and leather, the rank reek of camel drivers. He looks up: a scattering of clouds. He will have to cross on cloud shadows.

Almost through, a path with trees ahead and the sound of water. Then, a sudden shift of wind and he is caught in a spot of blazing sunlight. He hurries on.