XV
Dalli told me her mom was a painter, and loved art. I looked at her paintings; she was immensely talented. Very mathematical about her landscapes. Her finished works are like a dream. One of her sisters was a year older than her, and liked to listen to music, and played violin. The one younger didn't do much, but she was always playing with this radio in the room beneath the surface satellite dish. Their father died trying to protect them three years ago. They've been collecting materials from the village at night ever since. She said nothing made her father sad. That made me feel pretty bad about myself in comparison.
I've been scrounging the village for curiosities. It's really all I can do to keep my mind off of things. I found a little round table and two chairs to go along with it. I put that out front of the bunker and I usually drink coffee there. Sometimes I'm attacked by a zombie or a bot. It's worth it, if I get to stare at the city for the first hour of my day.
The fogs work very systematically. In the morning, everything is terribly enveloped in the stuff; everything is a solid grey shape in the distance. The city still sparkles all the same, though; two towers around the pyramid, surrounded by mountains. The sun rises directly left of the city, facing it from the bunker door. As the fogs start to dissipate, they form into huge columns, and settle in enormous puddles on the ground. The puddles are anything like a few meters wide and about a foot deep at most; but they're hundreds of meters long, arrayed in almost perfect rows. Then, some clouds meander through the air in wisps only about fifty feet off the ground, and soon everything is clear and covered in dew. The world is colorful and bright for about ten minutes - then, the silvering of the day begins.
XVI
The clean water well works now, so we've been showering plenty. That's all I have to say about that, really.
I looked over her memorabilia of her father. There's a whole table loaded with pictures and items that belonged to him, with huge dusty candles on them, all on a bright red embroidered fabric. He's smiling in every one. It's the sort of smile that makes someone ugly, but that sort of folds in on itself, because it's clearly a happy thing. They buried him in the town cemetery. He had blue eyes and brown hair, and he always wore sneakers. Dalli asked me if I wanted to wear his old shoes. I said they weren't for me.
The way I see her sitting and doing something - knitting something, or drawing something - she seems unnatural, or awkward. There's something wrong; it's obvious, what it is. I wish I had never seen a girl who had to see these things happen. Nothing will ever be right again. My present efforts are all I can do to try to fix her. It's only a little better for me, because I'm doing just fine.
XVII
Two nights ago I dreamt of a war. I guess it was between the humans and the machines. All of it struck a deep nerve of fear in me; it was almost constant horror. The men were put through as many gunshots as they could survive; women had their flesh torn from their bones; children were brutally beaten and dismembered alive. And I was one of the aggressors. I saw the emaciated forms of children at my feet. I watched women with no skinn crawl around on the ground. I saw houses on fire with flaming human figures running out of them, and I had started the fire. I watched myself put a gun to the skull of a kneeling child and pull the trigger. Their heads exploded in blood and their eyes popped out. I cut off a woman's head and threw it to the pigs. There was a courtyard littered with stains of coagulated blood and human remains. I jumped awake as I found myself laughing and beating a line of hostages' faces in with a hammer.
I was sweating profusely. Dalli had left her room and come to sleep beside me; as I jumped awake, she flew out of the bed and huddled in the corner. I said I was sorry and she came back to bed; I told her I just had a bad dream. Having been woken up, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk. When I came back, I fell asleep, but had an even worse dream.
There was a grid of warehouses somewhere in the plains, on a beautiful day in the spring; we were herding naked, starved, diseased prisoners into them by the score. They had been drugged so heavily that they were ready to obey any order. Thereby, we had decided to run some experiments in testing the human will. We stood them up on bleachers and posed graphite blades in front of them. We asked them to jump forward, and their necks connected exactly with the blades. All of them were beheaded at once, and their bodies fell limp over the stands. Another group ran straight into a bar holding out blades, that their bodies slumped to the ground and their head fell after them. We repeated both experiments multiple times.
The dream shifted, and suddenly I was apparently someone else entirely. It was me and three other people hunting for some kind of horrifying animal. Imagine a small alligator that has fur instead of scales, a nose like an anteater, white skin underneath and enormous black pupils. Its fur is stiff and dry; the creature itself is disgusting. We hunted them with rifles and stowed them in a shed we had put on wheels. After about a few minutes we were happened upon by a thin, silver robot that was about thirty stories high, and had a hunched and collected sort of head and boney, metal fingers. It trapped us in it grasp, and I blacked out in the dream.
Still in the dream, I "woke up" in a horrible confusion, in some kind of churning pile or pool of screaming, raving animals. I made my way to the surface and beheld the single most horrifying sight of my life: thousands of screaming, raving, rabid, frail, panicking animals of all kinds in a vat that was a thousand feet across and probably a thousand feet deep. Everything was scratching and killing and trying to make sense of things. Some humans were caught in the disarray. The noise, the sanguinary screeching, far exceeded disturbing. It was all around me. Some snipers up above were picking off the humans. I tried to look for my friends, but their skulls popped as I pointed them out of the fray. At last, I found the last of my partners, but he was being grappled by one of the beasts we had been hunting. I grabbed a flashlight from my belt and beat it in the face until it was dead, then pried him loose.
We dashed over the mess, operating on sheer adrenaline. As we flew, I noticed that there were four immense panels leaning down into the bowl; they looked like four huge cheese-graters. But there was a human head sticking out of each hole, like they were seated in them. All of them were adjusted so their heads fitted the requirements. A bunch of gibberish sounded over a phantom intercom, and a lever was apparently pulled. A blade flew down the bottom side of the grater and beheaded everyone who sat inside. Their heads rolled into the bowl, and their bodies slid beneath. My friend and I reached the edge as a horrendous rumbling occurred, and we climbed onto a catwalk that reached over the bowl.
As we hung from the railing, we witnessed the jumble of creatures begin to shrink into the whole as a terrible grinding sound shimmered from the deep. We watched thousands of animals sink into a fifty-foot garbage disposer. Before the stewards came out again, we followed the catwalk in a frail rush to a ladder and climbed down, into a hallway with a light at the end. We sprinted to the end in primal fear, and soon met with the same woods in which we walked earlier.
Our running slowed to a heaving breathing and collapsing upon the ground. I was wide-eyed, watching the sky. My partner walked a few steps ahead, pulled the handgun from out of his belt, and shot himself, I suspected out of irreparable mental distortion. I woke up from the dream, and it was day. I had coffee as normally goes out front, and killed three feral robots.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
The Children of Men
I
Found notebook, pen, in house. Bombed out. I'm tired.
II
Found some bots. Shot them all, dead. Feel to writing fun shit. Can't think right. Another day I hope alright again. Head hurts always. Not easy to write, it's not. Trying really hard.
III
Sky always white. Rains often. Mountains around valley, I am in the second one. Barren, houses around. Robots and zombies, they try to kill me, I kill them instead with gun. Gun easy to use, point and fucking shoot. Fucking shit ass bitch fuck ass, dick. Fuck you. Cursing helps me think. I write better when I fucking curse. Words go together alright then. At a fire I made, piece out.
IV
In valley, there are houses. I find food and good things in the houses. Rooms are bed, food, white bowl, clothes, dark, hollow sitting. Like bed rooms, great for sleeping. Always dead children in the houses. Fun to shoot.
Robots. They are like people or horses. Horses are hard shooting, people easy. Horses are big, people small. Horse fast, people slow. Make really scary noises, sound digtl.
Zombies. Are gray flesh people, crazy as heck. Try to eat skin brains or blood. I like shooting them and hear screaming. Robots have good scream, too. But scream from steeds, horses. Loud, screechy. This is a semicolon; [u]fuck[/u].
V
Remembered more things today. I remembered syntax. Real important, syntax. Fuck this is really hard. Head hurts and eyes drip with blood. Today is a shit ass day, fuck.
VI
Love the clouds. Vast, majestic. More words today. Why am I stupid?
Today I found some sunglasses. they say "Wayfarer" on side. They're cool as heck. They were in a bed room on a table of drawers with mirror. Lots of other colorful shit. Girl was on bed, mostly decayed. She must have had a fat ass, because it was not as thin as it should have been by then.
VII
Today I had an epiphany. I remembered language in its entirety, so now I can write better. Cursing helps me think; that has not changed.
Zombies are seriously goddamn annoying. They're all fucking decaying and loud and they try to tear shit up; it's gay as hell. My rifle is like an arm, though, and I can kill things real easy. There's always ammo around. Robots are usually the same, only they move faster and are real smart. After a bunch of them mobbed me I started getting the hang of how they all work. At night, I always sleep on the ground floor in a house with my ear on the floor so I am more sensitive to vibrations. Never act sensibly around them; always be unpredictable.
Houses are all bombed out and cracked up. There's unperishable food everywhere, in most kitchens. In the middle of the whole valley is a yellow house with a small kitchen. There's a small table, with two chairs by the window. There were two black skeletons sat at the table, not moving, of course. Cool.
I like jelly a lot I just take jars around with me and eat with a spoon. I don't get sick, but sometimes my eyes bleed. It really hurts. I wish they didn't, and I don't know why they do. I'm okay, though.
Sometimes I think about memories. They happen occasionally. I remember being at gardens in really nice places with peacocks walking around. There are a lot of really nice sculptures and fountains. The ground here is either tall grass or all broken up and cratered. The indentations rise up like waves, and they've grown to stay like that. I'm sure it was bombed. But I don't know if there was a war.
I'd like to write more, but I'm tired. Good night.
VIII
Found a campsite by the mountains that surround the valley. Lots of normal people like me. They all have guns and food.
I don't need to be here, because I find food fine, and I don't seem to be susceptible to robots and zombies. I've let them attack me before, and they can't seem to hurt me. They say I am cool.
When they asked me what my name was, I couldn't remember. But I was thinking about a couple memories when they asked, a movie I liked and a song I liked. ISo I said, Joaquin Robinson. It's a good name.
They have a book here called the Kapliad. They say it's about a city called Runark, which split in two. The new city was called Babylon. That name rings a bell with me. The main character seems really cool. He's chill as fuck. Wore a grey gas mask, red hoody, jeans, Chucks. They tell me he's still alive. Cool.
Some things I should have said earlier:
There's a city on the other side of the valley. It's called 9830389. It's populated entirely by robots. They won't tell me more about it. The valley is miles wide. It's totally enclosed by things that are either mountains or just cliffs. It's extremely hard to get out. Some people live in the mountains.
When I went outside my tent, I noticed there's a really big pyramid and a bunch of towers in the city. You can see the lights through the really thick fog. I feel like sitting and writing more, as long as I'm at the camp. I am still regaining thoughts. Very slow.
I have spoken to a woman here in private. Her name is Laena. She told me that 9830389 has a few human inhabitants. When you get there, if you want to live in the city, they run a series of tests to confirm your ability to peacefully live in the city. Most people who go there do not survive the tests. I may go there if I have to.
Laena has gone to bed. I'm going to go to bed, too. Good night.
IX
I have decided to stay at the camp and read the entirety of the Kapliad. For some reason, I feel like it would be very liberating. It don't feel like I need to curse or pass destructive emotions when I am endorsed by intelligence in its simplest manifestation. At present, my comprehensive vocabulary has been released by some even fresher epiphany, however my imaginative and abstracting capabilities still seem to suffer some unexplainable depression. I am very passionately drawn in by words; I feel as if a grand expanse of turmoil and wisdom lies conveniently at my feet, summarized into a simple and plain series of vivid aphorisms. I will write again, only having finished reading this mysterious volume.
X
Many things have happened since my last entry, and lots of time has elapsed, so I'l try my best to summarize and address them as well as I can. I have fully remembered everything, and so I will begin from there.
I awoke in an underground test facility. The room in which I awoke was all white, there was a dead woman in a lab coat against the wall, and there was a TV in the corner near the door. The facility itself was strewn with the bodies of scientists and workers; everything was ravaged and destroyed. All the clocks were dead, and I had no access to the surface. I wandered this place looking for food for approximately ten days; there were multiple cafeterias all around, and I soon drew the conclusion that the place was remarkably enormous.
During this time, I was completely conscious and regular. Of course, I was incredibly confused, but everything was otherwise straightforward. All I had was a robe that I had stolen from someone's locker; eventually I took the uniform of a dead guard and his handgun as well.
The lab itself was apparently designed for research on cyborgs. I didn't appear to have any augmentations whatsoever. Some rooms were identical to the one in which I awoke, although it seemed as though the patients didn't exactly survive. One of them was the upper half of a body with the tailbone hanging down - no muscle or flesh, just organs suspended by a wire prefecture in the ribcage. He or she had crawled a few feet from the incubator before expiring, and the whole floor was pooled with blood. Their eyes were rolled back into their head, and so I guessed they had undergone leagues of pain.
Another one was essentially just a skeleton, only the brain and spinal cord were in perfect codition, and there was a metal box on the back of the skull. There were two grey spheres for eyesi n the sockets, and its bones were laced with a sort of metal wire concentrated to various points, which I assumed were its muscles. This one was sitting on the bench outside, a trail of blood leading to it. I tried to wake it up, but it wouldn't respond.
Another was just a shapely woman with a strange machine enclosing her head. She had apparently made it just down the hallway before collapsing; her skin, I soon discovered, was systematically sliced all over in patterns, and she was surrounded by a great pool of her own blood.
My wanderings were eventually concluded as I met up with two other survivors. One had a sort of silver visor for a head and the other a dark glass prism. Both of them appeared to be nothing short of robots, clad in lab coats, shirts and pants that they had taken from the locker room. They were peaceful, and actually very intelligent and wonderful to speak to, even in the midst of so much violence and destruction.
They told me they had been awake for about the same amount of time as me, and that they were both good friends before they were taken here. They remembered their lives before they came here, that they had both been fatally wounded in the war, and had signed up to donate their bodies for research. Apparently, I must have done the same, although they weren't sure what had been done to me. It soon became apparent that I had been internally modified to affect my physical capabilities, because I demonstrated running up and down the hall at inhuman speeds, I had exceptional strength (picking up a refrigerator, ripping off doors, throwing benches), and I had a photographic memory.
In the middle of the conversation they began to randomly ask me various questions. I didn't know the answer to any of them, and they concluded by declaring that I must have been human. They told me that I had hesitated and shaken my head before trying to come up with an answer, and that nothing I said was repetitive. Then they began to poke and prod me until I grew literally angry. Finally, they told me a joke that was hard to understand, which I laughed at after some deep deliberation.
The conversation eventually turned on them, and I asked them about the same dial boards that each of them had on their left arms. After inspecting them for some time, the one with the silver head pressed a button, and the board illuminated with blue lights. The other did the same. There were four dials, which read, "Anger", "Separation", "Depression", and "Revelation."
For a few moments, I watched them curiously and carefully turning the knobs, before I looked up into the darkness of their metal helmets and saw something incredible. The one with the silver head had only a black strip before his eyes through which to see, whereas the one with the prism of glass had an entire face through which to portray what I saw: it seemed as though their every thought was meticulously displayed in their faces, which suddenly became a remarkably vivid collage of LED images. They seemed to be computer monitors without pixels, as if I was staring at real life. I saw beautiful stretches of woods from the backseat of a car, I saw the stars at night, a birthday party, images of classical paintings and films, television, music videos, and various other beautiful, as well as ugly, displays of human imagination.
I indicated this to them by saying, "Wow, I wish I could do that." They soon recognized this on each other's faces and spent a while transacting their thoughts. We soon discovered that they could manipulate what emotions they felt and what appeared on the screen by turning the knobs on their arms. They managed somehow to generate very distinct and clear images, like smiley-faces and lines from poems they ad memorized. A moment of silence fell on us as they spent time reveling in their own fascination. Across the face of the one with the prism head, I saw an inscription that read much like the [i]Kapliad[/i] in diction, although I didn't quite know what it was from. Having accessed my photographic memory, I can now distinctly recall that it said, "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."
But soon this fascination passed as a noise came from down the hall, and the three of us looked to see a humanoid machine, or a robot, standing at the end. Both of them seemed to react rather frightened, but I managed to step forth and attempt to interact with it. Suddenly it came bounding towards me, and I instantly deliberated that it was attacking. Without thinking I brandished my handgun and shot it to the ground. I said it was strange that I had wandered for days without seeing anything, but was attacked as soon as I met up with other people. We decided that marauding machines were likely attracted to a multitude of people, and that we should either keep moving or leave each other.
The latter idea seemed like the worse one, and so we carried on through the lab, until finally we came upon the lab's server hub. All the computers in the facility were blackscreened, and we reckoned that they all worked on the same network. The two of them took on the task quite enthusiastically, and I stayed behind on the lookout for more machines. They managed to turn them back on within minutes, and we accessed the computer outside the hub.
I asked them if they would find the records regarding all of our designs, out of a very sentimental curiosity. They sat at the terminal as I watched guard in the hallway. We were attacked three times in the first half our or so, and we soon realized that we had attracted many marauders after the initial attack. Fortunately, I had taken a few extra magazines from the guard just in case.
They had to move back and forth between the server hub and the computer, because they had to continuously break through authorization requests, although I never inquired to how they did it. The attacks became more frequent, and they began to come in two's and threes. There were feral robots, outcast humans, and even what I can only describe as robotic quadrupeds, like robotic panthers or tigers. Either side of the hallway was littered with bodies, and I began to hurry my two friends.
First, they accessed their own records. They had a completely robotic exterior, but they retained their own brains and vital organs. After accessing mine, they found that I did retain my vital organs, but there were no notes regarding my brain. I accepted this a little uneasily, although we concluded simply that nothing happened to it. However, none of the records were updated after about six months ago from that time. They owed this to the several racks of destroyed servers in the hub, which were probably the last ones used.
Not long afterwards, finding nothing more to research and having become overrun by ferals and outcasts, we decided that it was about time to leave. Before we left, they looked up a map of the facility (which was harrowingly complex) and quickly found their way to the security locker rooms. Once there, they took uniforms like my own and we all took rifles and plenty of ammunition. They proved to be just as skilled at shooting as me, and so we managed to safely make our way to the exit and fight our way out. which was through a long, dark corridor of stairs leading straight up. Suddenly struck by a diverse feeling of intrigue, I decided to let them go ahead, having warmly embraced them at the approval of my survival, and I returned to the desk in the ravaged lobby to access the computer there. I heard them fighting off a few ferals outside as I would occasionally turn and kill one of my own.
I accessed my records again and skimmed over them madly. Eventually, the two of them were far enough away that the outcasts were more attracted to them, and after a few minutes there were only those who remained in the compound. At that point I had become overwhelmed by the horrible banging and screeching of the machines, and I soon became horribly annoyed at the prospect of seeing another one. As I pulled up another tab in my profile I read a particularly important note, which told that I would, within the first two weeks, undergo a violent impairment of mental capabilities that will serve as an automatic reset button designed for reeducation. But there were no scientists or lab assistants around to reeducate me, and so I was left to fend for myself in the wasteland.
I was overcome by insufferable rage and hatred towards absolutely everything that crossed my mind. I murdered every living thing I came in contact with, to the extent that I learned to survive based on my very nature of the time. Everything was subconsciously inherent, and almost nothing was a fully conscious endeavor. I was, for something like six months, an absolute child, scrounging for ammunition and nourishment at every hour of the day, until I felt like going to sleep. The act of murdering and taking was a game, and I became a champion. Sometimes I fear that I had perhaps murdered even the innocent, a potential reality that has recently grown to haunt me. But as I began to emerge from this stupod, I soon concluded that I was only inclined to kill that which might kill me.
The world began to change with the reading of the [i]Kapliad[/i]. Everything I knew and all with which I was familiar suddenly developed meaning and consistency. Living organisms were born, experienced sensations, judged these emotions, and died. The sun rose in the east, settled in the west, and was followed by the landscape of the Cosmos. Intelligence was the greatest tool a survivor could ever know, the ultimate weapon of a champion, and the final resolve of all death and suffering in the universe.
As soon as I had completed the first few chapters of the tome, I reveled in a terrible depression that was occasionally enlightened by faint and inconceivable nuances in my intellect, that flowers had color or that the world carried on in cycles. After a while, I left teh camp, curious to wander the wasteland and reflect on all I had ever seen in the last few months of my self-reeducation.
I took time not just to scrounge for food but to admire the figures of robots strewn across the ground, the vacant expression in feral mens' faces, and the story to be told of a bombed out house whose family was left huddled and dead in the basement. Perhaps they all committed suicide. Perhaps they froze during winter. Was there a war here? Was it genocide? Or was this a degree of civilization that had almost made it - a society of outcasts that had almost met with success, but failed the testament of reality, and collapsed under its own futile attempts. Gradually I became more and more horrified, having learned the true nature of the wasteland.
Throughout my wanderings of the Valley itself in the last few weeks since I left the camp. I feel much less like a child, more like an adult, at last. There's nothing more horrifying to me than the knowledge that I was once blissfully ignorant and conceited, that I may have once murdered an innocent person, or perhaps a multitude of them, and taken all for which they were worth. The simple idea of killing something that wears clothes, builds houses and preaches peace is enough for me to turn to suicide. But I refuse to succumb to such a fate, and so I will press on, so that I might manage to transgress all that makes me ill with myself and formulate a far more reasonable future. Hopefully, one day, I will escape the Valley. I may even care to move to Babylon.
XI
The Valley is home now. There's really not much to it; it's incredibly wide, almost no features, dilapidated houses everywhere, and everything is shrouded in some degree of fog. The ground is always changing elevation, so you're either walking up or down at any point in time - and it's not uniform, which makes me think this place was bombed sometime in the past. Imagine a giant bowl enclosed by immense ridges on every side - and no matter how long you walk, the ridges never seem to get any closer. This all is then surrounded by a hundred miles of mountains, also in every direction, and borders on the Fields of Runark in the north. Leaving is a big deal.
9830389 lies at the southern end of the Valley. Through the fog, you can always make out the citadel and a couple of towers on either side - all of it is sparkling with lights everywhere, as if someone dashed the whole city with glitter. The citadel is a giant pyramid, and I think the two Dukes live there. I don't know much else about the city, other than that it's a city of robots. Sometimes I think about trying to live there, but I hear the only humans who go there are people who want to die. The Admission Council will readily execute anyone who asks. And besides, the admission test usually rejects anything covered in tissue. But maybe I'll pass, who knows?
That's pretty much the Valley in summary. I spend all my time moving from house to house, gathering up supplies. Every new house is like a puzzle: trying to find out where the family ultimately expired, where they thought it was a godo place to hide ammunition, where their food stash was, what kind of people they were based on what stuff they had lying around, rich or poor, good people or bad people. I spend the day there fighting any robots who discover I'm there so that they don't eat me at night. When night comes, I usually sleep in the attic or something, so I can just jump off the roof and run my ass out of there if I need to. Oh yeah - I can withstand some pretty heavy falls. Feels good, really.
Of course, I'm not the only one looking for places to sleep and things to eat; there's always another band of marauders I have to kill from across a depression, or feral things I have to tear to pieces before they give up. Population-wise, the Valley is surprisingly rich. Not as though you're bumping into people, but you're always going to happen upon someone else throughout the day. Where do they come from? I don't know. But they're always hostile, and they're always trying to murder as many things as possible. Maybe they understand they won't survive anyway, so they're just trying to make their way while they can. Although, as long as they're shooting at something, they're probably not going to survive. It's a very obnoxious paradox.
All of the other marauders carry subordinate guns to mine, and I'm physically adept in comparison anyway, so I always leave a fight unscathed. I'm really afraid to get shot, but I know it's going to happen eventually. Still, no reason worrying about it. I don't ever expect to die, but I'm still very sure that it will probably happen one of these days. There's no way you can tell. Marauders are scheming, and ferals are in more places than you think. I'm constantly getting jumped on and shot at, and I can never tell when it will happen. One of these days.
XII
The idea of an actual wasteland didn't sink in until the last few days: it was, without surprise, a land that had been laid waste. Judging by the wide array of dilapidated buildings all around the Valley, which are all stocked with food and supplies for war, I could hardly help but deduce that this whole place was once at war. Everywhere, I see similar models of robots and the horrendously decayed figures of men who seem to have missed the part where they became skeletons, and remained dark grey cadavers for eternity. There is the occasional maddening roar of industry from the City, which thunders overhead like the voice of a god.
The whole landscape is incomplete without the addition of fleshy and metallic corpses sunk into the ground, usually gripping rifles, or something of the sort. There are bunkers still burgeoning with maniacal humanoid machines and walking corpses caught in a fury. Earlier today I entered a cement building on top of a short hill that seemed like some kind of battlement. Everything was close-up, so I only had my handgun out. It was a cramped array of hallways and windows that had all been broken in. Relief is the indication of a place being clear; I wave my gun around the hallways without making a noise, and the sheer degree of potential chaos, the fear of the unknown and the probability of extreme danger, is so nerve-racking that I've actually exceed my wits and commenced to screaming and curling up on the ground.
The robots are completely silent, except for the sound of machinery working inside of them. That's the most horrifying aspect, the fact that they're next to silent. Sometimes it feels like I'm staring at the skeleton of a metal human being. Maybe that's just my imagination. It always feels, to some degree, painful, whenever I rip a robot to pieces with my bare hands and throw it on the ground. I sometimes wonder if my brain is a machine, too; but I always remember that tearing a human apart is ten times as terrible as tearing a robot apart.
Like I said, all the robots look essentially the same. More importantly, so do the humans. They're 97% men; women are always dressed like they had just been doing the dishes. There are children, too. This is all excluding the houses, which are only occasionally single-family houses. There are often entire families there, and all the houses are crazy barricaded. If they were just plain old houses with holes in them, I would never consider squatting there; they're all boarded up and plated with iron. Sometimes, though, I find a family that's been absolutely torn to pieces; there are just bones and rotten flesh everywhere. They were either people or soldiers; either way, I never take those ones.
An update on my physical attributes: I'm horribly strong. I can punch out walls and run like a leopard. I can break spines with either my arms or legs and throw people up to ten feet. At one point I kicked a guy in the lower stomach and he landed about ten feet away on his face. I think he was dead, too. I'm punched a skull so hard I broke it, I fell twenty feet and it hardly fazed me, and punches to the face are only annoying.
XIII
It was a war between humans and machines. No one won, I guess. I'll have to go into detail as to how I've discovered this:
There was what must have been a very expensive estate sitting on a plateau around the north of the Valley (in other news, I've managed to visibly grow closer to the ridges). It was surrounded in hedges, gardens, dry fountains, a gazebo, and plenty of wrought iron things. The back half was slouching from the rest of the house; the whole thing was split perfectly in two, it seemed, the earth beneath the slouching part having been badly eroded with time.
At first, I approached it calmly and slowly, but soon enough I realized that there was no one there. Sometimes I come to a place where I'm positive there's nothing dangerous around, and I'm usually right. I walked through the front gate, even though I came at it from the side - it seemed like a more dignified thing to do. There were, of course, bodies of robots and humans everywhere, sunk into things and lying over the hedges like they were stretching their backs really hard. A lot of humans were lined up and hunched in at the fountains, as if they had all been drowned.
The interior of the house felt like a haunted mansion - which it probably was. The front room immense, and seemed to conceive of the whole house. An immense staircase sat just ahead of the front door; the very top of the stairs marks the household divide, and the back half seems to abide by a slightly more brutal degree of gravity. I hopped over the gap that had cracked between the top step and the second-floor walkway - the house shook as if read to fall over. The chandelier behind me, about fifteen feet wide, fell and shattered on the floor.
After that, there was total silence. As the inane ringing faded out, I looked back ahead of me and saw something run through the forward doorway. It walked in two legs and hardly made a noise. I tiptoed through the door with ballerina-grade carefulness and found myself before a window that encompassed the entirety of the outside wall. There was only the sight of dead people all over the garden and those impossible ridges on the other side of a horrible stretch of nothing, all shrouded in mist. I looked around, and the whole place was empty. There were bookshelves against the three inner walls, all of them brimming; one table sat diagonally before a glorious armchair, and the carpets on the floor were more ornate than my brain.
I looked behind the armchair and didn't find it; the only other place to look was a doorway on the opposite side of the room. It was the darkest doorway I'd ever seen. Flashlight in hand, I entered the room and found the Royal Bathroom, evidently installed just for the Royal Study. There was a little girl in the tub. She wore a white dress, had blond hair and blue eyes, and looked about eight years old. Immediately I said,
"Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. What's your name?"
She was crunched up in the corner. She peeked out of her arms at me with red around her eyes and shakily said, "Dalli."
"Well," I said, "how'd you get here?"
"I ran away," she said.
"Wow," I told her. "That's brave, but you shouldn't have done that. It's extremely dangerous out here. Do you live in a safe place?"
"Yeah," she said. "We live in a bunker."
"There you go," I said. "And I guess you don't know the way home from here?"
"No," she said. "I've never seen this place before."
"Are you hungry?"
"Yeah," she said.
I gave her some bread and over-fried ground beef from my backpack and let her have some water. I asked, "Is your family okay?"
"Yeah," she said.
"Why'd you run away?" I asked.
"Because my sisters said they hated me," she replied.
"Man," I said. "They didn't mean that. They probably don't know what they're talking about."
She just kept crying.
"I'll help you find your way home," I told her.
"You will?"
"Yeah, definitely," I said. " But you gotta be willing to be brave again. You're not gonna get hurt as long as you're with me. We really gotta find your home, you know."
She agreed to come with me. I let her have my bullet proof vest, and I got her a little girl's robe from a bedroom in the mansion. We met with plenty of violence along the way, and none of it was well received. She became more and more disturbed as time went on. I could hardly stop her crying sometimes, and I began to consider just leaving her. I definitely decided against it. Whenever we met with maniacs with guns, she would just hide behind me and wait until they were all dead. I once had to protect her from straight-up feral men, who seemed more eager to destroy her before me. I think one of them slapped her once; but only because I kicked him seven feet away as he reached his hand out at her.
Along the way, I happened to say, "What is all this, anyway?" I spoke in the context of all the dead things lying around.
So, she told me the story. I reckoned I should have told you all of that just to take care of the reason I learned it from a little girl.
It was a war between humans and machines. The formation of a new kingdom had gone horribly wrong. The founders were split between two sides; those who wanted it built on the work of machines, and those who wanted it populated by men. A robot majority would eventually result in the eradication of all human life; generations would simply cease to reproduce, and machines would take over. On the other hand, if only humans ruled, the result might be a series of tragedies and the ultimate downfall of the kingdom. Battles were fought all throughout the Valley. Once, the Valley was populated by sparse communities of free peoples, until the kingdom decided to take it for itself. After fifty years, everything became what it is now.
The city concluded on a harrowing compromise; the kingdom would be populated by men, but all of them were to be augmented by machines. At first, this seemed like a gloriously peaceful resolve, but soon it became an enormous mistake. The applied cyborg technology served as the government's grip on all citizens; politics and economics were eradicated, and everyone worked regardless of their own free will. They're allowed minimal amounts of free time, which is growing shorter and shorter every day. I asked her how she knows all this; she said they listened into the city's underground radio, which is clear all the way past Babylon. She says the DJ's are two robots who only entered in the last year or so. Cathedral bells rang in my my head; I told her I may know them.
We arrived at her bunker after about a week. It was in the middle of an abandoned village that still had salvageable materials in the houses. In the last few days, she began to recognize the countryside a lot better based on the landmarks, and at last we found her cement abode peeking out of a short hill. She departed from me in the last stretch of fifty feet or so and when screaming towards the door. Before she even reached it, the door swung open, and two girls a little older than her came out and embraced her. A beautiful grown woman rushed out behind them with one hand over her mouth and the other on her chest. Home at last.
A quadruped machine jumped out from behind a burnt-out townhouse. The girls dispersed and screamed violently. Before I had my rifle in my hands, the steed had pounced, and in a second, Dalli was the only one not scraped into a mess of flesh and blood against the ground. I placed seven bullets in it and threw my rifle on the ground. I fell on my knees and squeezed my head; Dalli just screamed and buried her face in the ground. The steed fizzled out and died at last. Of all the fucking shit I've ever seen in this fucking Wasteland, this is the fucking worst. Why did I have to see this? Why is this happening to me? Who the fuck am I, and why the fuck am I here? What the fuck am I trying to do?
I took her inside and we didn't sleep through the night. I scribbled this out and now I'm just about ready to have some nightmares. Good night.
XIII
It's been seven days in the bunker. Six days ago, I shoveled up the remains of her family and buried them in a shallow grave.
The bunker is stocked for seven people to survive for three years. There's plenty of coffee; I usually have five or six cups a day. There are cigarettes, too, but I only smoke outside, because the vent system isn't direct enough to act as a sink for the smoke. Every day is corrupted by the reminder of what happened. Nothing relieves the mortifying pain of tragedy. Death is very easy to grasp, but tragedy is a whole other world apart - a much, much greater world.
The city is practically calling to me. It's visible outside the door, looking down the street. Two towers, the one on the right taller than the other; between them is a pyramid more immense than anything I've ever seen. There are light sparkling everywhere. On the opposite side of a hopelessly wide stretch of wasteland lies paradise, unparalleled.
XIV
I still have the Kapliad on me. Thumbed through a few pages, read the last few chapters. Apparently, it was written by a rabbit; although the idea of a classic historical account being written by a rabbit is ridiculous, it still seems like a pedestrian sort of idea. Dalli confirmed that rabbits are normal in "this world." She told me this planet is called War Planet. There are ten kingdoms and about twenty billion inhabitants - at least, that's as many as they can count. There are portions of the world that have yet to be discovered, so there may be sophisticated life there, as well. Rabbits hail from Leporia; humans hail from Silvarum; saxonites hail from Antoria; mariners hail from any given place in the ocean. The first two are the most prevalent; the second two are usually considered third or fourth down the list.
We've discussed going to 9830389. She told me they might let her stay there simply because she's a child, but I'd be much more of a dilemma. If I don't even know what sort of a being I am, then I'm not sure how well I'd come across. Apparently, they operate on interrogations and extended surgery sessions. And, of course, they execute anyone who asks. Maybe I'll ask them about that.
She always thanks me for saving her. All that does is revive the fact that her family was mercilessly robbed from this world in front of her eyes, before she blinked. When I go out to smoke, I just stare at the quadruped and flourish with rage. This is always followed by a glimpse at the city. Maybe that means something; maybe it doesn't. I remind myself of the message I saw in the robot guy's face: "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men." I didn't find it anywhere in the Kapliad, I don't think.
So that's what they are, those dead and feral abominations of metal and flesh: they're the children. They were conceived by unobliging intentions; they were set into motion on the basis of a surely reasonable goal; left to their own designs, they were machinated into self-genocide. The men that made them look away, rubbing their chins and pondering. The data is in; the experiment concludes. A kingdom of loathing results.
Found notebook, pen, in house. Bombed out. I'm tired.
II
Found some bots. Shot them all, dead. Feel to writing fun shit. Can't think right. Another day I hope alright again. Head hurts always. Not easy to write, it's not. Trying really hard.
III
Sky always white. Rains often. Mountains around valley, I am in the second one. Barren, houses around. Robots and zombies, they try to kill me, I kill them instead with gun. Gun easy to use, point and fucking shoot. Fucking shit ass bitch fuck ass, dick. Fuck you. Cursing helps me think. I write better when I fucking curse. Words go together alright then. At a fire I made, piece out.
IV
In valley, there are houses. I find food and good things in the houses. Rooms are bed, food, white bowl, clothes, dark, hollow sitting. Like bed rooms, great for sleeping. Always dead children in the houses. Fun to shoot.
Robots. They are like people or horses. Horses are hard shooting, people easy. Horses are big, people small. Horse fast, people slow. Make really scary noises, sound digtl.
Zombies. Are gray flesh people, crazy as heck. Try to eat skin brains or blood. I like shooting them and hear screaming. Robots have good scream, too. But scream from steeds, horses. Loud, screechy. This is a semicolon; [u]fuck[/u].
V
Remembered more things today. I remembered syntax. Real important, syntax. Fuck this is really hard. Head hurts and eyes drip with blood. Today is a shit ass day, fuck.
VI
Love the clouds. Vast, majestic. More words today. Why am I stupid?
Today I found some sunglasses. they say "Wayfarer" on side. They're cool as heck. They were in a bed room on a table of drawers with mirror. Lots of other colorful shit. Girl was on bed, mostly decayed. She must have had a fat ass, because it was not as thin as it should have been by then.
VII
Today I had an epiphany. I remembered language in its entirety, so now I can write better. Cursing helps me think; that has not changed.
Zombies are seriously goddamn annoying. They're all fucking decaying and loud and they try to tear shit up; it's gay as hell. My rifle is like an arm, though, and I can kill things real easy. There's always ammo around. Robots are usually the same, only they move faster and are real smart. After a bunch of them mobbed me I started getting the hang of how they all work. At night, I always sleep on the ground floor in a house with my ear on the floor so I am more sensitive to vibrations. Never act sensibly around them; always be unpredictable.
Houses are all bombed out and cracked up. There's unperishable food everywhere, in most kitchens. In the middle of the whole valley is a yellow house with a small kitchen. There's a small table, with two chairs by the window. There were two black skeletons sat at the table, not moving, of course. Cool.
I like jelly a lot I just take jars around with me and eat with a spoon. I don't get sick, but sometimes my eyes bleed. It really hurts. I wish they didn't, and I don't know why they do. I'm okay, though.
Sometimes I think about memories. They happen occasionally. I remember being at gardens in really nice places with peacocks walking around. There are a lot of really nice sculptures and fountains. The ground here is either tall grass or all broken up and cratered. The indentations rise up like waves, and they've grown to stay like that. I'm sure it was bombed. But I don't know if there was a war.
I'd like to write more, but I'm tired. Good night.
VIII
Found a campsite by the mountains that surround the valley. Lots of normal people like me. They all have guns and food.
I don't need to be here, because I find food fine, and I don't seem to be susceptible to robots and zombies. I've let them attack me before, and they can't seem to hurt me. They say I am cool.
When they asked me what my name was, I couldn't remember. But I was thinking about a couple memories when they asked, a movie I liked and a song I liked. ISo I said, Joaquin Robinson. It's a good name.
They have a book here called the Kapliad. They say it's about a city called Runark, which split in two. The new city was called Babylon. That name rings a bell with me. The main character seems really cool. He's chill as fuck. Wore a grey gas mask, red hoody, jeans, Chucks. They tell me he's still alive. Cool.
Some things I should have said earlier:
There's a city on the other side of the valley. It's called 9830389. It's populated entirely by robots. They won't tell me more about it. The valley is miles wide. It's totally enclosed by things that are either mountains or just cliffs. It's extremely hard to get out. Some people live in the mountains.
When I went outside my tent, I noticed there's a really big pyramid and a bunch of towers in the city. You can see the lights through the really thick fog. I feel like sitting and writing more, as long as I'm at the camp. I am still regaining thoughts. Very slow.
I have spoken to a woman here in private. Her name is Laena. She told me that 9830389 has a few human inhabitants. When you get there, if you want to live in the city, they run a series of tests to confirm your ability to peacefully live in the city. Most people who go there do not survive the tests. I may go there if I have to.
Laena has gone to bed. I'm going to go to bed, too. Good night.
IX
I have decided to stay at the camp and read the entirety of the Kapliad. For some reason, I feel like it would be very liberating. It don't feel like I need to curse or pass destructive emotions when I am endorsed by intelligence in its simplest manifestation. At present, my comprehensive vocabulary has been released by some even fresher epiphany, however my imaginative and abstracting capabilities still seem to suffer some unexplainable depression. I am very passionately drawn in by words; I feel as if a grand expanse of turmoil and wisdom lies conveniently at my feet, summarized into a simple and plain series of vivid aphorisms. I will write again, only having finished reading this mysterious volume.
X
Many things have happened since my last entry, and lots of time has elapsed, so I'l try my best to summarize and address them as well as I can. I have fully remembered everything, and so I will begin from there.
I awoke in an underground test facility. The room in which I awoke was all white, there was a dead woman in a lab coat against the wall, and there was a TV in the corner near the door. The facility itself was strewn with the bodies of scientists and workers; everything was ravaged and destroyed. All the clocks were dead, and I had no access to the surface. I wandered this place looking for food for approximately ten days; there were multiple cafeterias all around, and I soon drew the conclusion that the place was remarkably enormous.
During this time, I was completely conscious and regular. Of course, I was incredibly confused, but everything was otherwise straightforward. All I had was a robe that I had stolen from someone's locker; eventually I took the uniform of a dead guard and his handgun as well.
The lab itself was apparently designed for research on cyborgs. I didn't appear to have any augmentations whatsoever. Some rooms were identical to the one in which I awoke, although it seemed as though the patients didn't exactly survive. One of them was the upper half of a body with the tailbone hanging down - no muscle or flesh, just organs suspended by a wire prefecture in the ribcage. He or she had crawled a few feet from the incubator before expiring, and the whole floor was pooled with blood. Their eyes were rolled back into their head, and so I guessed they had undergone leagues of pain.
Another one was essentially just a skeleton, only the brain and spinal cord were in perfect codition, and there was a metal box on the back of the skull. There were two grey spheres for eyesi n the sockets, and its bones were laced with a sort of metal wire concentrated to various points, which I assumed were its muscles. This one was sitting on the bench outside, a trail of blood leading to it. I tried to wake it up, but it wouldn't respond.
Another was just a shapely woman with a strange machine enclosing her head. She had apparently made it just down the hallway before collapsing; her skin, I soon discovered, was systematically sliced all over in patterns, and she was surrounded by a great pool of her own blood.
My wanderings were eventually concluded as I met up with two other survivors. One had a sort of silver visor for a head and the other a dark glass prism. Both of them appeared to be nothing short of robots, clad in lab coats, shirts and pants that they had taken from the locker room. They were peaceful, and actually very intelligent and wonderful to speak to, even in the midst of so much violence and destruction.
They told me they had been awake for about the same amount of time as me, and that they were both good friends before they were taken here. They remembered their lives before they came here, that they had both been fatally wounded in the war, and had signed up to donate their bodies for research. Apparently, I must have done the same, although they weren't sure what had been done to me. It soon became apparent that I had been internally modified to affect my physical capabilities, because I demonstrated running up and down the hall at inhuman speeds, I had exceptional strength (picking up a refrigerator, ripping off doors, throwing benches), and I had a photographic memory.
In the middle of the conversation they began to randomly ask me various questions. I didn't know the answer to any of them, and they concluded by declaring that I must have been human. They told me that I had hesitated and shaken my head before trying to come up with an answer, and that nothing I said was repetitive. Then they began to poke and prod me until I grew literally angry. Finally, they told me a joke that was hard to understand, which I laughed at after some deep deliberation.
The conversation eventually turned on them, and I asked them about the same dial boards that each of them had on their left arms. After inspecting them for some time, the one with the silver head pressed a button, and the board illuminated with blue lights. The other did the same. There were four dials, which read, "Anger", "Separation", "Depression", and "Revelation."
For a few moments, I watched them curiously and carefully turning the knobs, before I looked up into the darkness of their metal helmets and saw something incredible. The one with the silver head had only a black strip before his eyes through which to see, whereas the one with the prism of glass had an entire face through which to portray what I saw: it seemed as though their every thought was meticulously displayed in their faces, which suddenly became a remarkably vivid collage of LED images. They seemed to be computer monitors without pixels, as if I was staring at real life. I saw beautiful stretches of woods from the backseat of a car, I saw the stars at night, a birthday party, images of classical paintings and films, television, music videos, and various other beautiful, as well as ugly, displays of human imagination.
I indicated this to them by saying, "Wow, I wish I could do that." They soon recognized this on each other's faces and spent a while transacting their thoughts. We soon discovered that they could manipulate what emotions they felt and what appeared on the screen by turning the knobs on their arms. They managed somehow to generate very distinct and clear images, like smiley-faces and lines from poems they ad memorized. A moment of silence fell on us as they spent time reveling in their own fascination. Across the face of the one with the prism head, I saw an inscription that read much like the [i]Kapliad[/i] in diction, although I didn't quite know what it was from. Having accessed my photographic memory, I can now distinctly recall that it said, "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men."
But soon this fascination passed as a noise came from down the hall, and the three of us looked to see a humanoid machine, or a robot, standing at the end. Both of them seemed to react rather frightened, but I managed to step forth and attempt to interact with it. Suddenly it came bounding towards me, and I instantly deliberated that it was attacking. Without thinking I brandished my handgun and shot it to the ground. I said it was strange that I had wandered for days without seeing anything, but was attacked as soon as I met up with other people. We decided that marauding machines were likely attracted to a multitude of people, and that we should either keep moving or leave each other.
The latter idea seemed like the worse one, and so we carried on through the lab, until finally we came upon the lab's server hub. All the computers in the facility were blackscreened, and we reckoned that they all worked on the same network. The two of them took on the task quite enthusiastically, and I stayed behind on the lookout for more machines. They managed to turn them back on within minutes, and we accessed the computer outside the hub.
I asked them if they would find the records regarding all of our designs, out of a very sentimental curiosity. They sat at the terminal as I watched guard in the hallway. We were attacked three times in the first half our or so, and we soon realized that we had attracted many marauders after the initial attack. Fortunately, I had taken a few extra magazines from the guard just in case.
They had to move back and forth between the server hub and the computer, because they had to continuously break through authorization requests, although I never inquired to how they did it. The attacks became more frequent, and they began to come in two's and threes. There were feral robots, outcast humans, and even what I can only describe as robotic quadrupeds, like robotic panthers or tigers. Either side of the hallway was littered with bodies, and I began to hurry my two friends.
First, they accessed their own records. They had a completely robotic exterior, but they retained their own brains and vital organs. After accessing mine, they found that I did retain my vital organs, but there were no notes regarding my brain. I accepted this a little uneasily, although we concluded simply that nothing happened to it. However, none of the records were updated after about six months ago from that time. They owed this to the several racks of destroyed servers in the hub, which were probably the last ones used.
Not long afterwards, finding nothing more to research and having become overrun by ferals and outcasts, we decided that it was about time to leave. Before we left, they looked up a map of the facility (which was harrowingly complex) and quickly found their way to the security locker rooms. Once there, they took uniforms like my own and we all took rifles and plenty of ammunition. They proved to be just as skilled at shooting as me, and so we managed to safely make our way to the exit and fight our way out. which was through a long, dark corridor of stairs leading straight up. Suddenly struck by a diverse feeling of intrigue, I decided to let them go ahead, having warmly embraced them at the approval of my survival, and I returned to the desk in the ravaged lobby to access the computer there. I heard them fighting off a few ferals outside as I would occasionally turn and kill one of my own.
I accessed my records again and skimmed over them madly. Eventually, the two of them were far enough away that the outcasts were more attracted to them, and after a few minutes there were only those who remained in the compound. At that point I had become overwhelmed by the horrible banging and screeching of the machines, and I soon became horribly annoyed at the prospect of seeing another one. As I pulled up another tab in my profile I read a particularly important note, which told that I would, within the first two weeks, undergo a violent impairment of mental capabilities that will serve as an automatic reset button designed for reeducation. But there were no scientists or lab assistants around to reeducate me, and so I was left to fend for myself in the wasteland.
I was overcome by insufferable rage and hatred towards absolutely everything that crossed my mind. I murdered every living thing I came in contact with, to the extent that I learned to survive based on my very nature of the time. Everything was subconsciously inherent, and almost nothing was a fully conscious endeavor. I was, for something like six months, an absolute child, scrounging for ammunition and nourishment at every hour of the day, until I felt like going to sleep. The act of murdering and taking was a game, and I became a champion. Sometimes I fear that I had perhaps murdered even the innocent, a potential reality that has recently grown to haunt me. But as I began to emerge from this stupod, I soon concluded that I was only inclined to kill that which might kill me.
The world began to change with the reading of the [i]Kapliad[/i]. Everything I knew and all with which I was familiar suddenly developed meaning and consistency. Living organisms were born, experienced sensations, judged these emotions, and died. The sun rose in the east, settled in the west, and was followed by the landscape of the Cosmos. Intelligence was the greatest tool a survivor could ever know, the ultimate weapon of a champion, and the final resolve of all death and suffering in the universe.
As soon as I had completed the first few chapters of the tome, I reveled in a terrible depression that was occasionally enlightened by faint and inconceivable nuances in my intellect, that flowers had color or that the world carried on in cycles. After a while, I left teh camp, curious to wander the wasteland and reflect on all I had ever seen in the last few months of my self-reeducation.
I took time not just to scrounge for food but to admire the figures of robots strewn across the ground, the vacant expression in feral mens' faces, and the story to be told of a bombed out house whose family was left huddled and dead in the basement. Perhaps they all committed suicide. Perhaps they froze during winter. Was there a war here? Was it genocide? Or was this a degree of civilization that had almost made it - a society of outcasts that had almost met with success, but failed the testament of reality, and collapsed under its own futile attempts. Gradually I became more and more horrified, having learned the true nature of the wasteland.
Throughout my wanderings of the Valley itself in the last few weeks since I left the camp. I feel much less like a child, more like an adult, at last. There's nothing more horrifying to me than the knowledge that I was once blissfully ignorant and conceited, that I may have once murdered an innocent person, or perhaps a multitude of them, and taken all for which they were worth. The simple idea of killing something that wears clothes, builds houses and preaches peace is enough for me to turn to suicide. But I refuse to succumb to such a fate, and so I will press on, so that I might manage to transgress all that makes me ill with myself and formulate a far more reasonable future. Hopefully, one day, I will escape the Valley. I may even care to move to Babylon.
XI
The Valley is home now. There's really not much to it; it's incredibly wide, almost no features, dilapidated houses everywhere, and everything is shrouded in some degree of fog. The ground is always changing elevation, so you're either walking up or down at any point in time - and it's not uniform, which makes me think this place was bombed sometime in the past. Imagine a giant bowl enclosed by immense ridges on every side - and no matter how long you walk, the ridges never seem to get any closer. This all is then surrounded by a hundred miles of mountains, also in every direction, and borders on the Fields of Runark in the north. Leaving is a big deal.
9830389 lies at the southern end of the Valley. Through the fog, you can always make out the citadel and a couple of towers on either side - all of it is sparkling with lights everywhere, as if someone dashed the whole city with glitter. The citadel is a giant pyramid, and I think the two Dukes live there. I don't know much else about the city, other than that it's a city of robots. Sometimes I think about trying to live there, but I hear the only humans who go there are people who want to die. The Admission Council will readily execute anyone who asks. And besides, the admission test usually rejects anything covered in tissue. But maybe I'll pass, who knows?
That's pretty much the Valley in summary. I spend all my time moving from house to house, gathering up supplies. Every new house is like a puzzle: trying to find out where the family ultimately expired, where they thought it was a godo place to hide ammunition, where their food stash was, what kind of people they were based on what stuff they had lying around, rich or poor, good people or bad people. I spend the day there fighting any robots who discover I'm there so that they don't eat me at night. When night comes, I usually sleep in the attic or something, so I can just jump off the roof and run my ass out of there if I need to. Oh yeah - I can withstand some pretty heavy falls. Feels good, really.
Of course, I'm not the only one looking for places to sleep and things to eat; there's always another band of marauders I have to kill from across a depression, or feral things I have to tear to pieces before they give up. Population-wise, the Valley is surprisingly rich. Not as though you're bumping into people, but you're always going to happen upon someone else throughout the day. Where do they come from? I don't know. But they're always hostile, and they're always trying to murder as many things as possible. Maybe they understand they won't survive anyway, so they're just trying to make their way while they can. Although, as long as they're shooting at something, they're probably not going to survive. It's a very obnoxious paradox.
All of the other marauders carry subordinate guns to mine, and I'm physically adept in comparison anyway, so I always leave a fight unscathed. I'm really afraid to get shot, but I know it's going to happen eventually. Still, no reason worrying about it. I don't ever expect to die, but I'm still very sure that it will probably happen one of these days. There's no way you can tell. Marauders are scheming, and ferals are in more places than you think. I'm constantly getting jumped on and shot at, and I can never tell when it will happen. One of these days.
XII
The idea of an actual wasteland didn't sink in until the last few days: it was, without surprise, a land that had been laid waste. Judging by the wide array of dilapidated buildings all around the Valley, which are all stocked with food and supplies for war, I could hardly help but deduce that this whole place was once at war. Everywhere, I see similar models of robots and the horrendously decayed figures of men who seem to have missed the part where they became skeletons, and remained dark grey cadavers for eternity. There is the occasional maddening roar of industry from the City, which thunders overhead like the voice of a god.
The whole landscape is incomplete without the addition of fleshy and metallic corpses sunk into the ground, usually gripping rifles, or something of the sort. There are bunkers still burgeoning with maniacal humanoid machines and walking corpses caught in a fury. Earlier today I entered a cement building on top of a short hill that seemed like some kind of battlement. Everything was close-up, so I only had my handgun out. It was a cramped array of hallways and windows that had all been broken in. Relief is the indication of a place being clear; I wave my gun around the hallways without making a noise, and the sheer degree of potential chaos, the fear of the unknown and the probability of extreme danger, is so nerve-racking that I've actually exceed my wits and commenced to screaming and curling up on the ground.
The robots are completely silent, except for the sound of machinery working inside of them. That's the most horrifying aspect, the fact that they're next to silent. Sometimes it feels like I'm staring at the skeleton of a metal human being. Maybe that's just my imagination. It always feels, to some degree, painful, whenever I rip a robot to pieces with my bare hands and throw it on the ground. I sometimes wonder if my brain is a machine, too; but I always remember that tearing a human apart is ten times as terrible as tearing a robot apart.
Like I said, all the robots look essentially the same. More importantly, so do the humans. They're 97% men; women are always dressed like they had just been doing the dishes. There are children, too. This is all excluding the houses, which are only occasionally single-family houses. There are often entire families there, and all the houses are crazy barricaded. If they were just plain old houses with holes in them, I would never consider squatting there; they're all boarded up and plated with iron. Sometimes, though, I find a family that's been absolutely torn to pieces; there are just bones and rotten flesh everywhere. They were either people or soldiers; either way, I never take those ones.
An update on my physical attributes: I'm horribly strong. I can punch out walls and run like a leopard. I can break spines with either my arms or legs and throw people up to ten feet. At one point I kicked a guy in the lower stomach and he landed about ten feet away on his face. I think he was dead, too. I'm punched a skull so hard I broke it, I fell twenty feet and it hardly fazed me, and punches to the face are only annoying.
XIII
It was a war between humans and machines. No one won, I guess. I'll have to go into detail as to how I've discovered this:
There was what must have been a very expensive estate sitting on a plateau around the north of the Valley (in other news, I've managed to visibly grow closer to the ridges). It was surrounded in hedges, gardens, dry fountains, a gazebo, and plenty of wrought iron things. The back half was slouching from the rest of the house; the whole thing was split perfectly in two, it seemed, the earth beneath the slouching part having been badly eroded with time.
At first, I approached it calmly and slowly, but soon enough I realized that there was no one there. Sometimes I come to a place where I'm positive there's nothing dangerous around, and I'm usually right. I walked through the front gate, even though I came at it from the side - it seemed like a more dignified thing to do. There were, of course, bodies of robots and humans everywhere, sunk into things and lying over the hedges like they were stretching their backs really hard. A lot of humans were lined up and hunched in at the fountains, as if they had all been drowned.
The interior of the house felt like a haunted mansion - which it probably was. The front room immense, and seemed to conceive of the whole house. An immense staircase sat just ahead of the front door; the very top of the stairs marks the household divide, and the back half seems to abide by a slightly more brutal degree of gravity. I hopped over the gap that had cracked between the top step and the second-floor walkway - the house shook as if read to fall over. The chandelier behind me, about fifteen feet wide, fell and shattered on the floor.
After that, there was total silence. As the inane ringing faded out, I looked back ahead of me and saw something run through the forward doorway. It walked in two legs and hardly made a noise. I tiptoed through the door with ballerina-grade carefulness and found myself before a window that encompassed the entirety of the outside wall. There was only the sight of dead people all over the garden and those impossible ridges on the other side of a horrible stretch of nothing, all shrouded in mist. I looked around, and the whole place was empty. There were bookshelves against the three inner walls, all of them brimming; one table sat diagonally before a glorious armchair, and the carpets on the floor were more ornate than my brain.
I looked behind the armchair and didn't find it; the only other place to look was a doorway on the opposite side of the room. It was the darkest doorway I'd ever seen. Flashlight in hand, I entered the room and found the Royal Bathroom, evidently installed just for the Royal Study. There was a little girl in the tub. She wore a white dress, had blond hair and blue eyes, and looked about eight years old. Immediately I said,
"Don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you. What's your name?"
She was crunched up in the corner. She peeked out of her arms at me with red around her eyes and shakily said, "Dalli."
"Well," I said, "how'd you get here?"
"I ran away," she said.
"Wow," I told her. "That's brave, but you shouldn't have done that. It's extremely dangerous out here. Do you live in a safe place?"
"Yeah," she said. "We live in a bunker."
"There you go," I said. "And I guess you don't know the way home from here?"
"No," she said. "I've never seen this place before."
"Are you hungry?"
"Yeah," she said.
I gave her some bread and over-fried ground beef from my backpack and let her have some water. I asked, "Is your family okay?"
"Yeah," she said.
"Why'd you run away?" I asked.
"Because my sisters said they hated me," she replied.
"Man," I said. "They didn't mean that. They probably don't know what they're talking about."
She just kept crying.
"I'll help you find your way home," I told her.
"You will?"
"Yeah, definitely," I said. " But you gotta be willing to be brave again. You're not gonna get hurt as long as you're with me. We really gotta find your home, you know."
She agreed to come with me. I let her have my bullet proof vest, and I got her a little girl's robe from a bedroom in the mansion. We met with plenty of violence along the way, and none of it was well received. She became more and more disturbed as time went on. I could hardly stop her crying sometimes, and I began to consider just leaving her. I definitely decided against it. Whenever we met with maniacs with guns, she would just hide behind me and wait until they were all dead. I once had to protect her from straight-up feral men, who seemed more eager to destroy her before me. I think one of them slapped her once; but only because I kicked him seven feet away as he reached his hand out at her.
Along the way, I happened to say, "What is all this, anyway?" I spoke in the context of all the dead things lying around.
So, she told me the story. I reckoned I should have told you all of that just to take care of the reason I learned it from a little girl.
It was a war between humans and machines. The formation of a new kingdom had gone horribly wrong. The founders were split between two sides; those who wanted it built on the work of machines, and those who wanted it populated by men. A robot majority would eventually result in the eradication of all human life; generations would simply cease to reproduce, and machines would take over. On the other hand, if only humans ruled, the result might be a series of tragedies and the ultimate downfall of the kingdom. Battles were fought all throughout the Valley. Once, the Valley was populated by sparse communities of free peoples, until the kingdom decided to take it for itself. After fifty years, everything became what it is now.
The city concluded on a harrowing compromise; the kingdom would be populated by men, but all of them were to be augmented by machines. At first, this seemed like a gloriously peaceful resolve, but soon it became an enormous mistake. The applied cyborg technology served as the government's grip on all citizens; politics and economics were eradicated, and everyone worked regardless of their own free will. They're allowed minimal amounts of free time, which is growing shorter and shorter every day. I asked her how she knows all this; she said they listened into the city's underground radio, which is clear all the way past Babylon. She says the DJ's are two robots who only entered in the last year or so. Cathedral bells rang in my my head; I told her I may know them.
We arrived at her bunker after about a week. It was in the middle of an abandoned village that still had salvageable materials in the houses. In the last few days, she began to recognize the countryside a lot better based on the landmarks, and at last we found her cement abode peeking out of a short hill. She departed from me in the last stretch of fifty feet or so and when screaming towards the door. Before she even reached it, the door swung open, and two girls a little older than her came out and embraced her. A beautiful grown woman rushed out behind them with one hand over her mouth and the other on her chest. Home at last.
A quadruped machine jumped out from behind a burnt-out townhouse. The girls dispersed and screamed violently. Before I had my rifle in my hands, the steed had pounced, and in a second, Dalli was the only one not scraped into a mess of flesh and blood against the ground. I placed seven bullets in it and threw my rifle on the ground. I fell on my knees and squeezed my head; Dalli just screamed and buried her face in the ground. The steed fizzled out and died at last. Of all the fucking shit I've ever seen in this fucking Wasteland, this is the fucking worst. Why did I have to see this? Why is this happening to me? Who the fuck am I, and why the fuck am I here? What the fuck am I trying to do?
I took her inside and we didn't sleep through the night. I scribbled this out and now I'm just about ready to have some nightmares. Good night.
XIII
It's been seven days in the bunker. Six days ago, I shoveled up the remains of her family and buried them in a shallow grave.
The bunker is stocked for seven people to survive for three years. There's plenty of coffee; I usually have five or six cups a day. There are cigarettes, too, but I only smoke outside, because the vent system isn't direct enough to act as a sink for the smoke. Every day is corrupted by the reminder of what happened. Nothing relieves the mortifying pain of tragedy. Death is very easy to grasp, but tragedy is a whole other world apart - a much, much greater world.
The city is practically calling to me. It's visible outside the door, looking down the street. Two towers, the one on the right taller than the other; between them is a pyramid more immense than anything I've ever seen. There are light sparkling everywhere. On the opposite side of a hopelessly wide stretch of wasteland lies paradise, unparalleled.
XIV
I still have the Kapliad on me. Thumbed through a few pages, read the last few chapters. Apparently, it was written by a rabbit; although the idea of a classic historical account being written by a rabbit is ridiculous, it still seems like a pedestrian sort of idea. Dalli confirmed that rabbits are normal in "this world." She told me this planet is called War Planet. There are ten kingdoms and about twenty billion inhabitants - at least, that's as many as they can count. There are portions of the world that have yet to be discovered, so there may be sophisticated life there, as well. Rabbits hail from Leporia; humans hail from Silvarum; saxonites hail from Antoria; mariners hail from any given place in the ocean. The first two are the most prevalent; the second two are usually considered third or fourth down the list.
We've discussed going to 9830389. She told me they might let her stay there simply because she's a child, but I'd be much more of a dilemma. If I don't even know what sort of a being I am, then I'm not sure how well I'd come across. Apparently, they operate on interrogations and extended surgery sessions. And, of course, they execute anyone who asks. Maybe I'll ask them about that.
She always thanks me for saving her. All that does is revive the fact that her family was mercilessly robbed from this world in front of her eyes, before she blinked. When I go out to smoke, I just stare at the quadruped and flourish with rage. This is always followed by a glimpse at the city. Maybe that means something; maybe it doesn't. I remind myself of the message I saw in the robot guy's face: "Thou turnest man to destruction; again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men." I didn't find it anywhere in the Kapliad, I don't think.
So that's what they are, those dead and feral abominations of metal and flesh: they're the children. They were conceived by unobliging intentions; they were set into motion on the basis of a surely reasonable goal; left to their own designs, they were machinated into self-genocide. The men that made them look away, rubbing their chins and pondering. The data is in; the experiment concludes. A kingdom of loathing results.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Tempest, prosaic
The clouds congregate. All the sky grows barren and white – the earth, grey and trodden with rain; a storm blossoms over the horizon between. Showering darkness proceeds endlessly over the wetlands, and the woods, the moors, the mountains, and the slopes of the dew-laden downs. By the design of their own hysterics, the concepts of the world’s kingdom turn against each other; crow rending vulture, brother killing brother, the sky befalling the earth.
Lightning strikes the ground, hurricanes lacerate the arboreal domain, and cyclones loom over land and sea. All the globe is a churning deluge. Those previous assets of the terrain are without form or reason, particles lapsing through the maelstrom of the deep. Storm clouds roar with destruction from above, and the loam boils with the turbine of disarray from below. The chaotic abyss prevails.
And at the height of all godless impurity and malice, the heavens are flooded with light, and sunshine perforates the storm. The darkness dissipates; the tempest relents; peace draws slowly across the settling wasteland, and the earth rebuilds itself again.
Lightning strikes the ground, hurricanes lacerate the arboreal domain, and cyclones loom over land and sea. All the globe is a churning deluge. Those previous assets of the terrain are without form or reason, particles lapsing through the maelstrom of the deep. Storm clouds roar with destruction from above, and the loam boils with the turbine of disarray from below. The chaotic abyss prevails.
And at the height of all godless impurity and malice, the heavens are flooded with light, and sunshine perforates the storm. The darkness dissipates; the tempest relents; peace draws slowly across the settling wasteland, and the earth rebuilds itself again.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Phantom Pt.1
Amidst the white and endless sky,
The clouds revolve and tremble;
Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,
Where rage and wrath assemble.
Through lust and mediocrity,
Mankind fell ill to feeling;
There sullen sought monstrosity
Left man and kindred reeling.
Then storm on darkened gables drew,
And turbid gales did linger,
In districts blood and bleating knew,
Where swords rest cold in fingers.
So silence veiled the lost remains,
And nature ceased to stir;
The slain deluged the streets and lanes,
Where frigid drafts abjure.
And somewhere in a city square,
A squire wrote in blood
Upon a pristine wall left there,
Whose sermon looms above:
"In every square of land and plain,
The story read the same;
Tempest high and lowly maimed,
Till only grace remained."
And on the arid, level wasteland,
Stranger by his trade,
Did wander still and sterile sand,
As time itself decayed.
A sanguine cloak his shoulders bore,
That flickered in the gales;
A sword and shield his stock and store,
And mead and rancid kale.
A sanguine hood engulfed his head;
A metal mask he wore,
That neither love nor hatred bred;
No character it bore.
Across the aural desert laid,
A shadow drew adrift;
A rising fog in colonnades
Amassed in storm clouds swift.
Graceful heavens, burdened be,
Grew dark with clouds and thunder.
Cyclones loomed on land and sea:
The dark is torn asunder.
The silence is eviscerated;
Lightning strikes the ground –
An ashen spot incinerated
Smokes without a sound.
Phantom rises ashes from,
A shadow cloaken darkly;
Bound to rise when kingdom come,
Obeying burden starkly.
Darkness clothed the Phantom wholly,
Floating round his form;
Pluming shadow bathed him fully,
Wav'ring null of norm.
Shining eyes of white there sunken
Glared at stranger wayward;
Hollow, absent, morbid-drunken
Eyes returned the favor.
Phantom, morbid, loft and lordly
Hovered there before;
Stranger fast stood wise and worldly,
Wand'ring forth no more.
"Phantom, art you?" spoke the Stranger,
Paying pleasance slowly.
"Art you not a spectral ranger,
Hunting vengeance lowly?"
"Stranger," morbid Phantom roared,
His booming voice resounding,
"All these golden sands I lord,
As they are of my founding.
"Bid me neither high nor low
Your judgment right or wrongly;
Conjure all the grace you know,
And bide in patience strongly.
"A moment now of tragedy
May ward you from my preaching;
Take me not as deity,
But shepherd for your teaching.
"I am all of lost society,
A shadow of the dead,
Whose souls transcend reality,
Where man to fate is fed.
"Hatred, rage, and malice straining,
Suffering befalls;
All our hopes and dreams remaining
Spoiled on the walls.
And all my wanted words retaining
Strike me ill with gall.
"Fogs drew out injustice on
A many heath and hill;
Our brazen blades were thrust upon
By black and godless will.
In forests dark with morning dew,
On pristine marble stairs,
In hovels where our children grew –
You'll find our bodies there.
"Cold and pale and silently,
Our forms are left to rot,
And all those manners violently
Our minds, as well, begot.
"Now darkly do our souls persist
And see upon our gloom:
In phantom ranks we now enlist
To dwell within our doom.
And no human life shall hence subsist
To occupy this room.
"But you there, strange and wayward one,
See neither fear nor virtue,
Whilst tread you 'neath a friendless sun,
Whilst all the earth desert you.
Now all our homes sit silently
In brisk and tranquil fogs;
Our forms portray impiety,
Disgraced by feral dogs.
What claim you to our empty homes?
What providence dispels you?
Will quaff you all the graceful loam,
And live by what compels you?"
"Presume of me no more, my friend,"
The Stranger said to Ghost.
"My stroll, I hope, shall never end,
Of which I make the most!
I find your grim philosophy
Revealing of your style;
It's really very awfully
Distraught, abstract, and vile!
Why do you strain vitality
To level with your wrongs?
For even past finality,
Your vice shall make you strong;
The birds acclaim reality
With sweet and vivid songs."
And here the sky grew dark and rolled;
The Phantom's rage congests;
The placid breeze relapsed with cold –
A hellish voice protests:
"What stretch of imbecility
Allows you on this earth?
What bitch of ill fertility
Was cursed to fare your birth?
Whose teaching told such twisted myths?
What fables do you serve?
Your sightless words have granted you
A grand esteem of nerve!
To thence perceive my words abstract
Should show to you your faults;
How vast the span of spoilt tact
That's justified your vault!
And thus, by all our force remaining,
Numerous we are,
We shan't permit your footsteps gaining
Distance, near or far;
And there upon those heaths and hills,
Through hollowed homes of old,
In sunshine and in shadow still,
You'll wander, free and bold!
And all our strange and wanting rage
Has suffered no recourse,
'For all the tragic world's a stage,
And all our lines remorse.'
Our sorrow flows throughout this cage,
Whose river knows no source."
The clouds revolve and tremble;
Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,
Where rage and wrath assemble.
Through lust and mediocrity,
Mankind fell ill to feeling;
There sullen sought monstrosity
Left man and kindred reeling.
Then storm on darkened gables drew,
And turbid gales did linger,
In districts blood and bleating knew,
Where swords rest cold in fingers.
So silence veiled the lost remains,
And nature ceased to stir;
The slain deluged the streets and lanes,
Where frigid drafts abjure.
And somewhere in a city square,
A squire wrote in blood
Upon a pristine wall left there,
Whose sermon looms above:
"In every square of land and plain,
The story read the same;
Tempest high and lowly maimed,
Till only grace remained."
And on the arid, level wasteland,
Stranger by his trade,
Did wander still and sterile sand,
As time itself decayed.
A sanguine cloak his shoulders bore,
That flickered in the gales;
A sword and shield his stock and store,
And mead and rancid kale.
A sanguine hood engulfed his head;
A metal mask he wore,
That neither love nor hatred bred;
No character it bore.
Across the aural desert laid,
A shadow drew adrift;
A rising fog in colonnades
Amassed in storm clouds swift.
Graceful heavens, burdened be,
Grew dark with clouds and thunder.
Cyclones loomed on land and sea:
The dark is torn asunder.
The silence is eviscerated;
Lightning strikes the ground –
An ashen spot incinerated
Smokes without a sound.
Phantom rises ashes from,
A shadow cloaken darkly;
Bound to rise when kingdom come,
Obeying burden starkly.
Darkness clothed the Phantom wholly,
Floating round his form;
Pluming shadow bathed him fully,
Wav'ring null of norm.
Shining eyes of white there sunken
Glared at stranger wayward;
Hollow, absent, morbid-drunken
Eyes returned the favor.
Phantom, morbid, loft and lordly
Hovered there before;
Stranger fast stood wise and worldly,
Wand'ring forth no more.
"Phantom, art you?" spoke the Stranger,
Paying pleasance slowly.
"Art you not a spectral ranger,
Hunting vengeance lowly?"
"Stranger," morbid Phantom roared,
His booming voice resounding,
"All these golden sands I lord,
As they are of my founding.
"Bid me neither high nor low
Your judgment right or wrongly;
Conjure all the grace you know,
And bide in patience strongly.
"A moment now of tragedy
May ward you from my preaching;
Take me not as deity,
But shepherd for your teaching.
"I am all of lost society,
A shadow of the dead,
Whose souls transcend reality,
Where man to fate is fed.
"Hatred, rage, and malice straining,
Suffering befalls;
All our hopes and dreams remaining
Spoiled on the walls.
And all my wanted words retaining
Strike me ill with gall.
"Fogs drew out injustice on
A many heath and hill;
Our brazen blades were thrust upon
By black and godless will.
In forests dark with morning dew,
On pristine marble stairs,
In hovels where our children grew –
You'll find our bodies there.
"Cold and pale and silently,
Our forms are left to rot,
And all those manners violently
Our minds, as well, begot.
"Now darkly do our souls persist
And see upon our gloom:
In phantom ranks we now enlist
To dwell within our doom.
And no human life shall hence subsist
To occupy this room.
"But you there, strange and wayward one,
See neither fear nor virtue,
Whilst tread you 'neath a friendless sun,
Whilst all the earth desert you.
Now all our homes sit silently
In brisk and tranquil fogs;
Our forms portray impiety,
Disgraced by feral dogs.
What claim you to our empty homes?
What providence dispels you?
Will quaff you all the graceful loam,
And live by what compels you?"
"Presume of me no more, my friend,"
The Stranger said to Ghost.
"My stroll, I hope, shall never end,
Of which I make the most!
I find your grim philosophy
Revealing of your style;
It's really very awfully
Distraught, abstract, and vile!
Why do you strain vitality
To level with your wrongs?
For even past finality,
Your vice shall make you strong;
The birds acclaim reality
With sweet and vivid songs."
And here the sky grew dark and rolled;
The Phantom's rage congests;
The placid breeze relapsed with cold –
A hellish voice protests:
"What stretch of imbecility
Allows you on this earth?
What bitch of ill fertility
Was cursed to fare your birth?
Whose teaching told such twisted myths?
What fables do you serve?
Your sightless words have granted you
A grand esteem of nerve!
To thence perceive my words abstract
Should show to you your faults;
How vast the span of spoilt tact
That's justified your vault!
And thus, by all our force remaining,
Numerous we are,
We shan't permit your footsteps gaining
Distance, near or far;
And there upon those heaths and hills,
Through hollowed homes of old,
In sunshine and in shadow still,
You'll wander, free and bold!
And all our strange and wanting rage
Has suffered no recourse,
'For all the tragic world's a stage,
And all our lines remorse.'
Our sorrow flows throughout this cage,
Whose river knows no source."
Friday, April 1, 2011
Emily Pt.1
Emily
These days, life is a rather simple ordeal. Breakfast precedes every event in the day, then I prepare, then I’m off to do business whereabouts. I’m not much like all those other aristocrats, who all know stuff like Latin and Ancient Greek, and who have big vocabularies, but I’m sure I’ll find it in me to tell you the story of how I met my wife, Emily.
A long time ago, I was what we called a “peasant.” My home was a dark flat in a low part of London, and all the buildings were squeezed together so there was just enough room. I saw kids in gangs on the street all the time, and they’d give me a hard time, say I’ve got nothin’ going with my life because I don’t go to school. Granted, it was a pretty analytical point for a bunch of poor kids, but I guess that shows their determination in belittling their fellow man. They did get me down sometimes. I’ll admit that because I’d rather just tell the truth. They didn’t seem to tell the truth much.
Because we couldn’t afford school, I just walked around the city all day. Sometimes I’d take a walk by the harbor and see my uncle. He was a good guy. He sat in at his dad’s Latin lectures when he was a kid, so he would always go on about Ancient Roman kings and wars. I’d walk up, and he’d yell, “Paulinius Tulinius Tarquinius Superbus the Fifty-Third! All hail!” I’d start walking all proud and he and all his friends would bow on the ground. Good lot, them.
I liked Trafalgar Square, too – now that was a nice place to be. I liked that because of those beautiful buildings around there, and the fountain, and that you could really see the sky. And all those ornate gables that rose about, the column, that gallery – they all seemed to say “Hello, how are you today?” when you looked at them. That’s how it was for me, at least. I think I was just a little insane in those days.
Last of all, I’d visit Hyde Park, my favorite place on the face of the earth. God really did a good job on that place. The Row, Carriage Drive, the Serpentine – if I could write volumes on any one subject in my life, they would be about the still and the peace around the Park. Grey or blue the day may be, it doesn’t a difference to me – I thought that up one day when I was walking on the Row and I heard a group of string players, whom I saw beneath a tent beside the Serpentine. No one was watching them, which was really curious, but they still played like they were going to hell otherwise. I stayed and watched for only a while because I had so much to do before the day was done. Those sorts of days were good, because I always busied myself around the city, or the park, and yet I never actually had anything to do.
But that was sort of the gist of walking around London, is that it looks good no matter what the weather is. I think a lot of people designed it so that it would still look good in the rain, because a lot of this gothic architecture seems to do that. Maybe people were generally just real sad or angry when they built that stuff. Besides that, whoever built it did a real good job on it. There’s nothing really that’s made to be only so good – it’s like they really put forth the extent of what they were given when they built the place. I mean, I couldn’t do nothing like any of that, but I’m sure others could, like those masons way back when. It’s that sort of history that makes walking around a place really enjoyable. There’s a grace about everything you look at, and it’s not something you point out or rave about, but it’s rather ingrained in your head all the while.
You can walk at your speed wherever you’re going, and there’s always time to look around and enjoy things while you do it. And there’s always something to enjoy, whether it’s some palace in the park or just a house that looks like it belongs in a book. When the sunshine’s all about everything, you can make out the features on it in good detail, like heaven put a few rays of grace on the faces of those glorious buildings about, and the gardens all around them. And if the rain’s got you, don’t worry about it – you’re just in a different world, looking at a different kind of beautiful.
Some days I’d just spend a long while standing between Kensington Palace and the pond out front of it. Other days I’d never stop walking, and I’d never be still for a moment. Doing these things was a real science to me. I was never really happy or sad, but just sort of complete. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s all I did. I would stand by the gatepost about the busy places and just watch people. I wondered why they were all so busy, or what it was they were so concerned about, particularly in such a pretty place as London.
Of course, between the daylights, I had to have a place to sleep and eat. That was usually when the day was done, because I would have to go home. The place where I lived was, as I’ve said, pretty dim a place, but that wasn’t quite what I was worried about as I was walking back home. I had just got done looking around at all these accomplishments of building things with bare hands and now I had to go back to the boys on the corner and my parents of Ire. I walked with my hands in my pockets, and I looked at the ground. That wasn’t like me. I looked and waved and smiled at all my friends and neighbors I passed, because it was always a good affair to see them, but it would change as I got close to the complex. I wasn’t all that pressed to look about the world at that time.
When I got to the front door of the building, I really had to concentrate, because the halls were full of kids running about, who were usually about my age. They’d yell things at me, and I’d just have to pretend like they weren’t. When I got to my apartment, which was on the fourth floor, I knocked, because I didn’t have a key. My parents would yell from the other side,
“Who’s that there?”
“Paul,” I’d say.
They come stomping up from the other side, and it was always scary to hear that. The doorknob would rattle, and then the door would fly open, and my dad would be there in a stained button shirt, frowning at me, and he’d say, “Ain’t you got a key?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” he’d say.
“You said I’d lose it,” I’d say.
“Oh,” he says. “Right.” Then he’d walk in and leave me to shut the door.
I’d go straight to my room, because I didn’t want to get in front of my parents and have them hound me with questions. They used to ask, “Wha’ve you been doing,” and “Where you been,” and all I would be able to say is “Walking about,” and that wouldn’t make them happy at all. They’d want me to get a job. I just ignore them and run into my room. I really didn’t want a job.
My mum stood in the kitchen and did dishes while she yelled at my dad. I didn’t like hearing that. He’d just sit there and read books. When I wanted to try to act like I wasn’t there, I would sit at my desk by the window and write about what I’d done that day, and what I’d do the next. After that, I’d try to sneak out and get dinner. When I went to bed, my parents were always yelling, and so I might have had to squeeze the pillow over my head to drown it out. I didn’t sleep well, you know. I always had bags around my eyes. In the night, I might be awake real late, and I’d think about all the ugly things about me, around where I lived and why they were that way, and I’d start feeling really low. Some kids might have gotten in a fight on the street, or they’re pulling the close off some poor girl, or my mum’s screaming at my dad real loud, till Ms. Kent would come over and ask her nicely to be quiet. It all happened in some poorly put-up walls, through windows that no one wants to be there, in a part of a city where no one wants to be. I’d get close to crying, but I never would, and I never did. That’s not what a good man does.
I woke up before my parents always. I’d make myself tea and toast fast as I could, and then I’d set out. And no one else was really awake at that hour, so I just rushed out and was back in the good parts of the city again before anyone was there to hound me or what have you. It would always be bright about that time, and there’d still always be a good many people walking around. Maybe once or twice in the morning I’d stop and watch them, and wonder again what it was they were doing. They all looked pretty silly. That time of the day, the sun was a bit diagonal, so it’d shine right across the faces of the buildings, and it would look really beautiful. Everyone I passed would get a “Good morning” from me. And sometimes someone I passed would say, “Now there’s a good lad.” They day began there.
I remember it was a bright day sometime about April, when I made my way to the library to have a go at the books. I took to the library a lot, mainly because I hadn’t a day of school behind me, but also just because I liked to sit there and read things, and imagine. I sat at a huge table with an immense volume in front of me, and I read a sentence at a time. But I didn’t really just read through it, so to say – I skimmed along the lines, and I could feel when a good sentence was coming up. When I got to that sentence, I read real slowly, then I looked up at the window in the archway ahead of me and I’d think about it as I watched the clouds drift by. I was out of luck if it was a clear day. That day, I was reading the Odyssey. I remembered exactly the line I stopped at, for reasons I still can’t quite explain. It read,
“Lo, how men blame the gods!
From us, they say, comes evil!”
Zeus said that to all the other gods around him, in that fantastic hall they had. I’m pretty sure he’s the father of the gods, and he gathers the clouds. You gotta respect a guy like that, really. But when I left the library that day, I really put it into practice. I looked all about those rich people in carriages, for whom the streets are so wide, and they’re all done up in pristine white, to the point where everything and their horses are white, save for some idle details and the mustaches on their faces. They were always going about as a family, stopping here and there to pick up a bunch of flowers or get an ice cream. I thought it was a pretty good deal that they were born into that kind of life. Everyone I’ve ever known has hated them for it, but I don’t quite know what there is to hate. They seemed to me like they’re doing alright. Maybe it’s just all about money, I thought. That’s a shallow thing to get upset about.
So, my parents will be angry, the blokes will be low, my uncle will laugh, and I’ll be a moron who walks around London all his life. To be honest, I don’t know what there is to complain about, once you’ve squared away what it is that you are. The day went on, and I really started to feel a lot better about home, and my parents, and how honestly senseless all that yelling is. And if the boys give me a hard time, I’ll get through it, and I’ll be all right at the end, long as I know what’s good in life. The day got brighter and clearer as I started to feel better and better, and it seemed as though the planets aligned for me that day.
I made my way to the Park. It was an emerald day there, and the skies were completely clear overhead. All those canopies came together and stirred about in a breeze. All those blades of grass there on the lawn went on until the woods swallowed them up, not far off. I stood by a tree and watched a band play on a wooden stage by the lake. The women wore white, and the men black, and the kids ran about in blue and laughed. I just stood beside, dirty and rotten as I was, because I’m sure they wouldn’t want a poor boy like me sitting around the rows of chairs they had set up. So I stood by with my hands in my pockets and watched the band. They played the kind of music that carries through the air real nice, and has a pretty little melody to it. They stay with you, those songs, and they just make your life better once you hear them.
Then I got looking through the crowd sitting down. They were all dressed alike, so faces got lost once you saw another. The men mostly had those mustaches and hard faces, like they’re really serious all the time. The women either looked like toads done up in white powder or they were really pretty. Some looked older than granddad. I stopped when I saw one face in particular.
It was a girl, must have been about my age. She had long, blond, golden hair tied up behind her head. She had really rich, blue eyes, and skin like cream and silk. There was something about her, I have to say. There was something that made me notice her in particular. Really, she was too fair to be a mortal – she must have been a goddess or something. Maybe she was an angel. She fit the bill. And her face was the kind you could just stare at. And she looked extremely bored – she held her chin in her hand and her eyes were just locked on the band. I realized I was staring at her, and I felt really bad, because you just shouldn’t do that. Her dad, as I guessed the man sitting beside her was, leaned over and whispered something to her. Still, her head was just drooping over her palm, and she leaned lopsided on her right armrest.
Then she looked at me.
Square in the eyes.
I felt a jolt run through me, and I jarred immediately, and fell to the ground. Then I stumbled up and started walking as fast as I could through the woods behind me. Why? I don’t know. I just had to get away. What if she tells her dad, and he comes running after me? What’ll he do to me? Jaysus, I thought. My mum’s Irish, and I always think in Irish when I’m excited.
Then I heard footsteps other than mine behind me in the leaves. I sifted through the trunks a bit faster, from canopy spot to canopy spot, over logs and that, always getting faster, until we were in a running chase. My heart was beating really hard, because I don’t usually run, and he was probably gonna knock me about if he caught me. I just ran, and I didn’t think about anything else.
Then I was on the ground. Something had slammed me in the back really hard, and I fell to the ground like a lummox. My spine was killing me as I lay there, slowly coming to terms with things again. There was a hefty piece of wood lying on the ground beside me, some huge stick. And when I looked up, I didn’t see a mustached top-hatter, or even some bloke. It was the girl. She was all dressed in an ornate white dress and her gloves went up to her elbows. She stood proudly over me with her hands on her hips, so she looked really tall, and she glared at me with those eyes. I was confused and speechless. I propped myself up on my elbow and said,
“You hit me with a piece of wood!”
She was still breathing hard as she just uttered, “Yeh?”
I went again without words. Then I said, “That was a good piece of wood!”
“I just picked it up,” she said, looking over at it.
“Oh,” I said.
“Why were you looking at me?” she shouted suddenly. She used a voice that could burn down a village.
“I dunno,” I said.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Is that what you do, you just look at people all day?”
“I dunno!”
“Do you know anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I…Paul.”
“I’m Emily,” she said. But she didn’t say it in her burning villages voice. She took on a more peaceful tone.
I was perplexed. I said, “Do you think it’s okay to just throw pieces of wood at people?”
“Don’t be patronizing!” she shouted.
“I’m sorry!” I said.
“I’m being patronizing!” she shouted.
“Right, sorry!”
“And don’t be so meek!” she shouted.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What’d I tell you?” she shouted.
I just looked at her. Then she asked in her quiet voice,
“What’s your last name?”
“Uh, Charleton.”
“Why’d you say ‘uh’?” she shrieked.
“I don’t know!” I pleaded.
“Are you lying to me?” she shouted.
“No!”
“It sounds like ‘charlatan.’”
“Oh.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I said.
“A liar!” she shrieked. Then she paused. Then she picked up the bit of wood and shouted, “Get up!”
So I got up really fast.
“And stand up straight, with your chest out, for God’s sakes.”
I did, and my back started feeling better. The pain was gone.
“Now you can breathe better,” she said. “I don’t know why you peasants don’t stand up straight.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said.
She paused again. She looked at the wood. She smiled as she said,
“Are you afraid of girls with bits of wood?”
“I guess,” I said. “You threw it really hard. Hit me real good.”
She held it up and looked at it. Then she swung it at me but faked it out, and I shouted, “Oh god!” and cringed back. But she just burst out laughing. Her whole face scrunched up when she did, and she slapped her chest. It was a deep sort of “haw-haw” laugh.
I just got angry at her. I said, “God above! Is this how you deal with people?”
Her laughing died as she said, “I’m really sorry. I’m just mean like that.” She relaxed her shoulders and threw the stick to the ground. Then she told me, “I suggest we start running or something. My dad’s probably coming, and he’s a whole lot of fun. He’ll probably make you work in a factory or something. Come on.”
She grabbed my wrist, and suddenly we were dashing through the woods.
These days, life is a rather simple ordeal. Breakfast precedes every event in the day, then I prepare, then I’m off to do business whereabouts. I’m not much like all those other aristocrats, who all know stuff like Latin and Ancient Greek, and who have big vocabularies, but I’m sure I’ll find it in me to tell you the story of how I met my wife, Emily.
A long time ago, I was what we called a “peasant.” My home was a dark flat in a low part of London, and all the buildings were squeezed together so there was just enough room. I saw kids in gangs on the street all the time, and they’d give me a hard time, say I’ve got nothin’ going with my life because I don’t go to school. Granted, it was a pretty analytical point for a bunch of poor kids, but I guess that shows their determination in belittling their fellow man. They did get me down sometimes. I’ll admit that because I’d rather just tell the truth. They didn’t seem to tell the truth much.
Because we couldn’t afford school, I just walked around the city all day. Sometimes I’d take a walk by the harbor and see my uncle. He was a good guy. He sat in at his dad’s Latin lectures when he was a kid, so he would always go on about Ancient Roman kings and wars. I’d walk up, and he’d yell, “Paulinius Tulinius Tarquinius Superbus the Fifty-Third! All hail!” I’d start walking all proud and he and all his friends would bow on the ground. Good lot, them.
I liked Trafalgar Square, too – now that was a nice place to be. I liked that because of those beautiful buildings around there, and the fountain, and that you could really see the sky. And all those ornate gables that rose about, the column, that gallery – they all seemed to say “Hello, how are you today?” when you looked at them. That’s how it was for me, at least. I think I was just a little insane in those days.
Last of all, I’d visit Hyde Park, my favorite place on the face of the earth. God really did a good job on that place. The Row, Carriage Drive, the Serpentine – if I could write volumes on any one subject in my life, they would be about the still and the peace around the Park. Grey or blue the day may be, it doesn’t a difference to me – I thought that up one day when I was walking on the Row and I heard a group of string players, whom I saw beneath a tent beside the Serpentine. No one was watching them, which was really curious, but they still played like they were going to hell otherwise. I stayed and watched for only a while because I had so much to do before the day was done. Those sorts of days were good, because I always busied myself around the city, or the park, and yet I never actually had anything to do.
But that was sort of the gist of walking around London, is that it looks good no matter what the weather is. I think a lot of people designed it so that it would still look good in the rain, because a lot of this gothic architecture seems to do that. Maybe people were generally just real sad or angry when they built that stuff. Besides that, whoever built it did a real good job on it. There’s nothing really that’s made to be only so good – it’s like they really put forth the extent of what they were given when they built the place. I mean, I couldn’t do nothing like any of that, but I’m sure others could, like those masons way back when. It’s that sort of history that makes walking around a place really enjoyable. There’s a grace about everything you look at, and it’s not something you point out or rave about, but it’s rather ingrained in your head all the while.
You can walk at your speed wherever you’re going, and there’s always time to look around and enjoy things while you do it. And there’s always something to enjoy, whether it’s some palace in the park or just a house that looks like it belongs in a book. When the sunshine’s all about everything, you can make out the features on it in good detail, like heaven put a few rays of grace on the faces of those glorious buildings about, and the gardens all around them. And if the rain’s got you, don’t worry about it – you’re just in a different world, looking at a different kind of beautiful.
Some days I’d just spend a long while standing between Kensington Palace and the pond out front of it. Other days I’d never stop walking, and I’d never be still for a moment. Doing these things was a real science to me. I was never really happy or sad, but just sort of complete. It’s all I wanted to do, and it’s all I did. I would stand by the gatepost about the busy places and just watch people. I wondered why they were all so busy, or what it was they were so concerned about, particularly in such a pretty place as London.
Of course, between the daylights, I had to have a place to sleep and eat. That was usually when the day was done, because I would have to go home. The place where I lived was, as I’ve said, pretty dim a place, but that wasn’t quite what I was worried about as I was walking back home. I had just got done looking around at all these accomplishments of building things with bare hands and now I had to go back to the boys on the corner and my parents of Ire. I walked with my hands in my pockets, and I looked at the ground. That wasn’t like me. I looked and waved and smiled at all my friends and neighbors I passed, because it was always a good affair to see them, but it would change as I got close to the complex. I wasn’t all that pressed to look about the world at that time.
When I got to the front door of the building, I really had to concentrate, because the halls were full of kids running about, who were usually about my age. They’d yell things at me, and I’d just have to pretend like they weren’t. When I got to my apartment, which was on the fourth floor, I knocked, because I didn’t have a key. My parents would yell from the other side,
“Who’s that there?”
“Paul,” I’d say.
They come stomping up from the other side, and it was always scary to hear that. The doorknob would rattle, and then the door would fly open, and my dad would be there in a stained button shirt, frowning at me, and he’d say, “Ain’t you got a key?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” he’d say.
“You said I’d lose it,” I’d say.
“Oh,” he says. “Right.” Then he’d walk in and leave me to shut the door.
I’d go straight to my room, because I didn’t want to get in front of my parents and have them hound me with questions. They used to ask, “Wha’ve you been doing,” and “Where you been,” and all I would be able to say is “Walking about,” and that wouldn’t make them happy at all. They’d want me to get a job. I just ignore them and run into my room. I really didn’t want a job.
My mum stood in the kitchen and did dishes while she yelled at my dad. I didn’t like hearing that. He’d just sit there and read books. When I wanted to try to act like I wasn’t there, I would sit at my desk by the window and write about what I’d done that day, and what I’d do the next. After that, I’d try to sneak out and get dinner. When I went to bed, my parents were always yelling, and so I might have had to squeeze the pillow over my head to drown it out. I didn’t sleep well, you know. I always had bags around my eyes. In the night, I might be awake real late, and I’d think about all the ugly things about me, around where I lived and why they were that way, and I’d start feeling really low. Some kids might have gotten in a fight on the street, or they’re pulling the close off some poor girl, or my mum’s screaming at my dad real loud, till Ms. Kent would come over and ask her nicely to be quiet. It all happened in some poorly put-up walls, through windows that no one wants to be there, in a part of a city where no one wants to be. I’d get close to crying, but I never would, and I never did. That’s not what a good man does.
I woke up before my parents always. I’d make myself tea and toast fast as I could, and then I’d set out. And no one else was really awake at that hour, so I just rushed out and was back in the good parts of the city again before anyone was there to hound me or what have you. It would always be bright about that time, and there’d still always be a good many people walking around. Maybe once or twice in the morning I’d stop and watch them, and wonder again what it was they were doing. They all looked pretty silly. That time of the day, the sun was a bit diagonal, so it’d shine right across the faces of the buildings, and it would look really beautiful. Everyone I passed would get a “Good morning” from me. And sometimes someone I passed would say, “Now there’s a good lad.” They day began there.
I remember it was a bright day sometime about April, when I made my way to the library to have a go at the books. I took to the library a lot, mainly because I hadn’t a day of school behind me, but also just because I liked to sit there and read things, and imagine. I sat at a huge table with an immense volume in front of me, and I read a sentence at a time. But I didn’t really just read through it, so to say – I skimmed along the lines, and I could feel when a good sentence was coming up. When I got to that sentence, I read real slowly, then I looked up at the window in the archway ahead of me and I’d think about it as I watched the clouds drift by. I was out of luck if it was a clear day. That day, I was reading the Odyssey. I remembered exactly the line I stopped at, for reasons I still can’t quite explain. It read,
“Lo, how men blame the gods!
From us, they say, comes evil!”
Zeus said that to all the other gods around him, in that fantastic hall they had. I’m pretty sure he’s the father of the gods, and he gathers the clouds. You gotta respect a guy like that, really. But when I left the library that day, I really put it into practice. I looked all about those rich people in carriages, for whom the streets are so wide, and they’re all done up in pristine white, to the point where everything and their horses are white, save for some idle details and the mustaches on their faces. They were always going about as a family, stopping here and there to pick up a bunch of flowers or get an ice cream. I thought it was a pretty good deal that they were born into that kind of life. Everyone I’ve ever known has hated them for it, but I don’t quite know what there is to hate. They seemed to me like they’re doing alright. Maybe it’s just all about money, I thought. That’s a shallow thing to get upset about.
So, my parents will be angry, the blokes will be low, my uncle will laugh, and I’ll be a moron who walks around London all his life. To be honest, I don’t know what there is to complain about, once you’ve squared away what it is that you are. The day went on, and I really started to feel a lot better about home, and my parents, and how honestly senseless all that yelling is. And if the boys give me a hard time, I’ll get through it, and I’ll be all right at the end, long as I know what’s good in life. The day got brighter and clearer as I started to feel better and better, and it seemed as though the planets aligned for me that day.
I made my way to the Park. It was an emerald day there, and the skies were completely clear overhead. All those canopies came together and stirred about in a breeze. All those blades of grass there on the lawn went on until the woods swallowed them up, not far off. I stood by a tree and watched a band play on a wooden stage by the lake. The women wore white, and the men black, and the kids ran about in blue and laughed. I just stood beside, dirty and rotten as I was, because I’m sure they wouldn’t want a poor boy like me sitting around the rows of chairs they had set up. So I stood by with my hands in my pockets and watched the band. They played the kind of music that carries through the air real nice, and has a pretty little melody to it. They stay with you, those songs, and they just make your life better once you hear them.
Then I got looking through the crowd sitting down. They were all dressed alike, so faces got lost once you saw another. The men mostly had those mustaches and hard faces, like they’re really serious all the time. The women either looked like toads done up in white powder or they were really pretty. Some looked older than granddad. I stopped when I saw one face in particular.
It was a girl, must have been about my age. She had long, blond, golden hair tied up behind her head. She had really rich, blue eyes, and skin like cream and silk. There was something about her, I have to say. There was something that made me notice her in particular. Really, she was too fair to be a mortal – she must have been a goddess or something. Maybe she was an angel. She fit the bill. And her face was the kind you could just stare at. And she looked extremely bored – she held her chin in her hand and her eyes were just locked on the band. I realized I was staring at her, and I felt really bad, because you just shouldn’t do that. Her dad, as I guessed the man sitting beside her was, leaned over and whispered something to her. Still, her head was just drooping over her palm, and she leaned lopsided on her right armrest.
Then she looked at me.
Square in the eyes.
I felt a jolt run through me, and I jarred immediately, and fell to the ground. Then I stumbled up and started walking as fast as I could through the woods behind me. Why? I don’t know. I just had to get away. What if she tells her dad, and he comes running after me? What’ll he do to me? Jaysus, I thought. My mum’s Irish, and I always think in Irish when I’m excited.
Then I heard footsteps other than mine behind me in the leaves. I sifted through the trunks a bit faster, from canopy spot to canopy spot, over logs and that, always getting faster, until we were in a running chase. My heart was beating really hard, because I don’t usually run, and he was probably gonna knock me about if he caught me. I just ran, and I didn’t think about anything else.
Then I was on the ground. Something had slammed me in the back really hard, and I fell to the ground like a lummox. My spine was killing me as I lay there, slowly coming to terms with things again. There was a hefty piece of wood lying on the ground beside me, some huge stick. And when I looked up, I didn’t see a mustached top-hatter, or even some bloke. It was the girl. She was all dressed in an ornate white dress and her gloves went up to her elbows. She stood proudly over me with her hands on her hips, so she looked really tall, and she glared at me with those eyes. I was confused and speechless. I propped myself up on my elbow and said,
“You hit me with a piece of wood!”
She was still breathing hard as she just uttered, “Yeh?”
I went again without words. Then I said, “That was a good piece of wood!”
“I just picked it up,” she said, looking over at it.
“Oh,” I said.
“Why were you looking at me?” she shouted suddenly. She used a voice that could burn down a village.
“I dunno,” I said.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I dunno,” I said.
“Is that what you do, you just look at people all day?”
“I dunno!”
“Do you know anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I…Paul.”
“I’m Emily,” she said. But she didn’t say it in her burning villages voice. She took on a more peaceful tone.
I was perplexed. I said, “Do you think it’s okay to just throw pieces of wood at people?”
“Don’t be patronizing!” she shouted.
“I’m sorry!” I said.
“I’m being patronizing!” she shouted.
“Right, sorry!”
“And don’t be so meek!” she shouted.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What’d I tell you?” she shouted.
I just looked at her. Then she asked in her quiet voice,
“What’s your last name?”
“Uh, Charleton.”
“Why’d you say ‘uh’?” she shrieked.
“I don’t know!” I pleaded.
“Are you lying to me?” she shouted.
“No!”
“It sounds like ‘charlatan.’”
“Oh.”
“Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I said.
“A liar!” she shrieked. Then she paused. Then she picked up the bit of wood and shouted, “Get up!”
So I got up really fast.
“And stand up straight, with your chest out, for God’s sakes.”
I did, and my back started feeling better. The pain was gone.
“Now you can breathe better,” she said. “I don’t know why you peasants don’t stand up straight.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said.
She paused again. She looked at the wood. She smiled as she said,
“Are you afraid of girls with bits of wood?”
“I guess,” I said. “You threw it really hard. Hit me real good.”
She held it up and looked at it. Then she swung it at me but faked it out, and I shouted, “Oh god!” and cringed back. But she just burst out laughing. Her whole face scrunched up when she did, and she slapped her chest. It was a deep sort of “haw-haw” laugh.
I just got angry at her. I said, “God above! Is this how you deal with people?”
Her laughing died as she said, “I’m really sorry. I’m just mean like that.” She relaxed her shoulders and threw the stick to the ground. Then she told me, “I suggest we start running or something. My dad’s probably coming, and he’s a whole lot of fun. He’ll probably make you work in a factory or something. Come on.”
She grabbed my wrist, and suddenly we were dashing through the woods.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The Peasantry Elite
The Peasant Elite of the United States of America
A collection of individuals, who have since derived from a line of those who have, at some point in the past, been considered "peasants" in a foreign land, are hereby incapable of having become political points of reference without thorough education in the canonical science of philosophical, governmental, and humanitarian history, and the theories that have arisen and will arise thereof.
The advent of the formation of the United States of America, an event that was ushered through blood and the stubbornness of thought, sent waves of political upheaval through the whole of the European world, such that the turbulence of Europe in the following century may be owed exclusively to the impact of the Declaration of Independence on the seatholders and peasants alike, on the other side of the Pond. Most importantly, the violence wrought by the French people on their aristocrats, a toll in deaths of approximately 44 thousand, may be owed to the extensive buildup of political stifling through many years of governmental callousness to widespread suffering and hardship, initiated at last by an example of violent opposition of people like themselves opposite the Pond, of whom they learned on scraps of paper and words on the breeze. This violence stands firm and evident in the minds of those whom it impacted, primarily the French people themselves, but also quite notably the British, who of all the European world may have received the most obstinate and pretentious of governmental circumstance, although perhaps not the most violent or inhumane.
These reforms, wrought by time and thoroughness of belief in injustice prolonged through the generations, must be considered necessary only in the circumstances that dealt them, much less the continuity of rebelliousness through all generations. Violence is evident only in an antiquated playing field; what fields have we now, the Capitalist Democrats we are, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, but fields of governmental soundness and focus on economics and politics, about an inescapable and often arbitrary aura of complete tranquility? Americans swell at the mere thought of an armed foreigner even touching their shores, and have employed godlike defense thereof, to establish a firm and absolute understanding with those outsiders about the European and Asian world that the American populace is a people of peace and justice. The streets of America are twice as safe from deliberate wrongdoers than the simply insane; a child wandering in the night may be abducted by one of perversion, whereas a man will either be gunned down forthright by an inadvertent attempt at his life, an improbable circumstance, or successfully subdue his assailant on grounds of mediocrity of judgment. America is a sound plane of being, obstructed only by those obstructions predetermined.
But these predeterminations are not without uncertainty. All points thought to be definitive and therefore acted upon in light of their conclusive reasoning will be almost definitely and completely eradicated by the truth of uncertainty. Nothing is definitive in the real world, and neither in the mind of an individual. Jacob Bronowski, who is credited most famously with his television series, The Ascent of Man, placed both feet in the pond into which four million Jews were flushed in the epicenter of their extermination at Auschwitz and explained the invalidity of dogma, arrogance, and ignorance in the civil and righteous plane of reasoning. Violence and suffering are, indeed, wrought in the human world by one's inability to keep their judgment in check, their "deliberate deafness" to the suffering at hand, and the simple fact of wisdom's keep, which is always limited in some way. Therefore, he proclaimed, we must turn to science, not to walk around in white suits, but to act on the order of that which we do not know, or that which may not be true, in order to hereby vanquish suffering once and for all, and correct those who endorse it, regardless of their creed or check or lack of knowledge.
What good, then, is there in a government that operates on definitiveness of action at the present point in time? What does anyone know, regardless of degree in academia or in fluency in political affairs, that may be considered definitive at any point in time? And what good is a government that operates on slow change, perhaps too slow to save lives, or too slow to allow appropriate justice to those who will be repressed for only a set amount of time? What formality of operation reigns supreme over the grace of high wisdom, a superior government that may be applied in present time, purposed by indoctrination to an unexplained thirst for that which must be done, regardless? What purpose has been defined at all by the government of the United States of America, that may be deduced to the most basic of fundamental principles of mankind?
The documents upheld so indisputably by the American public, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, are still subject to immediate, evident, and constant change, on grounds that circumstances cannot be defined on a sheet of paper but only alleviated in real time by real agents of peace, through wisdom that may be reasoned to the beginning of the cosmos itself. How foreign yet is this cosmic wisdom to the present world? When will it become evident, if it is not evident already? Truly, at any given point in time, there is a finer operative to acquire, and life as a mode of being must be transcended by the succession of operatives over immeasurable periods of time, that is, if one wishes to establish a government that simply bears no falsity or mediocrity. Unfortunately, the nature of the populous Man is often overridden by his seemingly unbreakable bond to practice over theory, which may be the only struggle that Man has ever known. Therefore, it is imperative that he should abide by further accessions of thought than those which are immediate, and that he should never cease to ask "Why" about things, until the moment of his death, so that the truth may be embraced once and for all for the remainder of mankind's ascent to righteousness, which has since proven to be a unique one indeed.
He who is a human being is a peasant, and a king, as well. No man or woman who has ever held a throne or an office of authority has deserved that office or throne, but has inherited it wrongly. This is simply the nature of a machine that has been contrived for the convenience of man's dwelling in this realm. It is a very abstract sort of machine. As well, it must be observed that man has fared this realm through his art, much less through his definitiveness in thought, and certainly not in terms that may be considered anything but signature of a human being. He is not a thing of order, but of antiquity; the biological world was nothing like the world we presently know, and was certainly something far removed from the tranquility of the original fertility of earth long ago. It is certainly an abstraction. And these abstractions must be maintained throughout the course of mankind's ascent.
However, they should not be maintained through the loss of blood or the shedding of life, either completely or in measurable quantities, and should be constrained to arenas of expulsion that are ineffectual to the survival of mankind, in one form or another. As I attempt to arrive at one conclusion, another will brew; there is no present or future absolution in the nature of affairs that will ever stand for any period of time longer than that which may be measured. The things that are take nature in the fact of their occurrence, which will take place over an indefinite point of time before fizzling out; the things that will be take nature in the origin of everything; the things that were actually never were at all, for the simple fact that they are not presently occurring. Conclusions will always occur. This may be the nature of all universal affairs, and the purpose of the big bang, that in this realm things simply cannot remain definitive. Oblivion is a constant affair, and therefore may not exist in this realm. Maintenance of a single ideology for any length of time will ensure its destruction; its succession must be planned and accorded upon its publication, so to ensure that it will be caught peacefully in the future by educated hands.
The definitiveness of action will corrupt and dissolve the American world, and the world of government as a whole, inevitably; government is simply a doctrine that will, in one circumstance or another, be succeeded by something inherently superior. One event leads to another; we as forward operators of our preferences of being, not as kings or peasants, but as the sentient descendants of the gravitational cosmos, victims not to our deficiencies in contrived morality but athletes in the theoretical operative of universal complacency, indoctrinated to ourselves, who are one with everyone else, and everything else at that. Many times in my life have I fared the conception that Americans are a stupid collection of individuals. This is false. Americans are not stupid; peasants are stupid. And it just so happens that most of America is populated by peasants. Perhaps this is only one step in achieving a more intelligent way of life.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Crimson Court
On a day in the spring, when the bell towers ring,
Many vile a patron gave rout
To the queen and the king, and the squires that sing,
In the courtyards and gardens about.
Many bishops and pawns were left dead on the lawn,
And what glory their murderers quaffed!
As the evening drew on, and the night turned to dawn,
All those killers drank richly and laughed.
But they never quite left all those courtyards bereft,
And they donned all those corsets of gold.
By ambrosia they slept; all those soldiers they kept,
Who did just as those murderers told.
On a day in the fall, from the ramparts and walls,
Many vile a patron gave rout
To those killers of gall in their crystalline halls
In the courtyards and gardens about.
Many vile a patron gave rout
To the queen and the king, and the squires that sing,
In the courtyards and gardens about.
Many bishops and pawns were left dead on the lawn,
And what glory their murderers quaffed!
As the evening drew on, and the night turned to dawn,
All those killers drank richly and laughed.
But they never quite left all those courtyards bereft,
And they donned all those corsets of gold.
By ambrosia they slept; all those soldiers they kept,
Who did just as those murderers told.
On a day in the fall, from the ramparts and walls,
Many vile a patron gave rout
To those killers of gall in their crystalline halls
In the courtyards and gardens about.
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