Chapter Thirty Five

Mirror glass smile I think, but magnified.  There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet.  Sometimes that particular slide comes up, and you magnify the humid handstain upon the glass, magnifying ever inward.  Not nonchalance, I think, but rather observation.  The wheel is cranked and the view grows indistinct.  Powers of ten.  Down into the glass and then upon the glass and viewing lifeforms upon the surface of the glass and into the mitochondrial DNA and further down into the atoms and then the subatomic substratum into another hidey-hole altogether and then all at once there are planets orbiting around the sun and we have come back to the beginning.  Iceland, I think.  Aliens expiring into waterfalls that fall into rock that fall into the earth that are heated and evaporate when coming into contact with thermal vents that may or may not have given original intention to this thing we kindly like to call human.

        Theia in an elliptical orbit.  Planets smashing and rocks tumbling from the sky.  Hypothesized dinosaurs and prehistorical artifacts.  Mammals are grown from our imaginative capacity.  Good and evil at the beginning of the world, always.  They may have lived in trees, and only walked part of the time.  They were just mammals after all.

        Or else seasick aboard the outboard boat.  A rusting hulk at sea in her presence, and yearnings after elusive fame.  What friendlinesses are we pretended to.  She mimed the remainder of the evening while I watched her slip away.  There was a rueful character in her smile.  But we couldn’t figure out if she was a god then, or if not a god elsewise some similar invention.  Narcotic properties in the midst of the aqueous wastes.  I will not smell her.  Neither will I swallow her down.

        Atlantis was a sunny isle as well, and we would have charted a course for that oblivious destination, but the ruins were not in Spain after all.  They were in a book, and they were only a single line of text like this one.  How to make an empire out of words if the glue isn’t working.  How to make a mythos out of a margin.  One line, and despite inadequacy the story carries on like words on wing, like wings on words, like a thing that ought to have been.  She took all those books away, and there were twenty two of them.

        And when I am standing upon the hill and overlooking the passage of Mormons through history it is not fit to think about the books that other men have placed within my hand.  Neither is it fit to dispute the primacy of one doctrine over another.  Waves upon waves rock the boat of ages as I do another line, and that fucker is eying my woman.  I know he is.  My family is destroyed.

        1 So it is.

        2 So it is.

        3 So it is.

        I thought I might have cornered her in concerned areas, I thought she might have happened to look my way in the middle of this history, but that was all my second guessing, and none of her illuminations from the first.  Many men to make a monument to her, but women pray with more futility.  What repair can be repaired to a woman who is her own destiny?  Who, like Isis, lurks in the frailer origins of our alchemy and will not be moved?  For every altar toppled over she lurks beneath another and another still more removed into the future, while the male of the species can only cast his eyes forward from stone and fail to cover his nakedness.  No matter what the century.  No matter what the eon.  No matter what the going to or the coming from.

        In that continent where hairy men come down from the north.  In that continent where decadent dark people ply boats up silted waterways.  In that continent which is the source of our industry and affirmation, where everything is fixed and civilized, and where the future has been thwarted.  One might attempt to circumnavigate the history of the world, but a larger share remains for the secondmost estate.  A larger share remains to those fixed within their amber past.  I was not ruling from Cairo.  I am no son of the Prophet.

        A tender girl, she weeps within our dungeons, but she will not be moved.  Even when broken, her resolve is entirely too resolute.  Placed within the flames, the salamander is transfigured.  Pipes come down from the room and dispel the foul humors, but there is not the likeness of gold in her working.  One thing is much like another.  Leather against flesh.  Leather against flesh and bone.  Straps cutting into the skin.  Crueler tortures.  Something intimate.