Love in the Kali Yuga

Though he did not know, Gary was Buddha. His infinite compassion, cultivated over lifetimes of chanting and meditation and altruistic acts, required that he remain veiled, even to himself.

The salesman who sold him the assault rifle at the show, had he known (his infinite soul laid bare beneath the soft, loving gaze of the Awakened One), would have fallen to his knees in adoration. As it was, Gary discovered that he had been shorted five dollars and thirty-eight cents in change only when he reached the parking lot, far too late to go back into the convention center and demand his money back.

This fact, the unfairness of it, the sheer, stupid pettiness of it, was one of the last things Gary furiously considered as he walked into the post office where he worked. He pumped twenty-five bullets into his co-worker George, thereby saving George from the karma of acting on the sweating, wrenching, watery-bowelled fantasies he’d been indulging lately of sexually assaulting his 12 year-old step-daughter. Gary did this, all unaware, before putting the gun in his mouth and scattering the contents of his skull all over the first-class mail sacks, his final act of compassion this lifetime.

Angkor Wat

Note: The inspiration for this post came from a post on the Shared Worlds Website. It is, therefore, less of a fiction, and more of a sketch.

The towers, always the towers, in pictures, in half-believed stories explorers brought back. Towers which were, “…not possible to describe with a pen….” Yet, after saying so, they would always try, had to try. Indeed, the place seems a magnet for words, a lens that turns stone into stories, and vice-versa. The towers stack up upon themselves like hives of the spirit. Every inch is crammed full with words, or pictures that replace words, telling, retelling the stories, refracting them, even imparting lessons through the very structure itself (difficult stairs symbolizing the arduousness of the spiritual path, starry gods memorialized in the alignment of the grounds)

Angkor Wat’s architecture captures in three-dimensional form the fourth dimension of time, freezing into place both the movement of the mind, and the revolutions of heaven, binding the myths of a civilization to the stones of a city, for later peoples to try to understand if they could.

Wise men create a multi-foliate city to honor the highest they know. When the world moves on, their souls come back as trees and vines, weaving roots into the terraces and towers they built, veiling it in green to wait for the future to arrive.

Chemical Warfare

“I’m done,” Klug said, head down. A sweet chemical smell filled the air. The poisonous dust powdered his feet, and I could see them cracking as it dried him out. Soon he’d be no more than a shell, one more casualty.

“No, no,” I lied, “You’re fine. Let’s just see if we can make it to the food and then you can…”

“Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot!” he yelled, his voice thick and choked. “I’m done!” His eyes rolled spastically in his head. “It hurts, man. It hurts….” He started to convulse, his abdomen twitching, white foam at the corners of his mouth.

“Get back!” I yelled. “Klug’s got a dose!” I watched his brown skin craze and burst, the blood he’d only recently sucked oozing from the fissures.

After he was gone I stood over his body awhile, but I knew I’d have to keep marching soon, to the feeding grounds that loomed over what would be Klug’s final resting place. I could see, already, a few of us climbing the sheets and burrowing into the edges of the mattress, making our way to the sleeping form that was both enemy and food.

This was far from over, and the night had only begun.

First Bardo

He remembered…something, a pain in his chest, a loud noise, being afraid, a man pointing a gun at him, a long walk with his wife after dinner on a quiet summer evening, and then, all gone.

He thought it would be more difficult, but really it felt like jerking out of sleep: the body begins to relax (not your body, there is no you to notice) and then the roar of something from outside the darkness behind your eyelids and suddenly your body convulses and you are awake, laying there with your eyes open in the dark and your heart beating rapidly in your chest. This was like that.

But instead of darkness he found himself in luminous emptiness that rang like a bell and thought, well that’s that, then. There was a moment, brief, like a half-remembered melody, a scent of something on the air (parallel melding of the serrated edge of memory and sweetness: cinnamon, vanilla, his mother’s hair, candle wax) that made him ache and long to ache yet longer, and then the roar came again, and he knew that something had been missed, an opportunity, gone.

Moonfall

“I think it’s closer,” he said. “It looks closer.” He let the curtain fall against the now almost blinding glow of the rapidly engorging moon. It still shone through the thin fabric, silvering the dark bedroom.

“Well, come back to bed,” she answered. Her long, bare arms beckoned, pale and ghostly in the moonlight.

They had turned off the TV hours ago (wouldn’t be useful much longer anyway, the electrical interference, the satellites going mad in the weird gravity). The newscasts were thick with riots of disaster: tidal waves devouring coastal cities, leaving nothing but the broken teeth of shattered skyscrapers and bloated bodies clogging the streets, while fires and looting turned the inland cities to smoking ruins. And it just kept getting closer, drawn like a calamitous lover into Earth’s fatal embrace.

He lay beside her, feeling his passion rise again, and reached for the small packets on the bedside table. She held his arm, and took the condom in its small metallic wrapper from his hand, letting it fall to the floor. “Don’t bother,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

The real reason for that iceberg

He hoisted his trident hand to hand restlessly. It was well past the time on the invitation he’d sent, but the dancefloor (inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a hundred glowing jellyfish swaying gently beneath invisible, deep tides) remained empty.

The bandleader glanced over his shoulder nervously at his king, and was about to send them through yet another rendition of “Mood Indigo” when they all heard it: like an enormous, gargantuan shell splintering, the deep muted thump through the miles of water sharp with overtones like shark’s teeth snapping together.

And then they came, in singles and pairs at first, and then in bewildered clumps, and then a steady stream, staring at the mermaids with slack awe, wondering at their lungs' sudden disinterest in air. The band began to play “Sleepwalk” (the king’s favorite tune), the seahorses pirouetted and bowed, and Neptune smiled, waiting for his guests to begin to dance.

Genesis 4:2-15*

With the darkness wound around himself like a shroud, he stepped out into the cool of evening. Hungry, as usual.

He thought to himself, once again, of his brother, gone these thousands of years: his smug smile, his cruel slaughter of the innocent beasts, the smell of his blood as it spilt in the desert sand.

Ashamed for the thirst that came and overwhelmed his sentiment every night, he smiled a tight, razor smile. Some vegetarian he’d turned out to be.

*here

A Little Revenge

The glass fell from his hand and shattered. He felt, muted and slow, the floor of the kitchen rise gently to meet him.

And as the bots started to reassemble his DNA, elation filled him, not unlike what he’d heard drowning victims experience: a moment of panic, then surrender, a blissful relaxation as he began to translate from one state to another.

His wife came swimming into his fading vision. Her concerned face, her words murmured and fumbling through his graying consciousness.

Then her face changed, smiled bitterly, and he heard her say, distinct and unmistakable, “You don’t hit women, you son-of-a-bitch.”