Civilisation

The city unfolded was beautiful. The stairway opened to a plaza of striated pink-, red-, and brown-sandstone bricks, dotted with beds of plum bushes. Houses of the same brick lined both sides of the path, crowned on the north side with the endless balconies of the tiers above, as though the city were a single long corridor that weaved back and forth ascending. A pair of turtledoves fluttered out of a higher loft, but looped back in, out of sight.

It was coming noon, and crowds at this level were light. Bells clattered on the necks of goats and sheep, ushered up by sticks or on wagons, come in to town for sale. Alleys too narrow for vehicular traffic told me a depth to the tiers, but my quarry was at the top of the city. For my travel, the main road seemed fine.

Higher inclines bred more pedestrians, the first ones travelling down.

I reached to tug my hood lower.

Well.

Did it matter if anyone saw? I was kind of already here. So they report me to the abbot, but that’s all within bounds of order. Or was I being too optimistic than an accidental onlooker wouldn’t, just, ruin their entire lives on ill-thought reactions because they noticed me skittering to my business. You know, with the shrieking and the pointing given to fat hairy spiders when they wander and pop into a living room. Like I’m trying to bother anyone except Czjeir’s mark. How more nondescript could I get without being completely invisible?

Whatever. Self-conscious fiddling with hoods was something I’d seen too much from Nails. Tilework spread up the walls like birds taking to flight.

A pair of oncoming men passed me at a wide berth.

To which every newcomer that approached agreed. As though a bubble of repulsive force centred upon me had stricken them, every one bounced away then flowed back into the vacant lane behind me. That is an enchantment I’ve always been able to do. With a face this ugly and a stench this fetid you always exude repulsive forces.

Not that I’d ever controlled traffic before. Maybe, a manifest aura...

A man yanked his son out of my path as though I were a rumbling undertow. A yelp and frantic whispers wafted behind me: “...pallor... has a disease...”

So that was it. Hcka! God! Of course! No, I’m not a semiwitch throttling alarm bells by unfitting attempts at modesty, I’m just an idiot who spent sixteen years in a room and broke all his metamelanocytes.

Hahaha, hahaha, hahaha.

Who’s the Clearwater grad who can brag he’s been studying? That’s just a leper in the sticks. Well, fine. Honestly I was overdue for it. The ostracization had positives, kinda... hell, if I was going to keep doing this...

A saleswoman, bent over her produce, glowered after that father and son but flipped to me a glistening smile. Incipient summons yanked my vector; I glided to her counter before she could call.

“—Ah, yes, hello, come over here! Yes, come over here.” A gallery of fruit surrounded her like jewels in an emperor’s throne. “Which do you like, friend? There is papaya, there is orange and apricot...”

“Uh,” is ‘none’ available?

“Ah, these are very fresh.” She began to squeeze each fruit in a pyramid of apples. “Brother in trials and in faith, I don’t excuse it for anyone to treat anyone how I see you treated. My apologies fill up the desert, for the lapse of virtue is shame! Shame before Shien and Czjeir!”

She thumped an apple on her countertop, grip so tight that her knuckles rose veins.

“I-it’s al, right. They just don’t want to get sick,” I explained.

“Absolutely not! Oh...” she moaned. “What good is it to shun a man for a pox? None, absolutely none dear; for who is not passed over who fears a neighbour as death? Czjeir will put His hand upon the faithful, and take to His breast those who would fall. For such a dearth of compassion, no excuses can exist.”

But they’re right. Don’t get penitent with me about it. They’re right.

Granted, for the wrong reasons, but...

Well, fine, whatever. Glad I could be here to help you into heaven. With your liberal definition of ‘excuses’. Because of course you’re correct, self-preservation is wicked. ...or am I just completely insane for thinking that it’s fair to shun leprosy?

Uncompassionate, at least, apparently. I mean, not that I’d never given sick people money before or anything, but that was also when I was trying to kill myself, so... wow, would that have been an embarrassing way to die, in retrospect.

The woman reached down for oranges. On the wall behind her hung a yellow glass daffodil, twined with pale green ribbons, of a charity sect whose symbol I knew but whose name I didn’t.

“Is it the spirit of this city to turn its face? I do not allow it,” she muttered. “I know many in Rajj, but not you. I am Veda. Do you come here as a stranger?”

“Ah—mm.”

“Mm?” She scooped up her small woven basket, began trawling fruits into it.

“Mm... mm, y-yeah.”

“It is light, but you have an accent. I have heard it before in ones from the south... when you are here, do you have somewhere to go to?’

“I-I-I’m visiting, some, one...”

“This someone is a friend?”

“...yeah.”

“Very good.” Full with an orange and two bright apples, she, grinning, slid the wicker basket to me.

“—Uh, my pocketbook,” I mumbled, scrambling through obviously empty pockets. Shit. I’d have to remember to include one next time—and find a way to make a withdrawal—if the bank even kept my account—and, and what was I doing anyway! She was an almsgiver!

“No, no dear,” she said, “how do I covet these fruits when I am looking at you? The recompense is to partake, and to eat well of good food, that you would no longer be one the jackals would circle, so ill and so thin as near death. Yes, you understand? They are all for you.”

God, okay! Yeah, I understand! That I can’t even repay the charity-men right!

“Thank you.” But it’s useless, it’s totally useless, you can’t do any single thing to help me. How can I explain to you what’s happening here? I’m in this town to kill somebody. Okay? I’m going to peel their throat like this orange, plunge my arm elbow-deep in their guts, and yank loops of intestine out of their neck. I’ll bundle it together like ribbons of taffy and rip through it with twice the enthusiasm. It’ll be the second most invigorating thing I’ve done in my miserable life, second only because last week I was more starving when I did the same thing. So I’ll do what you want, I guess, I’ll do just what you say. I’ll eat well, I’ll eat great. And somebody’s going to hell for it.

Do I have to tell you all that? Is that when you’ll start to get it? Hell!

So why do you pretend you care? You don’t even know what you’re talking to. Accursed charity-people, grinding every speck of grist they find into a virtue on their scales. You can’t even get mad at them...

Because, I mean, had I actually been a waylaid leper, she would have just done something quite beautiful. Her generosity glowed out like a searchlamp. That she’d cast its beam into such a black pit wasn’t any tally against her. It was a tally against me, for being unexpected and unreceptive.

Come on, hell. It was just apples.

“Thank you,” I repeated, and accepted the basket.

“Darling, what is your name?” she called after me as I split to the street. “Remember that I am here, Veda, if ever you are misplaced in Rajj!”

Thanks.

A grin cracked under my hood. Oh, give it a week or two. You’ll be hearing my name from the authorities, implicated in a multiple homicide.

That – now that’s who you’re talking to.

I steadied my pace into the crowd. Guilt clawed at my back as keenly as the parting vision of her hand to her mouth, brow crinkled in worry, will he be well to go on his own? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry that I’ll be fine without you...? I’m sorry that I’m too hard to help...

And that’s another spark of goodwill infected and crushed. To be as useless as I am is already selfish, but to hollow others’ worth is truly abominable.

I sighed up at the air. Behind me footsteps shuffled and voices rumbled: “Veda, Veda...”. The sky brightened a shade from steel to cyan as I imagined she had forgotten me, to instead tend her friendlier regulars. Yes, have them and be satisfied. You won’t be reaping any joyful return on your investment in me. We’ve agreed? You’re happy, you’re good now? Please, am I free to go?

That blue sky’s so endless. What a wonderful world Czjeir gave us all.

The scent of apples wafted from the bowl. My gaze flicked down to it and the brick.

What was I going to do with these...?

Gazes then rattled me to how conspicuous I looked, just kind of, carrying a bowl of fruit while doddering up the street. Yeah, amid the trimmed shrubs and the brick, that was me! A man who must adore apples, or maybe he’s delivering for his mother, or maybe he’s a beggar who just got his lunch and—no no no, shut up! Your ideas are arrows, stop butchering me. But it’s, you know, whatever. A passerby on the street, who cares really?

I broke into a sidestreet.

Hypocrisy in motion I was. Hell. What a cacophony of minds slotting souls into pegs. Is there anyone who’s not trying to take over the world? Like you own it, and like you’re able...

Upon the raised rim of a flowerbed I set down the bowl and seated myself. Where I’d come was a junction behind several houses where in someone had planted a plum tree, now so large that its branches bowed over the roof tops.

Pigeons, parrots, and thrushes squabbled as silhouettes far above, blotting the gaps in the canopy. Sugared scents ventilated the space. I nestled my shoulders against the bark and released a long sigh.

Here no static tugged the web of my internal perception. Rather, that one fizzling sun that summoned me to Rajj still tickled my core, effusing in enticing flares a warmth and a treacle that respectively bubbled in my chest and on the back of my tongue. Ohh, God! Whoever that was, their presence alone raised a smile far more genuinely than that charity worker. But were I reliant on only this faculty, I’d think that the only sure soul in the city. Wherever else I squinted, nothing rose but passing wisps, absented from reality by too weak a signal and too far a proximity.

None at all near to me.

I was alone.

Leaves rustled beneath the coos and caws of the birds.

Well, here’s thanks to whoever, and by that I guess I mean me, and by that I mean the force that controls me whenever I make even quarter-decent judgements, that I hadn’t bounded up the rooftops. Temperance (as if my mouth knew the word) afforded such observations of pleasant moments and places as these, and irreplaceable memories of Rajj’s streets and people. But maybe that was just irony. Star espousing the virtues of something once you have nothing to do with it...

Take from one hand, feed with the other. Just the best of everything, isn’t it.

The unremitting kindness always offered to me is baffling.

But yeah. Rajj was a nice place.

I rubbed a waxy red apple on my breast as if it weren’t already pristine. The crack of flesh pealed through the alley like the breaking of a skull, and the rich effusion of juice spouted out as blood.

Boulders mashed to sand against my palate. Quickly. Slowly. Squinting, reluctantly...

Stale.

I mean, it tasted fine, and like an apple. But the succulence had milkily perished as if boiled for too long in water. It was like lotus. It was like ash. It was beyond unpalatable, since at least something unpalatable I could spit out and hate. This was just pablum. A glob of crunchy substance that I was grazing on as a chore.

I was half a second from slacking my gob and letting the whole gross porridge slop to the floor.

They say that tigers learned to the taste of man’s flesh never again eat anything else. Well, maybe me and those tigers are cursed with over-refined palates? Though really...

The function of eating is rationally to ‘sustain life’, but isn’t the essence moreso ‘replenishment’. You’re supposed to feel, ah, good, more than just operable, when you reap in these nutriments.

I lapped at the open wound on the pith. Hcka! Maddening. There was the sting, the taste, but no flavour. It’s fine, it’s normal, it’s a completely normal and serviceable and truthfully rather lush apple; I’m not attuned to extract this life anymore. Or, was I ever, if this is an abstraction of trends! God knows I’ve prayed how many days over horrible meals just like this.

So what am I supposed to do, pitch this thing at a wall to watch it explode into a puree of gore? This isn’t my real provender.

I cored the apple with my thumb, broke the flesh into pieces, and scattered them to the dirt. Celadon pigeons descended from boughs to peck up the waste, and their gentle, bassy cooing thrummed in argument against the cackling parrots that followed them down to bicker. All ‘ack! Ack!’ with tiny pinching beaks like baby’s nails. Haha. The pigeons bullied them about with their fat bellies; the colourful streaks of the parrots whorled in and out after their turned heads. When grounded they all hobbled in circles, and sneaked every bite like it were a step in a square dance.

A second gut apple, skinned wedges of orange, these I threw madly in too. Let the delicacies fall like flood rains through the Sahara! Ahaha! While the cores and the skins, those I kept for me.

I think the birds were happy that day, or at the very least flew home heavy.

I swiped on my cloak, yanked down the hood, and trotted for the exit. All cheer drained from me at the mouth of the corridor back to the streets, where I froze. My stupid body again. I don’t wanna go, moaning and winging and feigning that there’s a statue in my skin and not blood. Well, listen. There’s no excuse to be doing the kicked puppy routine when you’re not really that hungry. With already conscious emotion, I don’t need to be strangling my leg or pressing my ears to my skull. Seriously... like you think I don’t get the damn message.

When sure I do. It’s just that it’s worthless.

I spat a sigh. Unclenched the death-grip I had on my arms.

Pointless torture of myself is also pretty worthless. Granted, it was helpful for suicide, which was more of a long-term goal, but whatever...

The same waiting bricks sat in that hall.

(So people are torture to you?)

(How deeply can you denigrate them, to treat blameless hearts like plunging knives?)

I raised my palm flat. Upon it I summoned a tichyan. I had never meant to be a counterfeiter, but I must have known the things pretty well. Stamped with a coiled serpent on one side and Amsherrat’s Church on the other, the ridges and weight of the thing pressed perfectly as any tichyan would on my thumb. Though is it really counterfeiting when it’s more like you have a quarry of gold on your property? And dredge it and press it into... well, yeah, of course. If I needed funding without driving all of Kitt into recession, I could exchange the raw materi(my body trembled like a volcano waking from an avalanche under the snow, frigid and yet boiling, as those screamers I’d muted screeched and slashed and beat and swept their vengeful return: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!! For there should be no end to charity—could be no end to charity—that in every pound of flesh I did not shear off, in every particle I did not give away, then what on earth was I doing but keeping them in pain? One, ten, twenty, fiffy tichyan, that’s money to change a few lives. A hundred, two, three, a thousand, distribute two thousand—)

(BECAUSE, WHAT YOU SHOULD DO, MEPHI,)

The swell of hitched breathing aborted.

Dead serenity closed on that street. I shrugged, flicked the fake copper tichyan onto my tongue, and pivoted to march down a new exit.