Empathisation

Over sidestreets I ventured for the rest of the way. Once my consternation over the ah... spinelessness of irrational misanthropy, faded, the aura of the air surprised me for its calm.

These walkways ran parallel but elevated to the main streets. Tree- and cliff-shade tempered the late midday heat, as such well-tended gardens lined these promenades that it baffled me nobody used them. Even I had almost quit—‘even’, as though it’s abnormal—at the head, when the trail curved public and the grove of forest deepened, to my mind’s own conjured homunculi of hikers that passing would gasp, ‘aha! Mephi, you like walks!’. But they never came.

Nature’s breath whorled as ether. By distance my fascination swayed down, to the shrunken people milling in their society. They were like blood vessels. They were like particles, bouncing off each other.

Fractals so elegant I rarely observed; for in Vamu or Amsherrat, I never approached life in the day. The rhythms to it I imagined existed, and traced from its shadow by my wanderings after curfew, as though I had the power to breathe vitality into that dust, ran more fluently than my best arabesques.

The metronome for life in people doubtlessly was the cardiac.

If humankind by its heartbeats aligns in such a song, then I, perennially sound, a bung note.

And I came to an elbow, on the precipice between shadow and light, that interrupted the cloak of the canopy. There I froze. But no eye below and no swooping cirrus, by my step into daylight, fell on me.

And my insides spat acid, at that. It infuriated me that I hadn’t exploded the moment my foot scraped a photon. Daytime is human territory and I am not a human, I am a not-human my credentials are incorrect, and I am unhuman deceiving life in a false shape. Don’t, don’t imply to me... the minimum qualifiers of what we call ‘personhood’. Are not present in me. Okay?

Unhuman appendages whipped about in ways that emphasized my point, though I hadn’t consciously called their emergence and the slip mortified me badly, doubly when forced to remove them.

All this path and all this beauty, this cultivated strip of wilderness inside a city; I started to wonder if Czjeir, at least for now, at least for today, on my debut... venture, had specifically cleared it for me, and this thought intimated to me, the first time, the idea, that ‘prayer,’ could be a motion mostly of trust; and a request that is not incantation. I also could just be hallucinating because the walkway may just be unpopular.

To dare believe it concretely, would goad my cynicism to bat it down dead, I know to a devotee’s ears that’s pathetic, but that is... it is to mine, too.

And the trail rising up the tiers crossed on streets and stairways, each empty at their juncture as if staged for me. Masses gone before me and neared once I went; our worlds moved parallel, neither party seen in flesh, theirs full the swell of even breaths, and mine the gap between.

Jihad! Jihad! Through my interiors. Scared in my hood I bowed my head. ‘Coincidence’ by any name—right?, there is no firework or bright flare. (Is that ever what it must be?) And I crossed that level.

Joyous! Joyous! Creaking bellows. Turbine old in wind-touched haunches start. Vacuum pulls me upwards; the river is so clear, through vacantly a corridor of countless absentees, which shook me into faith, that pressing on my back’s Czjeir. And I crossed that level.

Now jury, Jury! Call the gavel—on auspice does he fly or flee? Foul charge against him levied: from his heart into God’s ear, was groaned a curse of enmity, ‘please PLEASE let all them disappear’. And surely Czjeir did it! ‘You’re mine—to me for hugs, here!’. You will serve me, infidel, and you’ll smile as you do. Happy Birthday! It’s my pleasure; to love a feral one as you, the rabid fox who howls at touch and the cur who snaps at food, to see by you my glory grow, chaptered tablet of the soul upon which etched is a new writ: that I can tame Sharvara to accept a gift. Perch here, little vulture! Cradle sweetly in my arms. Locked already in good jesses; relax then psychic furore to thrive inward tender also eating off my gentle alms. And I being so weak, let the head fall, and let it be, let it be...

—SEE NOW WHAT FILTH from that monster’s flesh pours onto holy bosom! Obdurate in all offence so atrociously fork-tongued, that subtle endless whisperer is just backbiting scum. We hear an accuser! Mephi’s jumped to the stand! That blob of shit is leaking hate for all his ‘fellow’ man. Hold him up over masses! Puff him on titanic peaks! Favoured vantage for delight baptised ever more a sneer. This frantic pouncer pulls his leash to drink loss and crunch bones—an unclean bird by nature, whether seated or erect, throw him upward and he’ll play only for others’ contempt.

And oh so is that true! I wished an eye to stone me! I prayed, ‘drop me flat to ground!’ That I could be so useless, both to you and to me, and call the shame ‘humility’ so tight I cannot breathe, all to death, all to death, oh to fall, oh to fall, this rotted smear, as a smear—and yet I’m, only, climbing, higher, into a light that’s brighter and the air thinning my weight lighter reaching towards Your face and I crossed that level.

And then I stood in a plaza at the highest tier of Rajj. It was also empty.

I was shivering inside my skin.

What was this?

The sun hung at its apex blaring over the lip of Rajj’s rock, over the roof and tile, that seared all surfaces white.

It’s sensible that nobody would bake themselves under this. But I’m—I have a mathematics degree. My credentials for applying it though are half-baked, but I know roughly, probability. Of scaling an active city with a population of at least a few hundred thousand and just, encountering, nobody.

My nerves were buzzing in weird ways. I think, I think, I started to understand—a thing that, I’ll scream if I speak it—as also immersive, like water around a fish, and the ether I already knew, how to breathe when unpolluted as ‘Nature’, as being a similar element, but, an impure alloyed form of it, and the undilute a very sacrosanct particle, which every thing alive imbibed on every inhale, that would soothe me incredibly if I simply... receded.

You stop, Mephi! You stop, Mephi! You stop, Mephi! Don’t you dare—

Is Czjeir grinning on my shoulder? Are we, are we like... friends?

Really special friends? Am I like a super special good friend?

I shuddered to even twitch in any sure direction. If I suggested to myself a heading I would shoot along it for five billion miles.

And on my left side was the main path of the city descending, and the heat of the wriggling red sun that in the first place had hooked me to Rajj. Tendrils of its intangible body stroked over my flanks, as though half of me were dipped in the Katani in the summer in a section full of anemones.

And on my right side was the ascension to the city’s summit, where over the fields of sectarian parish houses there stood a monolithic cathedral. Presbyters cloistered over illumed books stuffed the unseen cubbies of this tier; the church district. An attendance of their meticulous seminars, or even an independent meditation upon the same texts they studied, would confer to any normal person the sufficient sensibilities of, correct service and charity, and signification of, pursual, that would or should—consummate... a meek subjection.

And straight ahead was—I don’t know, some more random streets into anywhere.

Turtledoves cooed in shaded eaves. Young laughter chimed from afar.

And logically I knew that going right just, made sense. Befriend some deacon or pastor who could... whether that kind of, forceful exorcism would affect me was unclear, but it—it—I mean, you see God, you renounce all dysfunctions, and you go to church, to, to learn properly, i-i-i-it’s just obvious, right? But, nothing in me really... it was a loose thread of ‘should’. Mephi, you ‘really probably should’. And much of my... definition hereon hinged on whether I would, keep pretending or... “Hello, I’m here, please let me study the scriptures, also, I’m probably going to kill and eat someone within the next two weeks, anyway take me in?” It was one devious way of throwing a problem into the lap of somebody else.

It took less consideration to choose my course than to explain why I chose it. It wasn’t even ‘choosing,’ it was... this strange thing where...

And I drifted left, downward, still cupped in the current, of invisible gold laced through as motes in the flowing caustics of crystalline shallows, that enveloped me deeper into this garden of playful, tickling, cozy anemones—and this, this thing happened that—inside my chest it, started, getting, warm. It wasn’t hot or bitter like a stabbing thrill, and didn’t sweetly, sarcastically fester like bacteria around a sewage pipe, but—when a clementine tree bursts into bloom. More and more and, zesty and bright it was—spreading like—and I had the vague intuition the phenomenon was not unfamiliar. Somewhere in my archives I kept it, taxodermied, by small hands that stitched earnestly as I could but fumbling, so proud I was to save it at all that I enshrined it bold on a pedestal. “Look at that!” I’d urge. “Look at him!” But quickly I stopped. Year over year his seams frayed that his fur fell to mange, and its claws drooped and wires showed in its gums, putrefying by a deformation so old and irreparable, for how sloppily I had first shot to preserve it, that the older I grew and the keener my sight the more ugly it got, the more snide its smile, the more wracked its contortion. I would’ve destroyed it then completely, except that would’ve freed it from being so hideous. Instead it rotted far in the backrooms somewhere between ‘dad’s jokes’ and ‘monocerous’. I eventually realised that I was feeling happiness.

And this reunion that should’ve harrowed me like the reverberation of a brass bell, didn’t, because I felt happy.

And this terror that my wheel had fallen into the wresting hand of a self-absorbed puppeteer, didn’t come, because it hadn’t, I could still turn, I was just happy.

And the gust of a hurricane suffused the air but its force was jubilee. Are ducks self-absorbed when they splash in a river? No way! To meet scheduled appointments, by inclinations of life’s sundial—you have flippers, you have wings—that’s, peacefully, delightfully, fulfilling a covenant. Can I... be like that, too?

And the wind settled calm. And I stood at the gates of a schoolyard.

A giant red sun throbbed above the campus as livid as a wet ulcer, so majestically radiant in its heat and encompassing by the chaotic licks of its tendrils, that by the Heresies it would be a god. I shuttered my sight off the web; sky and stone resolved back to average blue and white, and upon the heights of the edifices formerly occluded by its girth were revealed many artful Czjeirphets.

Desecration? Debasement? Desolation?

Children on the playground just inside the outer wall frolicked about, laughing, hooting.

Killing grounds. Honey bubbling on my tongue savour for blood to wash the brick clean.

My quarry? Who is it? What is it? Investigate—to investigate it, is why I came to this city.

But please don’t be a child. (AHAHAHA!? That’s your breaking point? Riiiight.) Really, though, please don’t. Czjeir, if anything could stop me now(—oh come on Mephi! Booo!), okay I’m not asking to be mourned, since obviously I am kind of, persistent, but a moment of silence for that human-shaped husk I had been gestating inside all this time? The results of this survey would define whether, I would ever parade those moth-rotten leathers on again. To profess through it normal kinds of interests and, attempts at even humble ‘aspirations’.

Or whether to give it all up.

To you. Please.

I’m here. You know that I’m here...

(Many smaller stars had glinted on the web scattered beneath the red behemoth, but the children outside reflected nothing at all.)

I stood at the gates.

A nun peeped out of a building with a bell, which she rung to summon the children in. By this motion, her angle dipped just far enough to skirt noticing me, shaded under the pillars of the entryway.

The playground inside the gates soon fell quiet and bare.

So, so then...

...do I just walk in? Haha.

Well, Czjeir, you make it too easy... not that it’s a complaint.

I spat a long breath, and cast my hood to my shoulders. Yeah, because if I’m here on Czjeir’s instruction, then ah... let’s not be, better not to be, all too, subtle about it, yeah...

And not one head in those classrooms looked out the window. Even in trespassing, I’m just never there. Barely one meter parallel sticks me with the ghosts (though for a spectre yourself, isn’t that so appropriate) who frisk through the corridors. The memories of laughing students wheel past me like moths. Maybe I’ve these fluttering heralds to decorate the weight of my footfalls, or maybe I’m caged in fantasia, what the experts call ‘delusional’, haha.

The clench of my nails and teeth relaxed. Heat of honey more and more flushed out from my bones, to pack full that great inner cavity, beneath a sternum melting pliant as butter, around blood bursting into verbenas—holy, holy, holy! Even a squinted dribble tracked down my cheek. To imbibe this is, on every step greater, on every step nearer, to guzzle the eminent radiance, of the yolk of a sun, which grows always thicker and brighter and yet never burns.

Oh would I nuzzle my face into the fur of the Hunger, and brag: Hey look! I’m doing, kinda alright at this so far! But still it only slept on the floor.

Mn...

My purpose in Rajj was to investigate what property sanctioned these certain souls as my quarry. And moreover to determine if my conception of ‘sanctioned quarry’ was in the first place correct. If my desires were not Czjeir’s I would better die than indulge them.

Envision I could both Czjeir’s mercy, that he would not allow me to err even on my stupidest impulses, and my own conceit, that with an ego truly tremendous, I had pasted God’s name on my tongue as a proxy to justify why I should be alive.

Maybe I am a lonely person. Objectively, that should be true. But do you understand yet that it’s an impulse in me to hate everyone? I know you won’t understand me, that suddenly I’m not speaking Kitt, when I say things that should be straightforward. I see problems everywhere. I see deficits, not hard to fill. Yet the solutions aren’t taken, and the simple law isn’t revered, that you’re not in the possession of anyone’s will but your own. It’s not that you’re so amazingly devious nobody’s figured it out. It’s that you enjoy the noise of an echo and careless people are largely obliging.

A hearth warmed my breast. My rotten brain I exorcized with a sigh – bitter on the expel, sweet on the catch – as the heated procession of classroom doors terminated at the One, the single portal to Day, behind which fulminated only the core of this spectacular, throbbing, wriggling, tentacled, cankerous sun.

I knocked.

A shuffling of aborted routine came from inside, to silence.

That sun was so close! I thumbed the placket of my cloak, aware of my own impatience. Should I knock again? Or... perhaps now wasn’t a good time...

Idiot, Mephi.

The comma is for who?

The doorknob creaked, (He was there!), and appeared did a man in the doorframe. Wow, the haze of celebration that such company was licenced for me! A brood of children like baby chicks grouped around a table peered around his shape from their seats. My hand shot as a harpoon to a snapper’s white belly; by a grip on his jaw, I yanked him to the hall.

His body wricked, as a fish, but his arm trailed out with prescience enough to close the door.

Fifty-two years and he’d metastasized into one rancid roll of fat. No, to speak physically, neither his outward looks nor his mild build merited such a remark. What transfixed my concern was what slurry ran inside the mold.

I was holding him aloft; mild sweat dampened my thumbs, pressed by a pad of flesh against bone, but oddly his face bore far less concern than he needed to have at this juncture.

“Oh—oh God, you!” he swore.

Me? What you expected me? But don’t curse with that name you grubby scarab.

“—oh come, come all off it, there’s nothing to audit,” he prattled, rolling his eyes to avert his gaze.

Even recognized me? No so irrelevant. Like through a scaffold of glass, fractals of lightning bounced all through his skin, and the numb burn of focus, that is, the strain of a pressed spring, or of a stretched slingshot, that closed all the world but him to grey, demanded my passions suspended until I could judge how to best release them.

He hung like a marionette, toes but scratching the stone.

My stillness bothered him. His chin pressed away from me, not yet struggling, but assertive that he would break the hold and dismiss me if I didn’t move.

And my will to proceed this already was wilting. Pathetic, right? I have him right there. I say it’s on Czjeir’s will and then I don’t do it, and I say it’s on my will and do even less. Cats are hideously ruthless creatures. Strange that catching a prey twenty times over will only train it more complacent, not even from surrender, but from suspicion that its tormentor grew bored.

Consider, I could fail here – that is, allow myself not to commit to completing my professed goal, of investigating why some souls attracted my concern more than others – and Czjeir would forgive me. He’d let me screw up and come back famished in a week. But, you know, with my wicked ego, I never really want him to have to.

I winched down his jaw to link our gazes.

This world hosts some truly despicable people. There’d been no coincidence that Hejat Vanderheir, the man I held locked in my grip, had taken a profession that positioned him so closely to children. Oh, he had drooled for the day—that the seminary would pass him, veiled meek in his piety and in politeness well-lauded, into the classroom-cum-orchard where he freely could rip off his skin and feast as a worm. Ah, it was the ribs, see. That flirting flash of skin right at the navel. A-blu-blu-blu-blu! It’s a normal thing, to give kisses and raspberries there, and to suck, and to lick, slogged a trail of slime down the curve of a peach, so soft it would bruise if his teeth even grazed it. More upon more boldly that dribbling maw stamped them with his secret brands, until one day it became only ritual. After school, between classes, daringly, in breaks to the privy.

‘This is between us’, ‘Don’t tell anyone else,’. What an unparalleled thing is love! Is his a bit strong? Is his a bit wrong? If love is Czjeir’s, let Czjeir blast him right now! And yet for 35 years, in a passionate war against God, he’d been winning, and only winning.

Czjeir doesn’t care, he’d deduced. More even: What is Czjeir? He’s dead; I’m alive. Were he to care, he’d say I’d done them a service.

One man.

Hejat Vanderheir.

Over one thousand students.

Their friends. Children of his relatives. His own daughter.

A rancid roll of fat. He sat on his fat oily rear and drummed his fat bloated belly. Because, for him, there was nothing more in life, and nothing more he wished in life, than that flash of despoiling ecstasy, every day, every hour, in which he could drink a little girl’s soul through her clit.

I released my hold. ‘Flumph,’ his clothes went to the floor.

Interesting.

Dark laughter eddied behind my molars. I faced him close and sober, but a shadow imposed over my pharynx snickered: He’s doomed.

A squeal of piglike distress then shattered me from my thoughts. I hadn’t simply released him; he’d actually crumpled onto the floor too shaken to stand. Tears and snot gushed from his face, scarlet as if sunburned, and his fingers pawed at it too.

“Nothing, nothing like such happened! It is a game, it doesn’t hurt!” He shrieked, voice cracking. “You wicked slave—casting such pains—who(‘s) are you!?”

I was unsure which misapprehension to untangle first, if I was to respond to that. Had I inflicted on him any pain, it was that of, momentarily, refining the long-dulled blades of his own conscience. (In retrospect, such an act is a miracle). Though if he meant, ‘how can you attack me so poignantly,’ well, it’s the same answer, I didn’t. Gorgons die by their own snakes; a dragon’s own claw can pierce it; and he’d erected every spike in this pit on his own.

As to my ownership, well...

...I suspected that if he heard the name, he wouldn’t believe me. Actually, that he might try to kill me. Fruitless, obviously, though the prospect of switching his weeping into rage was kind of... well, if it’s so simple, it’s fascinating.

But would he really? The curiosity itched.

Well—if you can surrender a doctorate, maybe leave the science back in Clearwater too. A relieving, filthy sigh of failure shuddered through my back.

On the floor the man wept.

“...You should probably, stop,” I said.

He looked at me, affronted, as if I had blasphemed him with screeds of curses.

“I mean, that it’d be,” what bilge was I blibbering now. “i-if you stopped, that it’d...” do what, Mephi? You saw him. Do what? “It’s just, something. You should, I-I mean I think it’d be maybe, be b-better if you, really, just... stop.”

“What is this?” He sneered. “Whoever sends you, spirit, they need not hide demands in odd intrigues. —And by who are you seen? Here is inside the building—you, you rebel then. What you bring is to me slop.”

I let the silence sit.

“Tcah, games.” Back on his feet, he shook his head sharply. “You are a nuisance and you interrupt the day. Out!”

“Okay.”

He spat, snorted, and marched away down the hall. That’s funny, telling me to leave then departing himself. Maybe I am made of titanium, that repulses sonic waves when struck, and returns them to the sender? How effortlessly magical. I pivoted to leave also, hung only for a moment to stare after the door to the classroom, with all the children inside, doubtless worried about the long pause—(they’re six years old, you dunce Mephi. They’re celebrating every second they’re in charge)—alright alright. Yeah, that was more likely. Hah!

And we’ll rattle up the coop for those chickies regardless. Yes, we’ll see action here...

You know I ought to be more furious about who I had just met. I ought be a crackling pelting of pitchforks and brimstone. Oh how great was his rage! When he lost his wits and murdered that man in the hall! If I could snap, wouldn’t that prove some tender compassion hidden in that miserable desert that we’ve termed ‘my heart’? So affronted, so incensed, congratulations Mephi, let’s get those blue ribbons and accolades because for prompt retributions you’re best in show. Oh, no, you don’t understand. If that’s how you think, you’ve never known hatred.

I’ll demonstrate to you a real case study.

The raging sun behind me wilted into a tickling glow, (the hunger was not so oppressive at present that splitting from a mark was impossible), as I marched through the halls. Classrooms passed me crowned with placards—then ‘Auditorium’, ‘Library’, ‘Record Office’.

Signals of souls thinned nearby, while those across campus whizzed like disturbed bees to herd themselves off the premises. The news was darting. I existed. Sick passions roiled in my blood hotter than smoke, so drunk I was on the ecstasy, that the trembling of my fists was evoked less in proportion by sensible fury than simply a wanton lust for exciting chaos.

‘Board Room,’ said a new placard. At least six living signals had congregated inside for a meeting.

I ripped open the door.

“Hejat Vanderheir, of your employ, has been violating his students,” I announced to a round table of stunned faces, a man, a cheerier man, an old nun. “I’m going to kill him. And, that’s all, sorry.”

“Get out of here,” the nun snapped, breathless. “Out, out, out.”

You’re using his same words, I marvelled. A younger woman clasped her hands and whispered prayers in frantic litany; another man in a jacket sputtered, “You—” and grabbed a broom. The elder nun hefted herself up and nabbed the implement from him, tracing the sign of Czjeir over her chest, marching for me on a warpath.

More interesting was the quiet young man at the corner of the table. To each piled syllable of my shocking pronouncement, his head bowed lower and church-yard still. A flare of azure lightning then crackled out of his soul, which swelled in potency from a dab to a supernova that roared like a cascade of oceans pouring upon oceans. (I caught my breath; the quality of this was enticingly bitter). By no crutch of supernatural devices I deduced the significance of this shift. Of everyone in this room, only he was reacting to the content of my message rather than my gauche presentation of it, because of anyone, only he of his own initiative had already suspected it true.

It’s pitiful, in the way that means ‘sad’. With cowardice, and indecision, I suppose I am familiar to commiserate guilt, though not enough to presume to know the whole abyss of it squeezing him now. How many victims? Hundreds? Thousands? That by his voice, he may have stopped? Well, souls are a sick thing to quantify. Nonetheless, the ferrous torrent of sand grains one-by-one crushing him may as well have poured from my mouth onto his head.

Greater mercy, Mephi, maybe, that he never knew. My intercession had chained him a debtor culpable of deathly charges, when his misstep wasn’t even so pestilent as blind fatuity or conniving malice, but simple frailty of will and wavering passivity. Even less than Hejat’s friends or employer, he hadn’t done anything. But that was the problem. He hadn’t done anything.

“Out, beastie! Whether you’re a witch, ghoul, or whatsit, y’int be in these halls!” the old nun rammed me with the broom.

“H-hm, auh.”

“Not even nighttime, you heller! ‘Where my men shall live is holy’, and for sneaking up here Czjeir best burn you alive! Betchyer—devil hooves start sizzling off if yer so much step on a tile.”

“Wouldn’t the conductive heat burn anyone going barefoot out there?” I wondered.

“Ooh, clever clogs. Git!” the broom rammed me again. Initiations to divinity ought be legitimized by such sublime glamours, of being shoved about by an old woman with a stick like everyday vermin. (This moron hadn’t realised she’d kept an equal-or-above monster on her staff for twenty years—well whatever. Maybe ducks are hard to recognize if you never hear them quack, and I both presently and typically am far more vocally fowl).

“Dear Mother Superior please guard our lives carefully,” the younger woman urged trembling.

“Pish, doesn’t need care, this one’s a piddle,” she didn’t actually believe this. I think she knew I could have slaughtered them if that was my power and I was inclined, so better she risk to bluster me off. “Just a wee numptin...”

“O-okay, sorry. I did, s-s-say I was leaving, so... mm, I-I think you have enough things to worry about anyway. Hah.”

So I departed.

The group, then, shuffled out of the room of their ‘captivity’ with a uniform gasp of hostages’ relief, and how swiftly the blustering old nun deflated, how her face scrunched like a sopping rag for all its wrinkles and sweat, with her hand held to her chest to stave a heart attack.

“Get the Bishop,” said one of the men, pressing her onwards, as they all sped away in the opposite direction as me.

Mhm. Woo-hoo.

And now—