ORGANIZING LIGHT
Book I: An Interview with Adam; Exiting the Garden
What happened to you?
Depends on what you consider “going wrong,” I guess. I started out all right. It hit the fan when I was twenty-three and I couldn’t stay the same. We’re always changing and life is movement and all that, but this was a rapid mutation, shifting species toward the dawn of a new sentience. The only woman I ever loved, her silhouette burned into the walls of my home, her outline in my bed. My fingers traced her body and I wanted to die. Popping opiates en masse to kill the fire in me, the heat death overloading my nervous system, neurons stretching out as a wick lines the innards of a candle, disappearing with the flame’s last breath. I won’t even be a memory. Who am I kidding? Every last one of us lost in time. Since then I left home for a new haven where the buildings are bright and marble and the people live in towers. Stink of the sewers all around us, there are no pedestrians there, only furies. I lost my brother to insanity and my father’s cancer took him back to God. I was left here to rot in the prison slums of the universe.
Day after day and I look to film. It's far beyond artificial, unacceptably so at this point. I stare into the eyes of people I don’t know, as though their stories are my own. I empathize with the pain of their families outside of the world concocted for massive currency. There’s a degree of resentment inside me because I don’t believe that many of the people I’ll meet, know, and love will ever empathize with me, with this wretched frustration. As I’ve aged I’ve become enamored with the sensations, those prickles of warmth at the universal human notions that lie beneath these societies, what we allege to value on celluloid streamers. That relationships can survive all of this awful wrenching between folks, that you can strike me and perhaps one day we’ll be friends again, beyond turning the other cheek, that I won’t be Linda Pugach’s ghost in this instance of flesh. I just can’t do it, story after story, the evil wizard and his tech, some twisted scepter, the colored faces of victims everywhere shifting as the everymen (and women) enter, assured that justice will take place on behalf of their officials and the scepter is adopted, absorbed like wasps into the fig tree’s fruit and passed onto the world many seasons later, rebranded by a jester wielding his streamlined wand, his king secretly nodding in approval as he unleashes one last plague on his people.
Why all this, then?
From then on I rose from white fire again and again, an epic poet’s dream-protagonist at war never to return home. The same days of tragedy lived on repeat. I’ll pass after a sharp mental decline - deviated brain; tragic sort of thing. Perhaps they’ll scatter my ashes along the path taken in a twisted symbolic ritual. Prints of Time planted on every body, twisting left and right pinned beneath celestial hands. A career spent in front of cameras so the entirety of this bloodline can see every line spoken and formed so selectively, the mass unaware of any pain. I can barely speak in public, often stumbling over my own feet. I’m afraid if I don’t start recording now, they’ll lose me. It’s a marketplace, you see, everything in front of us: all for sale.
The siren Cecilia told me, having handed me a shining gold piece: We were there together once, the cameras were rolling and we spoke to everyone though we were locked onto one-another, you proclaimed your love for me despite the fact that we are all apes in uniform, from your winter coat to my lingerie. “A marketplace,” it was the first time you’d said that and it was one of the few things you felt bore repeating. You said that you wanted to reset into a golden age of life and live it as dreams are dreamt. So I sent you here for an instant, where the day is always the same, the kind of thing you contemplate, envisioning the future from goal to goal - awaiting each delivery. This is the critical piece, the last thing you ever needed. No sitting at your dinner table thinking about the generations lost to defaulted infrastructure, whereupon a nearby youth explains her immediate-apparently-imminent destiny, not yet affected by bureaucratic restriction and you want to scream that it was always a lie, but your colorful mask is as resilient as her certainty, the warmed lentils and rice eaten in a softened peace, and you can only feel how quickly things are moving, your soul exhausted from the ride she has only just started.
I don’t need this. It’s been barbed wire between my teeth for years now, I bit down and with time the bleeding got so out of control I was waiting to take up Cecilia’s offer from my earliest days, the coin in my hand the toll to get out. How simple the changes seem to everyman, I think, a man thrown from one end of this life to another. "When did we speak last," I’d ask, “perhaps it was the life before this one?”
Eventually the two lives would merge so firmly that memories from one or the other would become entirely indistinguishable, I’d call the man-angel before me Michael once again and his visions would merge with my own as our paths fused into near-indiscriminate facsimiles. I see it all, everything, hint of the great plan before us all, pieces of a great many worlds’ blueprints. The lies of that puppet-jester hopping before me, the colors of all matter evaporating before that scepter, altered to the mad king’s liking and he sees me, sees my seeing. You asked, “why all this, then?”
For the answers.