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Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?
Answer: the Void. The Void and the Stone.
I have stumbled into another layer of within, the sky and its signs are covered by intricacies of stone. This that surrounds—no circular Wall but a great Temple carved into existence in the center of the Road, luxuriating in columns and steps of striated granite, studded with quartz like roused eyes. Exhales into the viscous air like a sleeping dragon. Circus ropes of thick vine lie net-like over the Walls and crumbling balconies, weeping fat tears of wet crimson fruit, which comprises my breakfast in this abandoned place. Sky like a dove’s belly can be seen through vast cracks in the domed ceiling, crusted with flecks of ancient paint like flocks of birds. Copper bells gone to rust litter the floor, fallen in some antediluvian cataclysm. Mosaic with no picture to reveal, (as though any Revelation lies buried and smoking here)the stones of the floor have conquered their polish and lacquer, host to grass and occasional columbine. The wind prophesies in breaths of blades, slicing my inky skin.
In the shadows of the altarstone I chew my fibrous breakfast, savoring the musky juice, beckoning the strange. It is not long in coming. The air is stale, still, except for the Cossack-wind that gallops through on occasional pogroms. Oh, the scrabble and scramble of sequence closing in like hands on a fly. Where am I going, beneath this frenzied sky? Clinging to my knowledge that there is nothing, no Center, am I blind to the wheels of fire? Oh, what do you what do you what do you see in the sky?
I see the corner of the nave move silkily, shadow within shadow, suggestion of gesticulate limbs. I swallow the sliver of fruit on my tongue, peering closer, dreading the next in this idiosyncratic parade, this sequence. This episodic hermitage so full of opiate swans and painted mouths. How will it end, if an end is ever to be contemplated under an infinite train of Bo Trees and crusted snow, skipping projector illuminating this same arboreal testing ground over and over, the ascetic, the pearl, the slanting light? My turquoise fingers are sticky with apple-blood.
It is not long in coming, the breakfast-strangeness. Obligingly a creature darts out of its sanctuary, making for my tiny Bo with determined speed. A handsome golden macaque with a bodhisattva face, clever twisting hands, his gleaming fur bristled with excitement, clapping wildly and slapping his palms on the stone slabs. He stops short an inch from my face and sniffs sharp and greedily at my shimmerings of blue. I have not moved, and how we must seem like Temple statues, the Monkey and the Deva, sea-blue and still as time.
“Who are you?” He inquires on an intake of breath, words riding air like a camel.
“I am the Seek—”
“Ssst!” He interrupts me with a venomous hiss between enormous teeth. “I know all that. Who are you?” Each syllable punctuated by a slap of Monkey-palm against Temple floor. There is a long silence filled by a tabernacle of flapping birds over some distant Maze-territory, the slow, irrefutable crumbling of the Temple into divinatory dust, reading the future (nothing, of course) in its granite entrails.
“No one, I suppose.” The answer was meeker than I intended. “I am my Wandering.”
“At least you know it. I am myself, nothing more. And often not even that. I know my name, I found it in the belly of a sturgeon with a golden ring and salty Himalayan caviar. But I learned to ascend it in the hysterical ravage of the Turkish Baths at the Center of the Labyrinth.” The Compass in my belly lashed out in epileptic grandeur and I choked and sputtered. “There is no Center! There is none, nothing!”
“Silly girl with no tail, did you think there was no Center just because you had not found it? I showed it my teeth, and it was afraid. Hoo!”
The little Monkey danced triumphantly, waving his arms skyward and stamping his long feet. I could hardly speak for the pressure of sequence. How great lay the Lie of the Maze if there was a Center I had never guessed to Seek? How could I guess the shape of un-knowledge from the depths of the Road? I rasped coldly at him, grasping his golden fur.
“Where is it? Tell me, tell me, please. I have to know. Where?”
A grin of jubilant savagery seized his mouth, and he rubbed his iconic belly. “I ate it. It was afraid. Hoo!”
What relief there is in the reassurance that the world is as you suspected. His absurdity revealed his lie. The Compass calmed to its usual pulse and the winds dried blue sweat from my brow. Madness knows madness, delirium draws its own. He was caught in the same narcotic web of enchantment and counter-enchantment, trapped in the same Golgotha of perception. I knew it for a Lie and was comforted.
“All is the act of Devouring here,” he lectured, “it is how you conquer, it is how you survive, it is how you ascend. It is why you ate the Compass, and the Wall. This is a Labyrinth. Have you any doubt that its nature is inside? There are beyond a thousandthousand Walls. What did you think you had done by Devouring one corner of one? There are beyond a thousandthousand Centers. I ate one. Downdowndown. It tasted like a witch’s nipple dipped in morphine. Delicious. I ate my name, which was a Center of a three thousand and forty forever Centers, but mine. And so I become another in a writhing nest of Centers. You do not know your name and cannot achieve that kind of mastery—you do not know the tracks of your prey. I ascended its fish-eggs and padlocks. Now I am myself, whole. I carry the Center with me, and everywhere I go is the achievement of the Quest. With every step I conquer the Labyrinth, the world of my birth-tree and my first-milk.”
“But you don’t, really. You trick yourself. There is no end to it. You can’t leave it. So it makes no difference. You and I are the same. You just have a better Lie to tell yourself.”
His eyes glittered shrewdly. “Darlingblue, it is all a Lie. That does not make it lesser. Is it victory to abandon a thing like a wounded wolf? Is the truest expression of mastery is to Abscond? Not the vital thing, no. I choose. We are not alike, because I understand these things, and you do not.”
“You think you understand. It does not make it so. After all, it is all a Lie. Even you.”
“True. Even the purity of crocodiles is a derivation of moon-mother tea ceremony and a falsity. You have your Labyrinth and I mine. And I have had the Temple where you have had the Road. You have been Assassinated—it is something to see. Nevertheless, I have been waiting for you. I see the wheels in the sky and the shape of approaching. Hoo.” I shut my eyes, heavy-lead-bodied and grinding closed.
“I am weary of all this. I do not wish to listen patiently to your reed-mat ministrations and nod like an ignorant postulant. I must keep moving.”
“Yes, girlb
odied thing, and I am going with you. For awhile.”
“You are not welcome.”
“It hardly matters.”
“I will not listen to you.”
“I will not speak.”
“The Doors will catch us both.”
He said nothing. I covered my eyes with my hand. “I don’t care. Come if you wish, Beast. Or stay. There is nothing new, even you.”
