The
steam whistle dopplers in my head, making a bizarre
siren song. I feel like I'm being teased down a black hole, smeared toward the
event horizon like a stripe of paint on a
canvas. Thinner and fainter, slower and further. I feel the
cold. This is familiar. He rattles his cage in
horror and raw animal fear. He knows.
We have been
here before.
We are
beyond the pale now, again, same as it ever was. Each life we live
runs aground here. The chairs are set in the familiar places, either side of the stone faced Judge.
There are three players on this stage. The Judge, Myself and It. I am myself. No, wait. This will make
little sense to a whole soul. We exist as three parts of a whole, the
jigsaw of
consciousness. I am free of want, the essence of
nirvana.
It is the spot of black that colors all things, the negative of my
image. He thrashes against his chains, foaming and howling, a
whirlwind of
emotion and
need and
desire. The
Judge, the keeper of
Here, sits in eternal
repose, waiting for us.
I just died
again.
The shortest life I lived was when I was a
silkworm, clinging to the underside of a
mulberry bush. I died in a
frost, before I even tasted the leaves. It was cold, almost as
cold as it is here.
I've heard the whistling sound
before. When I stormed the trenches in
Ypres, the grenade that
stomped all the air away beside me
drowned me in it. The overload that made my ears
scream was a pale
echo of it.
When I slipped
off the icy rooftop in
Prague, I felt everything fall away from around me. The
void swims exactly like the
cobblestones did just before they
leapt up and struck me
dumb, dashed to pieces on the cold wet
street. The
vertigo washes over me.
I
remember each and every time I lived because I
remember each and every time I died.
It is the punctuation on the sentence. They remember too.
He is
incoherent with rage, not that he says much when he does speak. When the lives end, he loses. The
fire of life
lashes and
tortures him, and he wails and howls for the ones he leaves
behind. They are the
tethers that tie him down to his
chair. He
squirms and
thrashes, never tiring, as though the chair was made of
thorns and
red hot iron. The animal wants to live.
The
Judge nods to us each in time and opens the
book, same as it ever was. We do the
dance we have done a thousand times before.
You stand in Judgment.
I
understand.
He spits and bares his teeth, wild-eyed with
rage.
The karma must balance.
I
understand.
He cries and
wails, frothing at the mouth.
If it does not, you will be cast from the bardo once again into the world.
Why does he
cry like that?
This is his hell. He wants to live forever. Do you?
No. I couldn't remember the stories without
the ends.