No. You used to enjoy our time together.
Yes, but those days are irretrievable, as you should have heard grasped by this point by my words, my tone, my weariness. It’s an audience, really, not a conversation. You’re not listening. I do take pleasure, however, in one thing.
Yes, something. Though wealth isn’t it—
Once I thought, following your lead, O Prophet of Wealth, that I would take the greatest pleasure in riches. Vaults of treasure, buried deep in blast-proof bunkers, a mile into the ocean floor, vaults behind virtual walls of zeros and ones only the most brilliant of the geniuses I hired could penetrate. I thought I would feel pleasure bathing in money, sleeping in money, clothing myself in money, eating vomiting crapping fucking money. I followed your lead and had jewelry fashioned out of rhodium for every appendage, the entire interior of a tower in silver, a new arena for my birthday and it and everyone in it painted in gold leaf. Anyone there quickly grasped the appeal of the golden calf. To warn off anyone else it’s now an abyss.
Yes. I once erected a massive obelisk wrought of platinum studded with red diamonds, jadeite, garnets, red beryl emeralds, black opals, all of them. It became a shrine.
Don’t you think your dildo paid off our foreign debt? I give money away, some of it, why do you think the people love me so much? 100 % of the vote, every election. It mints itself faster than we can spend it, look at how the vultures from every continent are circling our ports, such are the bounties the earth saw fit to bequeath us.
No. And it isn’t power—
Power, that aphrodisiac as someone once said, I don’t take pleasure in it either. Prophet of Power, that you were. Such a point of idiocy and a truism that money equals power, or some such thing, money buys power, power buys money, always the two shall meet and screw and someone ends up as the surplus in the equation. I can crap on the floor and order someone to lick it up. I can have an entire block of apartments leveled and raised anew in the span of a few days. I can throw every book in every library into a furnace and order that new ones be written to fill the shelves. I respect power, especially the power that hides in things, that resides in things over which we have no control, the power that surges up out of the pages of one of those books you torched, the ones some intrepid fool rescued, the power in one of those mountains looming over us that decides it is going to batter everything around it with its sublime volcanic breath. The power in atoms whirling about towards a bang that brought the earth into being and that will clear us all from this human plane. Would that a man should become a god, or what’s literature, or politics, or physics, or the military for? Yes, but I don’t take any great pleasure in it at all.
No. Though you wield it better than a prince. Or a king. Or queen, of the chessboard or the savannah. Better than I did. The king of the savannahs, the greatest lion of this nation that ever lived.
Yes that’s how they refer to me. The Lion devoured the Prophet, though they’re still hunting for you in Switzerland and Tehran.
Yes, voracious, eaten whole.
What gives me pleasure is… can you guess it?
No… I don’t… I can’t say. Not money, not power, not sex, not religion, not, not death. I… can’t.
What do you hear?
I hear you leaning back, your face calming as you peer in my direction, your back arching as it settles into position, you briefly touching a crucifix, though you are not a Christian and haven’t been one in a long while, that talisman that nevertheless rests uneasily in the valley of your chest as a kind of reassurance that you have stumped me and this is going to end horribly.
You’ve almost gone deaf, then. Listen.
No… please. Not laughter or weeping, not seeing me laugh or weep. Not even knowing that you have stumped me completely and there is nothing I can do. Not even screaming. No. I can’t hear the answer. Please don’t. I can’t.
You can’t? I don’t want that smell to reach my nostrils. Try harder. Open one of those books in your head; turn on one of those screens. Listen, Prophet.
Yes. No. I can’t. Not the fact that you even if I outwitted you now, as well as every single degenerate member of your cabinet, your military, your family, I would not leave here. I… can’t. Don’t, have mercy.
That smell is reaching my nose. Crossing the space between us. Listen, Prophet, listen. The roaring, isn’t it fearsome? Pure poetry and science, beyond symbols or words.
No. You know how this will turn out, and are trying to will me to save myself, because you know I won’t. I can’t. Don’t, though I give up.
I can smell the abyss your ears have become, your existence. Some prophet. That was your third chance, your time is up. Fearlessness. I take pleasure in that, tremendous pleasure. Unimaginable pleasure. Do you hear me growing hard at the very mention of the word? Do you hear my salivary glands filling, the sweat rushing into my pits, the adrenalin quickening my heartbeat? Fearlessness. Do you hear the dopamine surging through my brain as I think the word? A volcano surging through me. A terrible, sublime roar. I don’t even have to say it, from it an entire world flows. That is what I thought we both had back then, chest to chest in that clearing. I remember how in our school that professor of ours called an extreme version of this mindset the greatest danger known to humankind, and I immediately looked at you, though at your core you were all fear. Fear, fear, fear. You were never fearless, though you had me fooled. The coups, the progressive changes, the preemptive attacks, the coronation, the wars. All fear’s handiwork.
The reason I wanted to speak with you was just this. I am no longer afraid.
It was always fear. I can smell you trembling into the void. It’s nauseating. What did you think was the true source of anyone’s sovereignty? Did you take nothing from all the people you plastered on every wall? Yaa Asantewa and Anacaona, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines, the Bolshevik and the Long Marcher and the rest of them, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, the sage who defied Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and Patrice Lumumba and Thomas Sankara and Nelson Mandela? Those eyes staring back at you? Did you really not listen to the stories you told everyone else, Prophet, the stories they told you in response? Did you not take anything from our ancestors who survived the depredations of the gods, and later the encroachers from every corner of the continent? Of course they were frightened but were fearless nevertheless. Some more than others, all more than you.
No. Listen to me. I am no longer afraid.
Did you not learn anything from the brazen creatures who seized our mothers and fathers, who bought and sold them here and across the sea, who fought them here and over there and did not back down? The ones to whom you signed over so much of our matrimony and patrimony? Their puny bodies that melt in the sun, all their sicknesses of the flesh and mind and soul, yet they keep arriving. Their words, their ideas, their abstractions, the ones you love so much, gave them an armor of fearlessness. I, however, scare them out of their sleep, not infrequently. They never know what time it is with me. Did you not take anything from every single soul that dared to challenge you at penalty of things worse than mere death? What do you think allowed any of them, me, to survive you?