I smoke with my tea. I exhale fire upon the descending flea host and most scatter, although a few persist, a few survive and attach. I scratch at the biting little bastards crawling beneath the collar of my shirt. They establish beachheads in the cuffs of my trousers, my socks. And damn me if I can find them; they’re too small to see and that’s a good metaphor for how the Old Ones react to humanity. More on that anon, as the bards say.
At night I hunch before the bedroom mirror and stroke bumps and welts. It hurts, but I’ve grown to like it.
I killed a potter in Crete in the summer of 45 BC. I murdered his family as well. I’d been sent by Rome to do just that. No one gave a reason. No one ever gave reasons, just names, locations, and sometimes a preferred method. They paid me in silver that I squandered most recklessly on games of chance and whores. Between tasks, I remained a reliable drunk. I contracted a painful, wasting disease from the whores of Athens. My sunset years were painful.
The potter lived in the foothills in a modest villa. He grew grapes and olives, which his children tended. His goats were fat and his table settings much finer than one might expect. His wife and daughter were too lovely for a man of such humble station and so I understood him to be an exiled prince whose reckoning had come. I approached him to commission a set of vases for my master. We had dinner and wine. Afterward, we lounged in the shade of his porch and mused about the state of the so-called Republic, which in those days was prosperous.
The sun lowered and flattened into a bloody line, a scored vein delineating the vast black shell of the land. When the potter squatted to demonstrate an intricacy of a mechanism of his spinning wheel, I raised a short, stout plank and swung it edgewise across the base of his skull. His arms fell to his sides and he pitched facedown. Then I killed the wife and the daughter who cowered inside the villa between rows of the potter’s fine oversized vases I’d pretended to inspect. Then the baby in the wicker crib, because to leave it to starvation would’ve been monstrous.
Two of the potter’s three sons were very young and the only trouble they presented was tracking them down in a field on the hillside. Only the eldest, a stripling youth of thirteen or fourteen, fought back. He sprang from the shadows near the well and we struggled for a few moments. Eventually, I choked him until he became limp in my arms. I threw him down the well. Full darkness was upon the land, so I slept in the potter’s bed. The youth at the bottom of the well moaned weakly throughout the evening and my dreams were strange. I dreamed of a hole in the stars and an angry hum that echoed from its depths. I dreamed someone scuttled on all fours across the clay tiles of the roof, back and forth, whining like a fly that wanted in. Back. And Forth. Occasionally, the dark figure spied upon my restless self through a crack in the ceiling.
The next morning, I looted what valuables I could from the house. During my explorations, I discovered a barred door behind a rack of jars and pots. On the other side was a tiny cell full of scrolls. These scrolls were scriven with astronomical diagrams and writing I couldn’t decipher. The walls were thick stone and a plug of wood was inset at eye level. I worked the cork free, amazed at the soft, red light that spilled forth. I finally summoned the courage to press my eye against the peephole.
I suspect if a doctor were to give me a CAT scan, to follow the optic nerve deep into its fleshy backstop, he’d see the blood red peephole imprinted in my cerebral cortex, and through the hole, Darkness, the quaking mass at the center of everything where a sonorous wheedling choir of strings and lutes, flutes and cymbals crashes and shrieks and echoes from the abyss, the foot of the throne of an idiot god. The potter had certainly been a man of many facets.
I set out for the port and passage back to my beloved Rome. Many birds gathered in the yard. Later, in the city, my old associates seemed surprised to see me.
Semaphore. Soliloquy. Solipsism. That’s a trinity a man can get behind. The wife never understood me, and the first A.I. model wasn’t any great shakes either. Oh, Wife 2.0 said all the right things. She was soft and her hair smelled nice, and her programming allowed for realistic reactions to my eccentricities. Wife 2.0 listened too much, had been programmed to receive. She got weird; started hiding from me when I returned home, and eventually hanged herself in the linen closet. That’s when they revealed her as a replica of the girl I’d first met in Lincoln Park long ago. Unbeknownst to me, that girl passed away from a brain embolism one summer night while we vacationed in the Bahamas, and They, my past and future pals and acolytes and current dilettante sycophants of those who rule the Undying City, slipped her replacement under the covers while I snored. Who the hell knows what series of android spouse I’m up to now.
I killed most of my friends and those that remain don’t listen and never have. The only one left is my cat Softy-Cuddles. Cat version one million and one, I suspect. The recent iterations are black. Softy-Cuddles wasn’t always a Halloween cat (or a self-replicating cloud of nano-bots), though, he used to be milk white. Could be, I sliced the milkman’s throat and stole his cat. In any event, I found scores of pictures of both varieties, and me petting them, in a rusty King Kong lunchbox some version of me buried near the — what else? — birdbath in the back yard. When I riffle that stack of photos it creates a disturbing optical effect.
The cat is the only thing I’ve ever truly loved because he’s the only being I’m convinced doesn’t possess ulterior motives. I’ll miss the little sucker when I’m gone, nano-cloud or not.
During the Dark Ages, I spent twenty- nine years in a prison cell beneath a castle in the Byzantine Empire. Poetic justice, perhaps. It was a witchcraft rap — not true, by any means. The truth was infinitely more complicated, as I’ve amply demonstrated thus far. The government kept me alive because that’s what governments do when they encounter such anomalous persons as myself. In latter epochs, my type are termed “materials.” It wouldn’t do to slaughter me out of hand; nonetheless, I couldn’t be allowed to roam free. So down the rabbit hole I went.
No human voice spoke my name. I shit in a hole in the corner of the cell. Food and drink was lowered in a basket, and occasionally a candle, ink, quill and parchment. The world above was changing. They solicited answers to questions an Information Age mind would find anachronistic. There were questions about astronomy and quantum physics and things that go bump in the night. In reply, I scrawled crude pictures and dirty limericks. Incidentally, it was likely some highly advanced iteration of lonely old me that devised the questions and came tripping back through the cosmic cathode to plague myself. One day (or night) they bricked over the distant mouth of my pit. How my bells jangled then, how my laughter echoed from the rugged walls. For the love of God!
Time well spent. I got right with the universe, which meant I got right with its chief tenant: me. One achieves a certain equilibrium when one lives in a lightless pit, accompanied by the squeak and rustle of vermin and the slow drip of water from rock. The rats carried fleas and the fleas feasted upon me before they expired, before I rubbed out their puny existences. But these tiny devils had their banquet — while I drowsed, they sucked my blood, drowned and curdled in tears of my glazed eyes. And the flies.
Depending upon who I’m talking to, and when, the notion of re-growing lost limbs and organs, of reorganizing basic genetic matrices to build a better mousetrap, a better mouse, will sound fantastical or fantastically tedious. Due to the circumstances of my misspent youth, I evolved outside the mainstream, avoided the great and relentless campaigns to homogenize and balance every unique snowflake into a singular aesthetic. No clone mills for me, no thought rehabilitation. I come by my punctuated equilibrium honestly. I’m the amphibian that finally crawled ashore and grew roots, irradiated by the light of a dark star.