Alexandra, Jerome, and I waltz in the pre-dynastic streets. We sing the Hymn to the Dynast. We embrace. Jerome couples with Alexandra. We take books, phonograph records, kitchen appliances, and postage stamps, and we leave without paying, for we have no money of this epoch. No one protests. We stare at the clumsy bulk of an aeroplane soaring over the tops of the buildings. We cup our hands and drink at a public fountain. Naked, I show myself to the veiled green sun. I couple with Jerome. We peer into the pinched, dead faces of the pre-dynastic people we meet outside the grand hotel. We whisper to them in gentle voices, trying to warn them of their danger. Some sand blows across the pavement. Alexandra tenderly kisses an old man’s withered cheek and he flees her warmth. Jewelery finer than any our museums own glitters in every window. The great wealth of this epoch is awesome to us. Where did these people go astray? How did they lose the path? What is the source of their pain? Tell us, we beg. Explain yourselves to us. We are historians from a happier time. We seek to know you. What can you reveal to us concerning your poetry, your preferred positions of sexual intercourse, the street plans of your major cities, your religious beliefs and practices, your terms of endearment, heterosexual and homosexual, your ecological destruction, accidental and deliberate, your sports and rituals, your attitudes toward technical progress, your forms of government, your political processes, your visual art forms, your means of transportation, your collapse and social decay, your terrible last days? For your last days will be terrible. There is no avoiding that now. The course is fixed; the end is inevitable. The time of the Dynast must come.
I see myself tied into the totality of epochs. I am inextricably linked to the pharaohs, to Assurnasirpal, to Tiglath-Pileser, to the beggars in Calcutta, to Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, to Caesar, to Adam, to the dwarfed and pallid scrabblers on the bleak shores of the enfamined future. All time converges on this point of now. My soul’s core is the universal focus. There is no escape. The swollen reddened moon perpetually climbs the sky. The moment of the Dynast is eternally at hand. All of time and space becomes a cage for now. We are condemned to our own company until death do us part, and perhaps even afterward. Where did we go astray? How did we lose the path? Why can’t we escape? Ah. Yes. There’s the catch. There is no escape.
They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.
In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.
And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.
We wake. We say nothing to one another as we leave the room of dreams; we avert our eyes from each other’s gaze. We return to our separate offices. I spend the remainder of the afternoon analyzing shards of pre-dynastic poetry. The words are muddled and will not cohere. My eyes fill with tears. Why have I become so involved in the fate of these sad and foolish people?
Let me unmask myself. Let me confess everything. There is no Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies. I am no Metalinguistic Archaeologist, Third Grade, living in a remote and idyllic era far in your future and passing my days in pondering the wreckage of the twentieth century. The time of the Dynast may be coming, but he does not yet rule. I am your contemporary. I am your brother. These notes are the work of a pre-dynastic man like yourself, a native of the so-called twentieth century, who, like you, has lived through dark hours and may live to see darker ones. That much is true. All the rest is fantasy of my own invention. Do you believe that? Do I seem reliable now? Can you trust me, just this once?
All time converges on this point of now.
My……hurts me sorely.
The……of my……is decaying.
This is the path that the bison took.
This is the path that the moa took.
This is the……of the dying (beasts?)
Let us not……that dry path.
Let us not……that bony path.
Let us……another path……
O my brother, sharer of my mother’s (womb?)
O my sister, whose……I…………
Listen……close……the wall……
Now the cold winds come.
Now the heavy snows fall.
Now……………………
…………the suffering…………
…………the solitude…………
……blood…………sleep……blood………….
……………………blood…………
……………………
…………the river, the sea…………
……me…………