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diana pollin

Enki's Gift
Ref. No. 909008lt
Length 90,000 pages

Summary

Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the Earth would have been changed. (Pascal)

Can we change the course of Fate? With the fabulous opus of the Sumerian gods, the Tablet of Destinies, we can. Enki, god of wisdom, has unearthed the Tablet beneath the sands of Akkadia, to bestow it on a handpicked team of humans. The forces of evil oppose them, but not for the usual reasons. The scene is set in post 911 Manhattan, where the attacks have disturbed the cosmic sleep of the unquiet ghosts...or the eerily �missing�, like Mora.

From The Book

Oct 31, 2005

Paul Lerner

321 West 94th Street

New York, N.Y. 10025

Tel -

Comte Alexandre de Vallenquirre

Director

Editions de l’Ombre

Hotel Pierre

New York

Dear Monsieur Le Comte,

I am writing to renew the contact we made at the cocktail reception given by the Alliance Française last May in New York. I remember sharing your very perceptive viewpoint about the influence of the Nouveau Roman on modern American literature, and as the evening progressed, I mentioned being selected by the Intercultural Arts Foundation for a tour of Europe during the summer months. Our conversation somehow drifted onto the subject of the supernatural in literature, and we found ourselves discussing Gauthier’s La Morte Amoureuse, which you described as your favorite 19th century short fiction. You wondered if there existed a contemporary work as “bizarrely daunting” (your words) as Gauthier’s and asked me to inform you if I ever came across such a manuscript.

Amazingly, such a manuscript was given to me about two months ago, during the IAF tour, and as its author, its origin , and its contents are deeply mysterious, it would appear to be just what you are seeking. I waited a full month to contact you as I had hoped to locate the author/ donator. The professor who claimed ownership is unknown in his stated institution of higher learning, the University of Indiana, nor is he listed as a member of any nationwide professional association. I even posted a query on the internet, but I have received no answer to this date. Therefore, I feel free to give over the manuscript with the hope that the work, and my offer to prepare it for publication, are still of interest .This being said, I feel that it is necessary to describe the very odd circumstances in which the manuscript came into my possession.

Shortly after the cocktail party, the IAF group left New York for Europe at the beginning of June. I had been most eager for this tour, starting in Paris, sweeping through Italy, Central Europe, and terminating in Istanbul, entered, no less, on the Orient Express at Vienna. It was my first grand tour of Europe, (I had previously been only to France and England.) and it had shaken me to the core. It made me realize that I , a future PhD degree holder, was less than a grain of sand in the sea of unparalleled brilliance of European culture, which was a lesson in humility to one who has prided himself on being a cut better than his class through his academic achievements. I consequently fell into a deep depression, the first of my life, which ended only after the manuscript was given to me at the end of August.

My depression, however, reached a culminating point in Vienna .The Foundation had booked three of the eight compartments in the same car, and I remember taking a seat in the third compartment, which I soon left to pace the outside connecting corridor. I watched the scenery fly by for about an hour until I entered , aimlessly, the eighth and last compartment. And there he was, alone.

“Davey Davis Jenkins, Professor of Art History and Archeology, University of Indiana,” he introduced himself.

He was middle aged with pleasant features, thick wavy steel gray hair and remarkably bright blue eyes. He appeared to be tall and bothered by long legs. I remember that he had on a short sleeve shirt with a checkered blue and pale red pattern against a pale yellow background, and a pair of light weight mixed cotton and linen beige trousers. Everything about him was fresh, cheerful and spotless. Well preserved ordinary good looks except his unusually brilliant and unsettlingly bright eyes, which he focused on me. He had a notebook on his lap.

I responded to his introduction and then made the slight gaffe, “I assume it is David Davis Jenkins.” He corrected me, insisting on the “Davey of Welsh origin,” and remarked on my Russian-Lithuanian Jewish parentage, saying it was the name tag on my laptop that gave him the information. He asked where I was getting off and told me that he “planned to alight in Constantinople, that is, if nothing else turns up.”

A silent minute went by while I got settled in. I mentioned by way of conversation that I was traveling with a group to which he responded, quickly, “I know.”

How could he have known? I was annoyed, but the man had such wonderful eyes, that I forgot the annoyance immediately. Then I felt what I had not noticed before, the infernal heat. I went to the window and gently forced it open to let in a stream of air. This brought forth a compliment,

“Good initiative, Paul. And, not only with the window. I travel a lot and am used to the heat. But, I see you take initiatives, like leaving an excruciatingly boring travel group. I have more than once run into the IAF tour. This year’s group would throw anyone into the depths of depression !”

“ Professor Davis, how would you...” I started, surprised at his truthful and brutal judgment.

“Please, call me Davey.” He interrupted. “ Look here ! You are bored, not particularly tired, just bored. All you have been doing is traipsing around monuments, listening to so-called expert guides who are only some ambitious official’s cousins. Buy an expensive guidebook and you will find verbatim what they have said. It's all highly superficial, and murderously boring.”

I wondered what exactly was his problem with boredom, surely not the worst disaster to hit the human race, at least in my opinion. He picked up on my thoughts immediately,

“ Please do not underestimate boredom! Ennui Mortel has been the cause of more pain and suffering than anyone can imagine ! This is not the expected conversation from a fellow traveler on the Orient Express. But it may be worth your while.” Then, to my astonishment, he transferred the notebook from his lap onto mine. “Here is literature for the trip. It’s a tale written by a student of mine. A really brilliant element.” But a twinkle from his fantastic eyes told me that I should not really believe the part about “a student of mine.” Not knowing what I was doing and suddenly incapable of refusing, I flipped through the neatly typed pages of the notebook while an awesome feeling of contentment fanned over me. Perhaps, he and his manuscript appeared on cue, as a manner of speaking, to deliver me from my strange anguish. I will never know.

I thanked him for the “literature for the trip” and as I gathered together my possessions, and shifted seats to sit by the window, a sudden, unexpected and delightful stream of cool air blew in while his bright eyes twinkled.

I look forward to your comments on his manuscript and hope to meet with you to discuss a project based on the work. I realize that you are in the city for a limited time and would be grateful if you could fit me into your schedule.

Sincerely,

Paul Lerner

Post Scriptum: His giving me the manuscript before he “alighted in Constantinople”, is a tale unto itself. I have decided to leave it for the end. Also, I added comments after certain chapters based on memories of exchanges I had with him which you will find blended into the body of the work.

From Book One

12- I shall but love thee better after death

In April, at her apartment, when Salim came for the second interview, there was a quivering intensity between them as she opened the door , an embarrassing crossing of bodies in the narrow corridor that led to her living room and a silent seething minute of the inexpressible before they became lovers.

After, he thought homeward, involuntarily. He thought of his wife and his father and his recollections gathered in pools of bitter tears. Happy memories of lost innocence stung him like a whip of angry bees. And then he shook himself out of the bed like a dog from a pond; it never happened, this… this incident with his cousin Malika. He wanted it to happen… maybe, in another lifetime, in a dream, in a fantasy but, he was not really there and he did not, could not have done… he was somewhere else. No, Salim you are here and, look around; your clothes are off.

Life will go on he decided, using the cliché as the safest buoy tossed in this sea of turmoil, and he told himself he will have to learn to live with it. People do. People live with all sorts of assaults on their regularities and maybe, all this ,one day, would be placed in a shelf in the back of his mind, “Incidents almost forgotten.” That was good enough. It had to be. Did he have a choice?

And, panic came after the guilt – suppose Malika should talk, brag, lack discretion? Well, it was his word against hers. But, she would not talk , would she? She could if she wanted to,

rip apart his present and future; one can endanger those; but not the past for the past is inviolable; worse, the past can violate; that is its privilege, its only grip on the living.

Malika dresses in haste, ties an elastic about her long hair, pulls on her jeans. No guilt or panic seizes the malevolent lady, determined to have her way; he has no airs and no claim on her. She knows that she has bored a little hole to his inner being, that his eyes rest restlessly on her, and her fine figure. She will come at him with the pounce of a panther, and already she feels the thrill, that annihilates her crushing sense of void. She cannot stop thinking of her deceased father in conversation with the Demon …”Because it will be amusing…” and she understands how inebriating power and its promise can be! So be it! Anything to snuff out the fires of a cruel and unknown longing of which she knows not the cause. She turns to him, smiling, and cold in her suggestion,

“How about a walk in the park. We both need to cool off.”

And he agrees, as he will always agree with her, and, as he will always now do her bidding. He dresses quickly and they leave.

There is a wildness to Riverside Park that is absent in its centrally dividing sister, a cute obviously manmade concoction, with a safe little lake, a Candyland cartography and microcosmic pretensions in regard to the larger city. Here, on the frankly less elegant green of the West Side, nature is rougher; tamed only to a certain degree but not contorted into a tasteful Disneyland of little bridges and boating restaurants and zoos and skating rinks and stone esplanades that serve as back drops for bridal pictures.

Riverside Park has tentative but recognizable links with the Manhattan of old. Unlike its sunken pseudo- marsh of a sister, it hinders no gust coming in from the River but on the contrary, forms a corridor, like the grand canal of Venice for any terror inspiring wind to gallop, prance, hurl and howl as it pleases, through the pigeon gray lanes of calibrated paving stones making rough with rubble, pitifully stray newspapers and detritus of any kind. Its sash of highways teeming with traffic only heightens its rustically utilitarian dimension.

Through the gullet of this windswept funnel Salim and Malika walk in full bodied ease with the papers that have been torn from the reader, with the softballs that have slipped from mitts, with the hats that have been severed from heads; no meaning or direction they care to give to their walking, and, they envy the kites, that look down on the green grass, while rising proudly higher and they are mysteriously silent with a culpable silence of children in a tree house after a pact has been signed in droplets of blood, engaging, magical, and sinister. So they let themselves be carried which ever way the wind blows them, feeling the blithe but perilous essence of their situation which is impossible, as all the ménage à trois are, at first, until the culprits find the usual paths of getting around impossibility.

Then, suddenly, the strong wind dies down, leaving the sky to express itself in juvenile patchiness, coyly putting on and casting off cloud puffs. The kites, less exuberant in their soaring, begin to falter; the flying scraps of paper sweep the lowly paving stones, the trees retrieve their tormented branches in a melancholic droop, the wind’s howl becomes a low hiss. A sharp and pitiless cold reinforces the gravity of the moment. Salim feels it painfully messaging his temples and circling his neck that he covers with an upturned collar. A bench presents itself; he directs her to it. They sit and stare at the River and the pale sun beyond and the trees greeting April, exuberantly flowering in virginal white and the dark stone wall that men have built to confine the garden. The exhilaration of their illicit act has died down , but their silence tells Salim, that it has slipped into a higher register, away from the physical and into the mind. And he remains hushed for a while until he retrieves a tissue among all the other masculine items – Swiss knife, calculator, car keys, map, subway pass –encumbering his pockets. The time it takes to wipe his nose, he has reviewed all the possibilities open to him, to them, for now he is forced to think as a couple albeit clandestine. Or not at all. She could do his thinking for him. Another temptation.

And what did he know about her, he who knew so much about Americana and so little about women? Maybe it was just one of those things, like that song she knew he enjoyed ? Or maybe she was just easy! … Which would make it easy for him, in a sense. The turmoil that was in his soul, that was his soul. He was torn between the sudden urge to take to his heels and the opposite, of settling in to enjoy a fling.

“What about us? Where are we going?” Salim breathes a warm stream of air into his hands cupped about his nose. He is dying of the cold; but, Malika in her head scarf and thick Italian movie director glasses looks fabulous; she looks, in fact, the way happy women look after love.

“Salim, I don’t know. I can’t explain what happened to myself. It just happened. I am shaken ; I fear the consequences for you, for me, for both of us. Something in me says that we must separate. Something else says that I – we cannot bear to remain apart.”

Ah there it was! Her distress is as profound as his ! He pulls his falling collar up about his neck and closes the top button of his jacket. God ! And what was this, “I fear the consequences for us?” What was she trying to say ? Is she doubting his ability to cope? But, Malika continues,

“Maybe , I sensed something in you that was different from all the others; that you picked me out or we found each other out of a crowd. You know, it was very intense the last time you came to my place for the interview. I was, like shaking all over. I could hardly keep the mike in my hands.”

He inches nearer to her, convinced of her emotional upset. He surrounds her in a loose embrace, convinced that she needs protection and that she too, is cold. But, suddenly he pulls away. The list of his obligations – father – store –family- is burdensome and real. But what the hell! He straightens up and lets her go. She is attractive, and good in bed, and he is entitled to his little on the side!

“I know that you respect me,” Malika speaks forth quickly, catching what he is thinking, and blasting it away with the bazooka of Respect. “As I respect you; as I most probably would respect your wife since you have chosen her. She is very lucky lady. She does not know how lucky. I ( A little dramatic stuttering, Malika, and take off your glasses. Eyes down.) I…I…don’t want to disrupt …disrupt your family or take you away from anything. You have your life. I have mine. I know that a thousand voices are yelling at me to stop at once. But I just can’t.”

Salim, (Play it wise Slim. A girl like her doesn’t come your way every day of the week.) : “Yeah, but, like I was thinking. Like what do you know about me? My personal life? What sorta guy I am.”

Malika: (Push come to shove; they’re all the same. This one maybe easier than I thought.) “Well, because you are a Punjabi. I already know more than a little about you. I know that you and I share a common history, common feelings. I too have experienced the nasty stares, the sarcastic remarks, the not so subtle prejudices against our race, and, although I don’t know your personal experience, I…”

“Yeah, but Malika, we are talking ‘us’ not Punjabis!”

Malika , (Finally an intelligent remark . ) “In other terms, Salim, you are asking me if I love you?”

“Well in a way, yes.”

(Keep him guessing Malika. But now’s the moment. Run your finger over his nose and mouth. ) “Salim, I don’t know that yet. (Snuggle up to him. If he doesn’t move away, good sign.) There now. You know I was catching cold. What do I feel for you ? A whole tangle of feelings. Of course, there is the physical attraction. But there’s more than that. Hum. I have never expressed love before because, I have never found a suitable partner . It’s as dumb as that. You intrigued me first, when you came to the apartment last month and then, today… Well, I can’t find the words for it. April the first. I’ll remember it forever! How can I say what I am feeling…”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight…

“What’s that Malika? It sounds pretty. Like it says, it’s outta sight.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Salim. It’s just some sahib poetry we had to learn in school. I suppose, I am basically a romantic.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. (Salim, big ignorant slob. Show a little interest.) You know, I liked the sahib poetry. Do you know more ?”

“Well, let’s see. It’s been years. I remember I had to stand up in front of the class…”

Something something something…

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

“That’s a very uplifting line. I’d go for that. You know more?”

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

Something something - I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose…

I will but love thee better after death.

From Book Two

3 – Carrie and the Kingdom of Window Panes

Alone – it was an evening in the late spring of 2002 - Carrie sat at her window, as she often did now that a coldness had entered her household, peering out at the street, of macabre neatness, of well tended lawns surrounding buildings, austere and squat. The day declining, wakened the street’s grimness that noon’s gaudy sunshine could burn in heat, that night could simply ignore, but dusk, haunted by the day's soul sounding solemnity, cannot .

Gentle Twilight ! Your hand strokes the earth in an elderly caress, a grandfatherly gesture from the dying. Are you treacherous or merely dispensing comfort? Being the hour of specious quiet, you speak through your stillness belonging neither to day nor to night; you cast your solemn net, catching incidental noises, that your heaviness lessens to sighs, for, you are, above all, the color gray, jealous and exclusive of all other colors and sounds, unlike morning, that mixes brightness and clamor, unlike night of full bodied blackness, sometimes garlanded with stars, and serenaded with unseen animal sounds. You, Twilight, are riddled with shadows, which you cannot suppress , and yet, despite your shadows and the color, which acquaints you with age, you speed across the sky, transitioning from gray to black, you are the hour of the dying but not the dead.

Quick, Carrie, come to the window! While a ghost of a light is still there, the gray gives a perfect hue to the window pane game! Press your lips against the glass. Remember, when you were a kid, you delighted in the newly learned art of writing, scrawling out messages, or drawing animals and faces, but you drew quickly, in the softly melting clouds of moisture, your warm human finger squeaked against the flat glassy canvass, giving your creation form, if not substance, hoping its beauty or quaintness to linger a moment before vanishing.

To the window , Carrie, and call on your sister. Make that call, it’s up to you, being the nearest of kin. The dead call on the living only exceptionally, and they choose their hour , as they do not like to battle with shadows, which is why they prefer night. This hour of paleness is hell for them. The dead after all, just want their peace. Take care how you waken one of them, even if she is your sister, even if she bears the title of “missing.”

Go to the window, sister Carrie, and press on it the soft matrix of your ovoid lips ,fecund with a tiny stream of gently propelled air , a medallion of fertile opalescence will appear on the window pane, the shadowy land where Mora lives, her long contemplative face, etched out in the smoke of your breath, alive for a minute or two, and if a miracle occurs, more. Yet, you know it is not necessary to believe in God to believe in miracles, only in ghosts.

Go to the window, Carrie, in the opacity of the medallion resides the shadow. Dust to dust, vapor to vapor, droplets being to the atmosphere what dust is to earth. The fog pinned to the pane, the shadow pinned to the person. There is a reflection to all, the world living in the mirror image of itself with just that pale shadow of twilight territory that we call dusk, or the realm of the dying , which is also a meeting ground.

Where there is shadow, there is life, even presumed. Or at least, life hanging by the limpest thread that can be knitted, or joined to its wearer. To the wearer must the cloth be cut , and so it is with the shadow. Do you remember the Fates? The three sisters of Greece? Scissoring Clotho ? She leaves, at times the merest snippet of a thread. Curious goddess of rare but inventive playfulness. The dying know this. Those who are pulled back from the kingdom of shadows do too.

Pulled back from the kingdom of shadows? Strangely reminiscent that is of another childhood amusement, gruesome in its argument, “How would it feel if you were dead ? ”Get under the bed covers and hold your breath until you burst at the lungs.” You descend beneath the soft skies of eiderdown, and you pretend you are drowning. You will emerge bedraggled and gasping for air and not displeased at the coolness brushing your heated cheeks, your gasps, a reassurance you are of the living. How long did I last? Was anybody counting the minutes? Was your sham death a version of Mora’s as she plunged into a patchwork of fallen beams, glass and steel? Yet, it is not like Mora to be bold and imprudent. Fate may play games but, Death lacks its humor. And yet, she has the feeling that her sister will spring from those dusty urban bedclothes in the hour of chaos, holding her breath, eerily cheery not yet, a ghost. Even something both human and immortal. Something both human and magical, like the face in the window pane medallion. The face is speaking now from its glassy field.

“Yes, I can, sister; I can linger more than the nanosecond allotted to my ordinary presence, already the miracle, and speak to you as when you were a child and afraid of the dark night, plentiful with monsters or, worse, nothingness. But, the fog is vapor and flesh at the same time. You have conjured me, and so, in a way, I am your creation, coming from your lungs, but also from your spirit. Cross over the boundary, sister, think not as a materialist but as the dumb kid who believes in ghosts, who believes of the possible return; I am the fog on the window pane summoning the ghost within you, for, the funny thing about ghosts, is that you can carry several within you , and not only your own. I can choose to communicate with you, or to use the more usual term, haunt you, only if you choose to haunt me. Say the word, Dear Sister, and I shall begin to haunt you , or perhaps, in your mind, you have already said it.”

From Book Three

The journey would be long and tedious, and she would need water. She gathered some figs which she put in a shawl tied into a loose knap sack; they would have to suffice for food with the loaf of bread and the gourd of water the Sorceress Joan had given her; she felt stronger than Marduk confronting the Quingu and apologized to Tiamet for the irreverent thought. She felt protected by divine magic, her eyeless face would turn any robber or bandit to stone. She covered the mirror in an old sack cloth and said a prayer.

The day’s journey was fraught with hazards. At the center of the sand dunes and in the dark cavernous rock piles lodged unknown creatures, some of human form, others half serpent or scorpions : the good demons Sheki, but certainly the evil ones, the Ekimmu. They emerged with their claws and fanged jaws ready for the kill. They pulled at her robes and pounced in front of her, barring her route. She removed the veil before her eyes, and they cowered into the shadows, and let her pass. Monster animals, huge desert wolves and jackals, ghostly white cobras and pit vipers hissing hatefully, giants with toad heads and dog heads and festering carbuncles clinging to their green skin, and long fanged lady daemons, beautiful and ethereal, but with eagle claws and fangs, and vultures with the faces of old witches plunging from the sky, came in droves. But she sent them all back to the land of shadows with her eyeless and penetrating gaze. Tiamet was testing her or was it Marduk ? No, not the perfect god. He would send something else, not as obvious as a giant cobra with seven dog heads spitting flames.

From Book four

1 – Subway Map Symbolism

It is , the A train, first a blue ribbon lacing the East River’s oval. A blue ribbon among the red and the purple and the yellow and the green. A merry pure blue ribbon twining the mad maypole of the island. Then it is a pyramid, The A. A pyramid with a bar, standing in for the Bridge of Brooklyn, which will lead her out of the lands of Schermerhorn and Hoyt and Jay and Borough hall and on to Eden, each stop shakes with illusions, hers. No, not illusions, dreams. She is looking at The Map, its strange calligraphy , its coded meanings. The up- down- up- slide of the M of Manhattan. The train of existence ? She caught it on the uphill. Lucky. A princess of an isle with its maids, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island huddled about its cradle of water, the Babylon between two rivers, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a god's anger, the anything-can-happen- between the half circles of a parenthesis, fated never to meet, given only the power to interrupt the usual, the candy cane isle of Eden veined erratically in red, blue, green, purple A, C, E, 1, 2, 3 streaks shimmering in an inviolate glass case before her studying eyes, roaming about its expanse as if it were an altar. Absurd? No. Not since Carrie believes in the power of magic.

Carrie, returns to the pole, ropes her arms about it, counts ten seconds per stop, then they speed off devouring more tunnel right up to Fulton and Broadway. She is riding an enormous rodent, one of those great long nosed creatures that will make a tunnel with its hands and mouth! She’ll be at Nassau - Fulton n’ Broadway before she can say Jiminy Cricket, and the teeth of the rodent snap soundly and sonorously shut.

But, Carrie loves the loud, definite shut of the doors, hears in its harsh sound the feeling of progress. She is a diver mounting to the surface in stages, each a little nearer, a little warmer, a little more familiar until the penultimate when the fine brown shoreline shimmers over the glassy blue. How many more stations to Fulton and Broadway? Ten . Could she hold her breath for a hundred jostling A line seconds? Could she pole twirl that long? But she misses the Fulton n’ Broadway stop on purpose, she has time to spare, and she goes on to Canal in a God-Knows-Why way. Just to get the lay of the land before meeting David at nine thirty, and at Fulton. She will wander wondrously about Canal. She wants to.

The street writhes in chicanery, but she plays the game. It is fake, all, but its fake calls. She can spend a perishable 20 minutes communing with cheap merchandise in its hoity toity it’s-fun-to-fool-and-be-fooled- form. Purses of squeaking plastic squeak loudly. 14k gold necklaces. 20 bucks. Awesomely unauthentic. Precious perfumes. Miss Liberty statuettes from China. Seven Fifty. A crazy warm November breeze plays kick the can. Garbage is a pinwheel. The gutter is a rainbow act. Is the sly sun slimy like the waters? Eden with a sewer. Overflowing. The god of filth sends in his rainbow necked birds after the spills. His hoity toity rainbow necked birds, picking through the detritus in low but effective gestures of survival.

And Carrie remembers a beggar she had seen that morning, as she was waiting for the A. The man was shaking and itching, scratching his inflamed back like a cat, against a yellow tile wall, his movements all vertical, in a strangely concocted gavotte celebrating the lice, the fleas, the blood suckers of all kinds, which had become his belongings, his only belongings, his commerce , his creation. Unless, he had become theirs? Yes! She understands it now… He was imprisoned in a celebration of their life. They frothed out from under his skin, to make him their marionette, and set him out to dance for their supper, until he collapsed into the sweetness of cheap alcohol, and the passing nothingness of specious death while death, the real one, avoided him, as he couldn’t pay the boat man to ferry him to the sewer where his gods nestled. “Dance!” Carrie heard the crawling pimps order, “for you have nothing better to do, and scratch around in the dirt where you may turn up a bill to rent the lonely room where you can end it all in loneliness ! And only then will you be rid of us! But until that time, dance!” She slipped him a five and asked,

“What is your dream beggar?”

“I dream of love, lady,” he answered, “Don’t you?”

“I dream of the love of my sister.” She said proudly. “And whom do you love, beggar?”

He shook his tin cup and his nit dotted locks, and started to answer, but the blackness of the tunnel was branded by a blood red A and she saw no more.

From Book Five

5 – Angels Rush in Where Fools Fear to Tread

Her voice hung around his table feats. His hunger was sated, yet, his thirst for vengeance seethed. He had no need of her bad advice. Indeed, she was like his wife, a paragon of perfidiousness. He knew – for the book had told him, although he had never read it in its entirety- just where her daggers of perfidiousness were pointed. He curled his fingers around his leather bound friend who spoke in a low conspiratorial voice. “Go Salim. Do not justify your leaving. You will only be sucked into their wickedness. Listen to me, not them. Walk away at once!” Yet, Salim, the smitten, had to speak:

“There will be no more contact with my infidel wife. My real wife lives in God.”

“Salim, your real wife is Carrie. Your job is Manager of The Borough Hall Candy and News Store, which your father owns. And, by the way, your father and your wife have not seen you in a long while. You have a child…”

“That has all changed. My wife the Kafir and pagan, is cheating on me with a man who lives on Fulton and Broadway. That is the fact. “

Raushan, the mignon of Moloch, answered, “The other fact is that you started cheating on her, months before she looked away!”

“Away Salim! You have heard enough!”

But Salim the table razer, turned a deaf ear to the voice of black leather . There was a score to settle! All the prayers in your gold trimmed pages cannot spare the supremely predatory memory of his unhappy twelfth year when he, a quizzical kid, was summoned by Miss Stoker (The name had stuck in his mind, alas forever!) wiggling a damning finger, to “s- plain” “What America means to me.” Miss Stoker, the gal on the low platform, her arms Sphinx folded on a rickety pockmarked desk where wood whorls had left planetary impressions, cocked an eyebrow at the terrified progressing youngster, ordered him to mount and placed him, militarily, between a Map of the City and the Ten Commandments of Healthy Nutrition, two banners of thick and murderously sharp edged plastic screwed firmly somewhere into a frame. A long long blinking moment did he stand, on that platform, hoping, perhaps, that the world would end, or the principal would poke his head in, announce an Important Assassination, and School was Dismissed. Yet, small disasters are nearly always allowed to proceed to their nefarious end. His enemy in History Room 103, the wall clock, immuring its daily torture in 50 minute allotments, had leisurely positioned its hand on five, lingering there with all the insouciance of a man on a beach and why not? It had all the time in the world, the callous louse! And there he stood, Salim, the Mongol warrior, like a duck at a shooting gallery before the giggling girls, and the sniggering boys, gulping in culpable fright , as he entered the continent of Aphrasia, whose denizen demons, Stammer, Stutter and Lisp drew lots to determine which one would smite him first. Shame was inflaming the points of his ears. Desks, chairs, doors, boards, folded arms leaning together like bowling pins, ears lent to head bent whisperers, pigtails wagging on restless heads, aisles filled with marooned backpacks, cackles here, chuckles there, or, just as awful, the haughty stares of self congratulatory superiority… all was a furious jumble of sight and sound! His jaw trembled open. He knew not what he said. He heard only a stammer , he supposed it was his, battling his trickster tongue to finish on : “This mean America is what to me!” The self congratulators released torrents of laughter. “A for effort,” A voice loudly whispered. Was it coming from Miss Stoker? Aloof and remote, the wall clock, refusing to wail the hour over, prolonged the torment : cross bar 4 , then scythe shaped 5, then sniggering 6 then boomerang 7… And standing in a cool far corner, by a tall unopened window, the starry banner, object of his morning laudations, hung loosely in a hollow cylindrical curl , but, with 21 of its 50 eyes seeing all ! He looked lamely at that bitch Stoker muzzling, he was sure, a churlish female teacher smile. A nod from her , and he retreated into his back row niche where he would and did remain forever! Saved, as a manner of speaking, by the Belle!

Oh yes! He had a score to settle! Raushan was solemnly waiting, her hands demurely posed on her folded knees, her tired gaze showed she was resigned not to reason with him. The Book glowered, but her gaze wandered wonderingly over the River, asking perhaps it, and not him, what went wrong. Or was she just lost in thought, disconnected from the situation , staring into the day’s darkening morning, that had arranged itself in a riot of clouds ? He felt the urgency to speak, to pounce on his aunt’s distraction with his new found importance. Oh yes, ma’am, despite the glower of the Book of Wisd’m, despite Room 103 and its demeaning horror, he had to speak! He had to clarify, avenge himself, obliterate Room 103. He had to chance it, he had to wipe the slate clean. He had to…What was that expression ? Angels rush in where fools fear to tread? The dull red barge had vanished from the River, there was no escape, not for anyone, and so, he launched into an unfettered diatribe.

From Book Six

1 – Pacific Beauty

In jolts and jinks, the train that Malika takes at 110th and Broadway, makes its way to Chambers , abandoning, after 14th Street, its soulless numbered stations . The line then swerves into a wild maize of history, the voyager dominates nothing. “ Thiss-top – ss Chambers Street ” A tinny voice from a tiny obscure room whines over the PA. The street, a rare rectilinear east - west path amidst the urban chaos, opens to The Bridge and the River , a finality leading to other finalities.

Speedily Malika ups the stairs. The cold glassy air of the last day of December smacks her out of her jostled underground stupor, and into the locus, which is both a road and an abode. Her bloodhound, Ibrahim has sniffed out the Street that has escaped the passage of time and the green café, where the shades gather, and the lovers meet. She is here to complete the spying, but not without hesitation. The choice is yours, Malika, standing in the nippy cold in the antechamber of an irreversible decision, on the great divide, twixt east and west; Chambers leads to the dawn or the decline, and you are suffering the onslaught of doubt, wondering what wayward star will guide your path : East to your Cousin Raushan’s, just across the River in an improvised visit, certain that you will be welcome, or west, and the great unknown. There is time, Malika, to get on that train, to head out to Brooklyn Heights, to pay your respects to a lady, who has not much time, but who will, with her customary courtesy, show true or deceitful delight in your company, and will afford you a pleasant afternoon. Or there is the west and the great gamble, and there, dear Malika, the fates have deserted you, and you are on your own. Or are you?

Hunger comes to forestall the decision, dissolves the urgency of her orientation, questions the sanity of a commando act on an empty stomach, directs her feet towards a store festooned with fruits and flowers on its outside, and there is a smiling Korean, the sage of the emporium, ready to advise and weigh. She snaps up a bright red shiny apple, then another, the first will appease her hunger, the second, will be a …promise? The Korean smiles as he pummels the scales with the two red spheres, a quizzical grin follows the jolting needle, and a nod finishes the weighing process. She is seized with a wave of dread. Is he a Kafir fakir, who already knows the fruit of her mission? She asks him, “east or west?” He smiles, jamming up his oriental face into a compost of horizontality.

“Oh, lady,” he answers ineptly, “Pacific Beauty. Very very good. You like.”

A bagged fruit burdens her pocket, its brother accompanies her walk to the River, the peaceful Hudson, bogged down in ice, heaving its dismay in December.

Look long at the River, Malika, before you turn and go. Look long at the garbage afloat on its surface , and see in its soiled and sullied remnants, its wasted and plundered packages, its flotsam and jetsam, the souls of soldiers, who, by dint of karma, cram the once pure watery body. They have washed up here, as sorry ghosts stranded on filthy banks, like this sham and washed up civilization, which some god has given you the gift to hate. (You know about gifts from the gods, Malika; it is better to be the giver than the getter.) To hate, Malika, but also to covet, for there is an inconsistency to your noxious ways spurring on your treadmill-like rebellion, for you are like a rat in a cage, bored, intelligent and desperate.

The thread of the past appears , 911 and also its hole, a caveat of a cavity that the vain and vacuous spirit of New York shall hasten to fill. The past in this land is emptied of meaning. “Fill’er up!” It says, even when everything is tanking. Keep up the show! America and Nature hate a vacuum, distrust its dormant possibilities, recoil from its absence of display. The end of the city will be a spectacular Armageddon, a gambol over the fiery ledges, a last endeavor to charm an indifferent doom, favoring charred bodies and landscapes, but which is not against what the Brits call “a good show.” Is it the life force or only a certain panache? Were the fire jumpers, those long shotters on the Tower window ledges, taking that chance , angling with the angels who were, frankly, not interested. Did they realize the fatuity of their flights? Is the delight of a minute’s cloud sailing worth the crushing cranium blow the hard pavement reserved for them in a taste of a fey afterlife before concrete death? Did they live the nanosecond long enough to hear the applause?

Does the past never repeat itself or does the luminosity of its lessons peter out in the heat of outrageous acts? Is fortune necessarily outrageous, to which you can add, fickle, devious, ungodly, unjust, and oh so desirable? Have you, Malika, by the River of the West, entered into a sort of cosmological crap game, tossing your poor morsel of apple into its silt and dung, conscious that, as in every game of chance, only the bank wins? You had the choice, Malika: to head East, for tea and chat served by a gracious lady, who has skimmed the foam from the sledge of existence, or to come here, to cast away your bitten core like bait to River snakes in hibernation, lying lazily, but treacherously, with the indolent tide in a congealed rebellion waiting for spring’s bright warmth to stir, strike, and move this orgy that passes for civilization to its end. You have thrown your apple core, as one more morsel into the maw of the River the Kafirs use as a receptacle for their discarding, but your cast off darling has seeds, and might become a hideous and mutant plant, might one day develop mouths springing forth from the slime and the sledge, and why not add the sublime to the monstrous mutant, a fiery tongue ? Fire comes this time, not from the sky, but from the unexpected, the enemy of flame , the River, green , and red, and muddy. Burning dung. Yet, Malika, why do you hate? Haven’t you anything better to do? Or is it very simply you have no taste for love? You have come this far; there is no turning back. An adventurer loves only Adventure. Come let us go, Malika, surrender unto serendipity, the gods are as bored as you, and need to be amused.

About The Author

The Tablet of Destinies conferring limitless power on the holder, has been found and brought to post 911 New York by Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom. Stern, a strange Holocaust survivor, Mora, the missing medium and David, a link with the spirit world will receive it. Unless...

Copyright 2009 - 2010, diana pollin (Expires September 24, 2010)

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