jedicist.org Blog

Yes, I’m just posting my imaginary waste on the blog, the scraps that otherwise would never see the light of day, things that in another age would lie dusty somewhere in a drawer, but now I can offer to you, because why not.  But no longer is my blog such a catalog of exotic adventures, no longer does it have the allure of far-away truths, and if you’ve continued to read it through this lapse into unreality, I thank you and appriciate you.

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Chin “Nose” Malai sat on a dilapidated movie theater seat, the type that bounces rather than reclines, peering over a descending wave of filthy heads.  A high-ceilinged room with a big inert gray screen—a relic of a bygone age—and about three hundred ill-fed unwashed bodies.  All had once been a possible revolutionaries—at least idealists, maybe artists, egomaniacs, but now rested together as one mass of flesh.  He might be able to remember not being in the theater, but it was days ago—impossible to tell, and he wasn’t really sure how he had ended up here.  He dozed, in and out of awareness, the incessant fluorescent light always waiting for him to wake to pierce his corneas with reality.  No fans stirred the heavy air, and the heat filled Chin with a relentless self renewing stench.  They were fed, occasionally, at random intervals.  Nose had no way to tell how much time had passed.

And then, as the seeming eternity was turning into bedsores, especially focused on the area of his left butt-cheek, the fluorescent lights dimmed.  At first Nose thought that he was losing consciousness, but soon the place was totally dark: three hundred blind mice in a hole.  As the light faded, the ambient chatter of the fleshy room grew to a crescendo in confusion.  The darkness was absolute enough to give Chin swimming hallucinations.  His butt still ached from the chair, which swayed below him in the dark.

The last thing he had expected was for the screen to come alive, but a sudden and shocking beam of silver light slammed across the room and plastered itself against the whiteness.

Whiteness. That’s what he had thought, just now, plastered itself against the whiteness. The word echoed in Chin’s skull.  It had erupted as if subliminally queued. It had imposed itself on him.  As he stared at the phenomenally bright rectangle of whiteness that consumed him.

He found he could not move his arms.

Big black block letters appeared on the whiteness, or perhaps in his cornea, or perhaps deeper along his optic nerve as they approached comprehension: you are witness.

Whitness?

one’s self I sing, a simple separate person.

Which was almost certainly not on the screen, so Chin was vaguely proud of them, being his own.

Which screen summarily went black, not off, but a dynamic seething gray, in which shapes could be made out.  Green began to pervade the picture.  And faces stared back at Nose, black and green, as if taken by night vision cameras, as if to prevent the subject from knowing they were being filmed, like lions behaving like themselves at night under the watchful eye of National Geographic.

Why was he being shown his own theater, his own prison?  Some exquisitely conceived psychological torture? Some self-imaging technique?

As soon as the question was conceived, he began looking for himself.  But to no avail.  He should be right there, right in front of himself, if the picture was a mirrorlike reverse image.  He wasn’t.  He looked at the guy next to him in the darkness.  He wasn’t on the screen. The whole theater had stilled to motionless.  The faces on-screen were writhing and farting.

He unzipped his pants.

In her old bed, Solemna’s flesh still ached. She would not be free again until the morning, when she’d have to worry about his breakfast, and the ensuing silence. The silence of ash, of hard dry land that would need to be plowed soon.

But now he needed her for what any body could provide-warmth, resistance. His hands eroded her body, telling a lie. He grunted, telling a truth.

His flesh cascaded upon her, then collapsing motionless. As if resolution had been reached after all these years. She felt her own breath. She did not feel his. She knew he wouldn’t get up. She wiggled out from beneath his body.

In the mud, his flesh was still smoldering. The fire made the mud boil around his feet, made the riverbank come alive with hunger. She had cooked all of his food for twenty five years, and she would not be free without him, either. In another age, she thought, she would cast her living body into the flames alongside him. It had been done before, though she did not know whether it was done of love or duty. Some things she would do for duty: she will burn the red silk sari she had been married in. Some things she would do for love: she will climb a mountain alone to break her bangles at on the summit. An then she will be free of both.

She will never be free. Power is only absolute in absence; he will always have been.

He had said to her, once, “Heaven is a temporary punishment for good deeds accumulated. Merits exhausted, souls fall back to bodies like bodies falling to earth on the battlefield.”

That was twenty years ago, when he still talked in metaphor and knew it was only that. Now he was a fire built from a tree felled by his wife.

She could do all that she ever wanted to. She could do nothing. She would live nobly off of charity. She would go days on end eating nothing. She would never ask for food, but she would receive it, nonetheless.

No, she would not. She would continue to cook, because she already knew how.

She felt her own breath. She began to disrobe, unfolding the pleats of her red sari. She wore a white garment; never again would she adorn herself in color. She thought of Draupadi, whose virtue five husbands failed to protect, whose colorful sari defended her.

There is no blameless one. They both had committed evil, justified only by the perceived righteousness of her cause. And she had won.