Vellum (24 page)

“This is empty. It's got nothing in it.”

He shrugged. “Sure, but it's a nice bottle.”

The cop's ochre partner was standing in some L.A. mansion now, decked out in leather jacket straight from
Shaft
and wraparound shades, deep undercover as a dealer in an operation aimed at bringing down this slick Armani-clad white lizard of a businessman he now stood before. It was the moment when the narc in pimp drag reveals his true identity to the villain, ditching the ersatz patois and attitude of the “street” and stepping over the threshold from
signifying motherfucker
to
motherfucker
with the flash of a badge, the drawing of his gun. He spoke now in the accent and dialect of authority, of the law, shucking the Hollywood jive-talk and liberated now to give his previously pent-up reply to an earlier line of the suit's:…“That's what you people call each other, isn't it?”

“Nobody calls me ogre,” he said, and dropped the guy with a jab of fist clenched around gun.

BREASTED, J., MEMPHITE THEOLOGY (1901), P. 54

“And yet it is this weak and decadent East that
is
the true birthplace of democracy, not Verse or the Rhyman Republic, and this not even in the latter period of the Papylonian or Azurian Empires, but back in the days of Sumer and Akkad. In the earliest cities of this ‘land between the two rivers'—or
mesopotamia
—we see a fully formed democracy in the shape of the
unkins,
gatherings of elders, local and federal, who voted on all matters of importance and whose legislative powers extended even to the impeachment and exile—for the crime of rape—of Ellial, king of Nixur, the city which, at the time in question, held hegemony among the loose federation of Sumerian city-states. Compare this to the unbridled appetites of Deus, patricidal autocrat and serial rapist, cataloged quite comprehensively in the Histories of Hesiod and Ovid.”

“You coming out tonight?” asked Puck, leaning over and hissing close to my ear, a stage whisper with enough breath in it to tickle the inside of my ear and send a shudder down my spine that ended in a judder of head like a wet mongrel shaking off the rain, and with enough volume to cause the student sitting in front to
hssshhh
us over his shoulder with a finger to his prissied lips. “Beers and queers,” said Puck, ignoring him. “You up for some debauchery and deviance?” And, his wanton sleight concealed by the darkness in the lecture hall and by the pen-carved wooden desk running along-front of our seats, he slid his hand between my thighs, a tongue between his teeth.

“And what of philosophy?” said Hobbsbaum. “In his work on the theology of the Eglyphans, his analysis of their
Weltanschauung
forms, he asserts…and I quote…quite a sufficient basis for suggesting that the later notions of
nous
and
logos,
hitherto supposed to have been introduced to Eglyph from abroad at a much later date, were present at this early period. Thus the Versid tradition of the origin of their philosophy in Eglyph undoubtedly contains more of the truth than has in recent years been conceded. This, of course,” said Hobbsbaum, “does not prevent him from going on to tell us that…The Eglyphan did not possess the terminology for the expression of a system of rational thought, neither did he develop the capacity to create the necessary terminology, as did the Versid. He thought in concrete pictures.”

“Apple-gold,” said Puck, “your skin.”

“Piss-yellow,” I said, and he shoved my shoulder with a look on his face that told me a) he didn't believe in my humility for a second, and b) stop angling for another compliment and take the one that's offered. He walked over to the dresser mirror to pick dirt out from under a fingernail with a horn and fluff his hair, blue-green now with the start of fall, an accident of the seasons that had come to charm me in the time I'd known him. Puck always looked best in the fall, when his hair darkened to match the shades of aqua and marine that shimmered in his wings.

“Yeah, actually, you're quite right,” he said. “Don't know what I see in you at all, corn-boy. I could do so much better than you.”

“You usually do, slut.”

I clicked off the microcassette recorder of the professor's slow and measured voice, flicked over to a clean page of my notepad.

“So are you coming, or what?”

“I'll get you down there,” I said.

CONCRETE PICTURES, ABSTRACT NOTES

“While the victim was,” the police spokesman stated to the cameras and tape recorders of the gathered crowd, “openly gay and appears to have approached the two suspects in a local bar known to be frequented by gays, leaving together with them, with the apparent intent of having sexual relations with either one or both of them, we have not, as yet, established a homophobic motivation for the attack. The primary motive, at this time, appears to have been robbery. This is not to undermine, in any way, the shocking brutality of this act, but it is too early yet, we feel, to label this a
hate crime.
”

On a corner of some page of scrawling notes and doodles drawn with one of those old four-color pens that can be clicked down red or green, blue or black, Puck had copied down the details from a flyer someone had posted on the student notice board in the Department of Afritan-Amourican Studies, for a demonstration against an Elven Nations rally. I had joked with him that he only wanted to go to size up all the corn-blond farmboys with their sky-blue eyes and lean swagger.

I sat on the bed, looking at the spiderwork page of jotted quotes and thoughts, references and wanderings, cartoons and caricatures, as if I could resolve it all into some meaning, if I only sat there long enough.

“In a statement today,” the reporter said, “police revealed that they have now arrested four suspects in the Thomas Messenger case. Two men, twenty-one-year-old Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney—whose age is as yet unconfirmed—are being held for attempted murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery, while their unnamed girlfriends are also being charged as accessories. The victim himself remains in critical condition, on full life support, here at Poudre Valley Hospital, with his family and friends maintaining their round-the-clock vigil. As his uncle said, in an emotional statement earlier today: ‘He's a small person with a big heart, mind and soul that someone tried to beat out of him. Right now, he's in God's hands.'”

Concrete pictures,
he had scribbled down, toward the bottom of the page where the doodling gradually took over from the increasingly distracted and abstracted jottings of his wandering attention. It was a thick smudge of block lettering written over and over itself in different inks, the work of a hand, a pen, tracing out the phrase over and over again, more as a shape to follow than as a fragment of meaning. Underneath it was something written in handwriting that flowed so fast, so compact and so cursive that it was almost shorthand, a tiny burst of sudden insight, it seemed, before the writing gave way completely to squiggled geometries and weird anatomies. Eventually, I gave up trying to read it.

THE PASSION OF THOMAS MESSENGER

“I can't help it,” he said. “Like a butterfly drawn to a flame.”

“Moth,” I said. “Like a moth drawn to a flame, you mean.”

“Butterflies are prettier,” he said, dismissing reality with a wave of the hand. Anyway. I know who I'm going home with tonight. He gave me a wink, a peck and a pat on the shoulder, slid off his bar stool and strode over to the pair, slow and deliberate, taking a battered softpack of Marlboros out of the back pocket of his hipster jeans, taking a cigarette out of the pack, and holding it up before him as an inquiry, an invitation. When one of them lit it with a
clunk,
a snicking
fssh,
and a final
clack
of his Zippo shutting, Puck glanced back at me for a second, smiling.

“The question then becomes,” said Hobbsbaum, “who is it that defines the
real,
the rational, delimiting it, and divorcing it from the romantic, and is it they who are in fact simply defining the romantic as that which is
excluded
from the rational? Oscillating between, on the one hand, the Rationalist idea of Reason as liberator from the sensual passions and, on the other hand, the Romantic concept of Passion as escape from the proscriptions and prescriptions of a dogmatic, legislative intellect, do we actually miss the fact that both Romanticism and Rationalism, and all the fantasists and realists of those schools of thought, gain their power, in fact, from the very act of division, of discrimination, founded on and feeding off of the exclusions they create and the fear of and desire for the Other that those exclusions inspire?”

According to the easy fantasies, Puck's soul should now be pictured as a spirit of pure light slumbering in the grace of Christ Adonais or some such shallow, sentimental nonsense…but my Puck was full and fiery, and for him, for us, the body was no trap he needed to be freed from but a marvelous articulation of flesh and fluids. His mind was as filthy as my mouth, and when we fucked, I'd whisper sweet profanities in his ear and he'd anoint me with his jism. No, Puck wasn't made for any celestial plane but for the earthiest of worlds, and any paradise without the stench of sweat and semen would be a hell to him, sterile and anodyne without the guts and grime. “I'd rather swing in the fire than sing in the choir,” he used to say. “You know me, Jack.”

But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing themselves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason. On a website under the domain name www.godhatesfags.com, some Nazi Christian fuck called Phelps has a little gif animation of Puck doctored from a newspaper photo, smiling as the flames of hell burn his soul in an eternity of damnation, far hotter, we can be sure, than the cigarettes that the two murderers used to burn his naked body, torturing him even as he begged for his life.

And that's reality. That's the truth, the gospel truth.

Errata

Pan Is Dead. Great Pan Is Dead

I
n Plutarch's
De Defectu Oraculorum,
the story is told that in the reign of Emperor Tiberius, passengers on a ship sailing for Italy from Greece heard a voice off in the distance, coming from the distant Isle of Paxos, and calling on the pilot of the vessel, Thamus, Thamus, Thamus. It called on him to say that, when they sailed by Palodes, he was to lean out over the side and call three times:

“Pan is dead, Great Pan is dead.”

And when he did, the story says, the sailor heard a loud lament rise up, the sound not of one voice but many.

To the Christians it was to become a symbol of the death of all the old pagan gods, in the hour of the death of a young Jewish pacifist and anarchist on a wooden cross, with nails in his hands and thorns around his head. But the story itself is like the voice from Paxos, faint and distant and perhaps misheard, if the name of the pilot is, as it may be, of more significance than the theologians of the church assumed.

“Tammuz, Tammuz, Tammuz, the all-great god is dead,” cried the initiates, in the yearly mystery of another dead and resurrected god of grain and vine, bread and wine.

On a cold October 7th, 1998, just after midnight, in the area of Sherman Hills, east of Laramie, Wyoming, a twenty-one-year-old first-year political sciences student named Matthew Shepard was bound to a split-rail fence, beaten and burned, stripped, pistol-whipped and left for dead. Eighteen hours later, at 6:22 p.m. on Snowy Mountain View Road, a passing cyclist noticed what he, at first, assumed to be a scarecrow. Another scarecrow, a real scarecrow, was later paraded through the streets by students of Colorado State University, on a homecoming float, with a sign hung round its neck saying,
I'm gay,
and the words
Up My Ass
painted on the back of its shirt, a few miles from the bed in Poudre Valley Hospital where Shepard died, on October 12th at 12:53 a.m., never having regained consciousness.

On the website www.godhatesfags.com, Reverend Fred Phelps counts the days of Matthew Shepard's eternity in Hell beneath an animation of his face among the flames.

The apostle Judas Didymos Thomas, famous doubter of the Gospels, gets two of his names, it seems, from words for twin—the Aramaic
te'oma
and the Greek
didymos.
He is described as being the double of the dead and resurrected god, and perhaps he is, for Tammuz—who entered Greek mythology as Adonis, son of Myrrha, by way of Phoenicia, where he was known simply as Adon, or Adonai, Lord—Tammuz stands as close behind the
christos
as his shadow, and if we were to see his face clearly, we could not fail to see the family resemblance. Our vision blurred by the shining stolen sunburst halo of the sun god, Helios, though, we have to squint our eyes and cock our heads, peer past two thousand years of blood and wine to even see the humble shepherd Tammuz, who died at the hands of soldiers two thousand years before that god, Adonai, son of Mary, was born on Mithra's birthday, in a stable. Not that it matters which shepherd died on what hill in which millennium; there will always be those who celebrate the scapegoat sacrifices, in Babylon, Jerusalem or Wyoming, and those who can only sing the loud laments, not for the passion of this one or that but in the end for every one of them.

“Pan is dead,” says Jack. “Great Pan is dead.”

I look at him, as difficult as it is, sitting there on the bed, holding the page of scrawled notes as if, somehow, in making sense of it he might make sense of everything. I'm not really sure I'm here to him, now; he's closed himself off so much over these last few months, I might as well be watching him from a window in another world. Even Joey can't seem to reach him.

I look at him, as difficult as it is, with his broken horns and the bloody, cauterized stumps where his golden wings once were, and I don't know how he could have done it without losing consciousness. I shudder at the image of this hornless, wingless creature, straight out of some medieval monk's engraving of the devil. There's blood everywhere.

The siren of an ambulance wails its approach and Joey gives me a nod as he steps past me, out the door—
you stay with him.

Jack lays the page of notes down and picks up a Zippo that sat on top of the biography of John Maclean dumped on the bed beside him. He starts playing with the lighter, flipping the lid open and closed, open and closed,
chik, chunk, chik, chunk.

“How's the book coming along?” he says.

Chik, chunk, chik, chunk.

“OK,” I say.

Chik, chunk, chik, chunk, chik…

“Did you put the burning map in? You've got to have a burning map. Every epic starts with a burning map.”

I shrug.

Chunk.

Flight into Eternity

I fly over the Vellum as a shadow of death, I fear now. With my wings of synthe, soaring above the worlds upon worlds like some grand angel, I have seen with my own eyes the tiny specks of people, humans and other creatures, moving like insects upon the face of the great artifice below. I know, I
know,
that this eternity is not desolate. I know it now. It is not desolate until I arrive.

I soar among the clouds, goggled and masked like some dread gargoyle, stop to perch on carved glass volutes of a fairy tower, and I look down upon humanity, zooming in with the lenses of the goggles to see, O God, the throngs of people who belong in these worlds. Ten thousand years without a soul to talk to, with only memories of conversation, argument; I had grown comfortable in my solitude, but now that I know that they are there, all I can dream of is to descend among them and smile, extend a hand, open my arms, rejoin the human race.

The first time it happened, the first time I saw another soul in this wilderness, I was so overcome, I was so blind with tears of laughter, that I hardly saw where I was landing. I swooped down, roaring with joy, drowning any cries of shock or fear, and landed, babbling, ripping the goggles off and throwing them away.

The world was silent for a second, before my horror ripped the air.

Is it the Book, I wonder, or myself? I know only that when I descend, when I spiral down toward the ground, or even dive, abandoning myself to gravity in the hope that I can outspeed whatever force is following me—I see their faces turning up to stare, hands pointing or tugging at sleeves, shadowing their eyes as they lift them up, mouths opening in wordless wonder. And then they are gone.

Since that first time it is always the same. I come down slowly, somewhere where only a solitary soul is plowing his fields or fishing in a yacht, approaching in silence, praying that it will not happen again. The radius of my influence seems to be different each time, but always the result is the same. I watch them catch my shadow in the corner of their eye and turn, look up and round. A rake drops from a hand. A rifle is raised for a brief second, and then lowered. Cigarettes are lit. Beer is swallowed. Barking dogs are ignored. And then just as I get too close—and once,
once,
I was standing on the ground walking toward an old man, I was so close that I could almost touch the stubble on his chin—and then, there is a…shimmer, like the air over a hot road shimmers in the sunlight on a summer day. And they are gone, disappeared to dust.

I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

Is it the Book, I wonder, or myself? Is it that I am so alien to their reality that we cannot even exist within each other's perception, that whole worlds of mothers, fathers, children, friends and enemies, civilizations must be cleared for my passing? I cannot believe that, dare not believe that. It can only be the Book. I fear that the shock wave which spread out through my own world, splaying it open at the ends of the earth, making it blossom wide to touch the edges of these other worlds that I have come to call the Vellum, I fear that that same shock wave is the aura of the Book itself, unleashed by my own hubris and damning me to an eternity alone, as its guardian.

I have considered destroying it, or leaving it behind. Perhaps I would only have to walk a world or two to escape its silence, cross some babbling river and find myself among the living again. And then what?

There is no reason to this. No clue, no intimation. Where are the guardians of the threshold? Where is the ancient prophecy, the war to fight, the tyrant to overthrow? The empty worlds of the Vellum carry no message of their own, only the echoes of my frustrated longing.

There is one option that I consider now, though. I myself am marked upon the Book, in the sigil on its cover, and I start to wonder. If only I can exist within its influence, is the mark of me there because I am, or am I here because of it?

So I stand on a jut of cold, gray rock now, a river running dark through underbrush below. Half hidden by the foliage around me like some Victorian folly of a statue, a Pre-Raphaelite angel, I watch the young man sitting reading under the apple tree in the distance, and I open the Book, flip forward a page to the map at the correct scale and with the pen in my hand, I mark a small…amendment, a correction, an X. I mark him in the Book.