Veracity (6 page)

6

I woke to the grating calls of a monkey. I shot up from bed; eyes wide open, listening to its sounds recede into the distance, crashing through the branches near the shelter. My hand was on my chest, and I looked down at it for a moment, feeling my pulse thump under my fingers. I could certainly think of better ways to wake up. "Stupid monkey," I mumbled, relaxing a bit and squinting at the morning light for the first time. After a few seconds of shaking my head, I flumped back down onto the sheets.

It had been a long night. Let alone was it a new place that I wasn't used to, I couldn't find a way to stop my mind from thinking. A continual stream of questions had kept me awake, rolling through my head restless hour after restless hour, and all of them having to pass by me unanswered. They were difficult questions. Such as, if we ourselves were some kind of fatal flaw, how could we possibly feign to 'fix' anything? And if truth was the path that we were supposed to walk, how could we ever know that we actually had it, that we were walking in the right direction? After all, what was truth in the first place?

Once, after Kara had asked the Elders to teach her everything there was to know about our senses, we had talked about this very thing, and she blew my mind with some of her ideas. She had concluded, leaning in to tell me - as careful as always, of course - that our perception was, at best, completely incomplete. She'd learned about the narrow spectrum of light that we see, the limited range of sound we hear, the enormity of smells that we are oblivious to; she pointed out the minute hairs of insects that feel an entire world of air currents that our sense of touch is unaware of, and told me of fish that could taste things in the water that were fathoms away. And this was only the information that our senses were too crude to pick up. There was much more information out there that our bodies didn't even have the capacity to detect: magnetic fields, cosmic rays, countless types of waves, chemical reactions. If, while sitting in a room, we could only take in a miniscule percentage of the possible stimulus inside it, how could we ever say we understood the room for what it really was? Truth, she held, was unperceivable. And for the most part, I agreed with her - or at least I'd nodded at her when she'd said it (looking as stunned as always I'm sure). How could we profess to hold the truth in our hands while it was pulsing inside of our fingers in more ways than we could ever know?

Yet, everything that Harek had said sounded so accurate, so substantiated. I knew that what he meant by the 'truth' was really 'as close as we could get
to
the truth', and I imagined that he had it, and that I would eventually be given access to the books in the Great Hall, and that, after reading them and splaying the evidence before me, I, too, would have it. But, I decided in the end, I would need to do that before I would accept that we were monsters; I wasn't going to be so easily won. I would need proof, something more than a well-rehearsed speech to throw away my faith in what we are.

I got out of bed and stretched beside it, looking into the tangle of bushes and vines inside the garden, which had a rectangular path around it that had been cleared for walking. Then, I looked down the corridor and noticed that the door was ajar.

At that same moment, there was a muffled rustling, as of clothing in movement, which was coming from a recess in the courtyard that I hadn't noticed before. I stepped forward to see who it was.

"Did you solve your problem with the monkey?" asked Dana, who was sitting at a small table, apparently waiting for me to stick my head around the corner.

"What?"

"I heard you mumble 'stupid monkey' a few minutes ago."

"Oh, yeah. Solved." I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

"Good. Then come, have a seat with me," he said, eyeing the only other chair at the table. Both of his hands were wrapped around a cup of steaming liquid, which smelled of pepper leaf tea, and one of his legs was casually draped over the other. He brought the cup to his mouth and sent a few swirls of steam eddying into the air before sipping from it.

Dana was a thin man, whose movements were always slow, his gestures methodical, deliberate. He had long curly hair that was aging and stranded in rusted colours, ranging from brown to grey. His beard, which shared the same varying colour, was longer and much more unkempt than Harek's. As the light material for our clothes was produced from the fibres of certain plants on the island, the cloth was naturally beige, but Dana took to privately dying his shirts with a kind of berry, which produced a pale maroon colour. I once speculated that this might be a way of separating himself from the rest of the Elders, though, really, it might also just have been his taste.

I walked over and sat on the other side of the wooden table, both of us angling toward the courtyard where a few small songbirds, hidden from view, were singing away. I was happy to have the chance to speak with him. Out of all the Elders, I held him in the highest regard, hung on his words, and pondered them carefully. For my part, we seemed to get along quite well together, or at least seemed to feel at ease in each other's company.

"I've come by to see how you're coping with things, and also to begin answering some of the questions that I'm sure have begun to spring up." He said this last sentence while turning his head in my direction, opening his eyes as the last words were spoken. This was one of his peculiarities. Often when speaking with him, he would look away for quite some time, and would keep his eyes closed when turning back to face you, and then open them when he imagined they would be aiming at your face. It was a touch odd.

"Well," I mumbled, picking a tiny dead leaf off the table between us and throwing it to the ground, "I think I'm doing alright. We're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it, right?"

Dana looked at me as if I'd just spat onto the table between us. He lowered his eyebrows, focusing on my face. "Is that what you got out of the conversation with Harek yesterday?"

I shifted in my seat. "Well, yeah - basically."

It took him a few uncomfortable seconds to react to this. He was dumbfounded, almost lost for words. His mouth formed several different vowels before he finally decided on what to say. "Harek... told you about denial, didn't he?"

My voice was soft, "Yes." I knew what was meant by it.

"Because I can't imagine him ever saying the words: 'we're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it', as that's completely inaccurate. Firstly, there is nothing we can do about what we are. And secondly, what we are is the darkest, most evil animal the fossil record has ever seen, and we had hoped you were on your way to at least understanding a little bit of that."

"Oh," I said. I put my hands on the table and started fiddling with them. This wasn't easy. Because I might be able to admit to the fact that we had it in us to do some appalling things, but to blanket everyone with a description such as 'atrocious' or 'vile' seemed a little simplistic to me. As far as I was concerned, there were a few people on the island who I would have a hard time stamping with such words, and I wondered what Dana would have to say about that. Could he really point at Thalia or Mitra and sincerely brand them with the description of 'vile'? "But... I mean - there must be some piece of us that isn't
so
horrible."

"Possibly, yes. But as a whole, at the most basic, fundamental layer, which is obviously where it matters most, we are essentially that: horrible."

I tapped a fingernail on the table before speaking. "But how can you know that for certain?"

Dana grinned, "How I know what we are isn't nearly as interesting as how you don't. I haven't pulled my ideas from the air, haven't rehearsed them from a book; I've formed them from observing our every action, and I would suggest that you begin to do the same.

"The easiest place to start is to think of children, as they are acting almost directly from that dark, fundamental layer that I'm speaking of. I know that you don't have a lot of experience with younger children, and that we don't have any on the island to draw examples from, but try and think about Anu or Siri as far back as you can remember. As soon as they'd learned how to talk they were exhibiting their innate behaviour: hitting each other, stealing and hoarding things to themselves, deriding one another. There has often been a misconception that we are born pure, but that notion couldn't be more mistaken. Babies aren't born innocent only to be later corrupted by society; they are born corrupt, and if they aren't effectively deprogrammed, then it is they who spread their malignancy throughout society."

"Did you say 'deprogrammed'?"

"Yes. Deprogrammed. Adults don't 'teach' children to be non-violent, caring, kind individuals; in fact, in a person's formative years, there isn't any 'teaching' that's done at all - it's only constant dissuasion, deterring, and discouragement that keep children from doing what they naturally want to do. Though of course, this must also be done while encouraging them to do the opposite, all with the aim of eventually coercing them to act in a way that isn't nearly as inborn. In its most basic sense, the raising of a child is but an attempt to rewire a rogue brain. It's a conscious unshaping, which is done in the hopes that the child might come to act as far away from their instinctive tendencies as possible.

"So, as to your question, is there a piece of us that isn't so horrible? Well, let's take a look. Let's imagine that there is a well-mannered, compassionate individual standing inside of this courtyard with us. And as they are such, we can only assume that the deprogramming stage of his or her life had gone over flawlessly. I ask you, is this a 'good' person? Does it really matter if they say please and thank you when they should, that they share, treat others respectfully, stifle their violent thoughts? Is the essence of a being measured by its shell, by how well they balance on the wobbly pillar that juts out of the mountain of things that they've 'unlearned', or is the essence of a being measured by its core, by what's beneath it when it falls?"

"By its core."

"Of course it is. In fact, the image of someone standing with one leg on a pillar is perfect, because I like to think of anything that we do or make (societies and cultures for example), as a kind of construction, as building blocks. And of course, the only way to find out what a structure is really made of is to grab hold of the bottom of it and shake, and see how it holds out when it has to fall back on its most rudimentary foundation. What do you think history has continually shown us, what do you think happens when we shake the wobbly pillar of the commended lady or gentleman that we imagined? Where do they land when it collapses? I'll tell you: suddenly, they find themselves remembering everything that they'd been raised to forget; they become precisely what they always were, yet had been striving their entire lives not to be.

"And as I said, we can be certain of this because it has been woven into every page of history that has ever been written. The dates change, as do the traditions and costumes, but the story has always been the same. The moment there was some kind of pressure, whether a group of people overpopulated an area, or was excessive for far too long and allowed their food stores to become depleted, or another group of their very own species marched across some of the imaginary borders that they created to separate one ideology from another, greed, fear, or arrogance bringing them there with weapons in hand, whenever things became difficult and something shook the very structure of what we are composed of, we have consistently crumbled to the ground into an ugly heap, and masses upon masses of people have suffered and died in unspeakable ways.

"And because we are outside of the system of evolution, things could never improve; even though it would seem reasonable that, as the centuries progressed, humanity might learn from its past mistakes, or at the very least from the banal repetition of them, in reality we never did. Instead, every passing age found new ways to create even more destruction, more suffering, more pain. And this can only be explained by the fact that what we are underneath of our 'not so horrible' shell, the very essence of our being, the foundation that all of the greatest societies have unsteadily balanced upon and have eventually collapsed into, is truthfully and irreversibly hideous." Dana finished, and, closing his eyes first, he turned his head to look back into the garden.

With each sentence that he spoke, I continued to wilt in my chair, until finally, I was sitting with my head bowed, looking like a child who had just been reprimanded. I was beginning to get a feeling as to what Coming of Age was all about. I wasn't there to make my mind up about anything, wasn't going to spend any time discussing things. Someone else had already done the thinking for me, and I was expected to ingest it. That was all.

Before that day, I'd always considered Dana to be a calm man. He was opinionated, yes, but always gentle. Yet suddenly, and just like Harek the day before, he was managing to come across as cold, almost confrontational, lashing out at my every thought as if they'd offended him in the deepest way. It occurred to me that they might be doing this intentionally, hoping to set a precedent of some kind, creating an environment where I'd be forced to choose my words with the greatest of caution. If so, they'd already succeeded. I was afraid to open my mouth.

Yet I had to, because there was something that wasn't making sense. I was sure that I'd come close to directly quoting Harek when I said there was something we could do to right the wrongs of our species. But if Dana was correct, and we were 'truthfully and irreversibly hideous', what kind of solution lay in sight? It obviously wasn't a new government or system; from what he'd said, they all ended in the same way. So what did Harek mean by 'a way to restore what we've ruined', 'a way to mend the damage we've caused'? The truth was, I was already sick of hearing how dead-ended we were - I wanted to hear how we planned to move forward in spite of it. I pressed him further. "Dana, maybe Harek wasn't supposed to tell me, and maybe I can't remember his exact words, but I'm positive he mentioned there was a way for us to fix things. Was I wrong about that?"