Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Perhaps it’s ‘just you wait, you night owl of a hermit, you’re the absolute opposite … but I want you all the same’ … or something. And anyway, who can ever tell what intrigues a woman in a man? It’s a good job something does. I’ll introduce you to her.”

“Why? If you’ve staked your own claim … including marriage?”

“I didn’t mention marriage explicitly. But it is a possibility, as they say in the classified ads. Thing is, I am patient. And patience is a virtue. I’m letting her have her little fling first. Until she reaches the I-can-always-find-an-old-man-to-darn-socks-for stage. And I won’t be an old man all that soon; I consequently offer greater mercy. I’m gaining the edge. And you must admit she is a beauty.”

“Sure, she’s beautiful all right,” said Melkior in the tone of someone who has added a silent curse.

“Very beautiful. I’ll introduce you to her so you can see close up. Seeing tears in her eyes would make you write poetry! I myself have moments when … But hell, I don’t know how to do it, I have no talent, words elude me. I generally employ ‘heart’ and ‘sorrow,’ but it’s hardly poetry, heart and sorrow, is it? Ugo will be writing sonnets for her. He’s made a date.”

The news slashed him like a saber. Had he not sensed that she would fall for the ass?

“A date … with her?”

“Or on her, as they say in a play. Do you imagine it’s any easier for me? Only I’m armored. Patience is my armor, as I have said.”

“You really love her?”

“What’s ‘really’? I love her with all my heart , not really. To the death!”

“And yet you joke about it?”

“Perhaps it’s just my turn of speech. But I have in me a deliberate realism: I wait. After the lot of you, I want to have her finally. Do you understand— finally! After me, the flood! Is that a joke? Can’t you see I’m letting myself be crucified?”

“What about jealousy? Aren’t you jealous?”

“Of course I am. But what am I to do? Murder, strangle, poison all those whom she temporarily fancies? Temporarily , I say. It’s her I want, not your death. It’s Ugo’s turn now, or perhaps yours, I don’t care. That’s exactly why I want to introduce you to her — to accelerate the course of history. To have you finish your reign as soon as possible. I’m not saying I’m in a rush. Anyway the war’s coming closer. It will drag you all into armies, into battles for someone’s complicated Futures. I’m staying behind. It’s simple — Unfit For Service. I have a certificate signed by a general, heh heh. Perhaps you will all get killed. She doesn’t need dead men.”

The account was about to be closed. Melkior felt his skeleton inside him moving comically in front of ATMAN’S grin that was eyeing him from beyond, from life. Like in a grotesque parade, Melkior found himself in a column of history’s dead marching past life into oblivion, while up there on the stand sat the timeless, eternal ATMAN the palmist, the charmingly grinning and kindly connoisseur of the future.

ATMAN smiled politely standing in front of Melkior and offered him his fine white hand for a “good night.” Melkior did not register ATMAN’S hand, he was feeling his body as if this were an outspread, undeniable, indestructible fear of everything that moved, that breathed, that lived.

“Well, good night, Mr. Melkior.” Mr. Adam accepted Melkior’s hand and pressed it hard, in cordial friendship. “I’m sorry to have kept you so long. I badly needed to lay bare my soul to someone. I’m in pain. Good night.”

And ATMAN trudged out dejectedly like a wretch who had just confessed all his weaknesses. He closed the door behind him softly as if it were his very soul that had left.

Loneliness welled inside Melkior as a painful physical condition, as an infinitely sad sense of being lost.

Begone now, leave me be, ’tis solitude I need

softly to approach the grass, my mistress wild,

to tell the nettles, thorns, and prickly weed

of love for Earth in a picture green.

In the picture: dead men, with no arm or eye,

heads in helmets floating down a stream,

a headless eye watching from a tree

the dagger duels of men soon dead to be.

With mortal fear my body has grown numb

— this body of sob, of ache, of grieving herd.

Glory for country, my skin for a drum,

and my bones …

He could not remember the rest. “… will be broken by sticks and stones,” he added mechanically. Oh Lord, forgive me, Lord, forgive me. She doesn’t need dead men.

He blew through pursed lips and the air came out as a whistle. It sounded like stage wind in a Shakespearean tragedy. Quiet, you fool, you’ll have the Weird Sisters upon us! After he had clammed up there came the voice of Dom Kuzma: “Forgive me for those slaps, my son, I only meant to raise you with the fear of God.” A feeling of goodness came over him. He had been moved today by the sight of Dom Kuzma with his scrawny neck quarrelling with death on the weighing machine. He wanted to find an excuse for him. Perhaps God dislikes me and Dom Kuzma is merely here as the executor of the dislike? The entire fault lay up there. Then. Today Dom Kuzma’s hands were a discarded, condemned tool. The tyrant had rejected his faithful servant. Sent him wandering from one weighing machine to another to weigh his poor body and defraud his death gram by gram.

The death of all. There is but one death. For the crocodiles and the bumblebees, there is but one death. ATMAN knows it, the Great Spirit ATMAN the Enamored who can see the Future, even accelerate it.

In what way does the Future exist? Does there exist something that has yet to happen? If not, how can something take place that does not exist? Does there already exist the bullet which will bore through my head? That very bullet, fitted into rifle cartridge number such and such, manufactured this afternoon at a Krupp factory in Essen, which will pierce my brain in a single second selected out of all of Time for this very purpose? In my mind I follow the bullet from its birth all the way to my head: manufacture, sorting, packaging, delivery. The large ammunition convoys. With the little bastard traveling in a crate just for me. And they have determined exactly where it will arrive, to whom it is to be issued, when it will be inserted into the rifle and then … and then, in my second, bang! and I stop writing its biography. It has spat into my inkwell itself. Finito , I follow it no more. It was alive in my thought. It has killed my thought and itself. It, too, is dead. There is but one death. It exists and it shall happen, Oh Immortal ATMAN. “Divinity of hell.” A good thought before sleep, Iago, a good thought indeed …

He threw himself down on his bed and closed his eyes. To rein in his thoughts.

The seminarian in his seminary is now dreaming of his beloved St. Margaret. Naked. But holy. And all is as God ordains. All is like Holy Communion, the sacrifice of body and blood. What is the name of the beautiful Viviana from the Give’nTake? He had not remembered to ask Maestro, and ATMAN would not tell him. From now until further notice her name is Viviana … “For we are doomed, you and I,” sings Melkior in his mind to keep awake. Sleep fortifies the body, nourishing, rounding, lining with fat the prime cut, the steaks, the hams. A fine cut of man-meat. Pechárek’sh going to gobble ush up, bud , and make no mishtake. And our shoul, the pshittashine dove, will hover over tropical sheazh and warble like the Leopardian lonely shparrow. — Gr, says the giant with the ring in his nose, gr. … And at that point a gigantic snoring starts up in the still of the night.