Four Kings
Shamash, Sin, Nergal, Ninib
Oriens
I turned circles in Russell Square, beneath the iron wrought arches that held the creeping ivy. I counted the irises to learn their names. In my counting, I learned the language of the East, of Springtime, of winding roads that led back home.
The morning called me to the square, so that I might receive it in my hands, so that I might see the sun shoot its arrows into the pavement that lines Southampton Row. The haze crept up from the frozen earth to cover the city like a mantle. When it parted, when I tried to break that dreaming veil with two flattened palms, I saw many beginnings shake beside each other. Like atoms making music.
When I was young, turning circles in Russell Square, I thought it was enough to see these new beginnings. In my sight, I thought I could make them palpable. I thought that making them palpable meant I was making them inevitable.
These peculiar novelties accumulated strange mass. I was able to give shape to it, but the mass kept growing. These shapes rested on my shoulders until the weight of them, stacking up like mountain snow, became unbearable. In holding this ever-gathering load, I felt my own body sink into the ground. It would take many years, and many confessions, before I would ever free myself from the burden of these breaking dawns, of these breaking dawns refracting.
Septentrio
Dead things evaded me, in the winters of my youth, when I walked along the canal at night. The cigarettes choked at my lungs, the bodies choked at my throat, and I choked at every pale thing that shook in the gloom.
Snow came early that year, on the first of December, when I was refusing the ocean, when I was refusing to cross it for anything.
I went to the Roman Church, where Mary Wollstonecraft rests beside Boudicca the Queen, to appeal to the patrons of the land.
“It’s not over and I’m not leaving.”
For the first time in a long time, I met silence head on. In my rejection of the inevitable, I confronted it. The voices did not happen. They did not come into my mind to soothsay my fear away. That’s when I knew I was fucked, like a slow motion car crash, like a fish heaving for water.
On the first of December, when it snowed and my friends called it winter, I went into the street with a glass bottle. I thought that catching the shapes, in their frozen purity, would somehow preserve my own childish hope. The ice hit the bottle and became water. Once the bottle filled, once I was shivering, I lifted the rim to my lips and whispered a prayer.
“Let me remain.”
My lungs grew cold as the dirty water slid down my throat. And I knew, in that moment I really knew, that some prayers, even the ones we’d die for, remain,
Remain,
Remain,
unanswered.
Occidens
In catching the snow on my tongue, I believed the lie: namely, that dead things stay dead. It wasn’t until I moved out West, at the edge of an ancient lake — lapping at the waves of the Pacific, that I began to understand the reality of death, the reality of the living dead.
The crows flew over my head as I dangled my ankles off the pier.
“They’re not ravens.” I reminded myself, as I snapped my lighter and brought another cigarette to my lips. “They not ravens, they’re not magpies.”
The clouds were greedy for the city — I could tell from the way they held onto the concrete with their phantom hands, when they fell onto the street to claim the people walking it.
Seattle is a city of dreamers who never woke up. They haunt the chrome-work like mist haunting the mountain. In the morning, when I saw them in the silver-grey, meandering around the Dome, I wondered how I too became haunted.
When I went to the pier, with oats in my pockets for the circling crows, I learned that the dead don’t leave us. They couldn’t even if they wanted to.
The tugboats sailed across the sound and became lights on the water. When I stared into those roving halos, I found strange languages in the shimmer. They didn’t belong to the light, no, they belonged to the tongues wagging beyond it.
You could see them wading in the reeds on rainy mornings — spearing fish, smoking them over fine grasses. I called out to them, but they did not turn their heads. They didn’t even recognize the language of my calling.
Were they trapped in the water? Who was I to say they stopped living, when I could see them making the motion before my very eyes?
And what’s more:
Who was I to declare myself dead, when I came to the shores of the Pacific? When I came to the edge to make the motion?
When I was clearly living-dead?
Merides
I found myself in a tower on the overpass. It rose up from the ground like a monument, like a testament to those who need towers — to look at and to live in.
In the summer, I lived by the ocean — this time the Atlantic — and I knew it was a dream, I knew it was mine, and I knew it would end in a flash.
When I tore into the new day each morning, ripping it apart like a communion wafer, I knew I was living, not dead. Because I gazed at him sleeping, I pulled verse from trembling breath, I felt the wells of life surge up inside me to give shape to the song that the gulls sang outside. And I knew I was in love. I knew I was in love. I even thought I might really be alive.
Oblivion is an impulse. It called him to the sea and forced him down on the ocean floor. Where he remains trapped today like a binding curse. The man I loved went back into the water and now he’s choking on it. He might have been choking on it the entire time. I didn’t notice. I was busy living love, I was busy loving life — I didn’t notice.
He’s heaving under the pressure of it. I can see everything from my tower in the sky, and I know that he’s heaving.
“Leave it to the Deep, leave it to the dead. Leave it to the stones, leave it to the waves.”
The first night I spent in the cloud tower was unbearable. Every object — the furniture, the books, the pictures, and the paper — mocked me. They were relics of a murdered life, they were relics of murdered love, murdered words, and they mocked me. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I went into the black to strike a bargain.
I took the knife and the book and the promises we made, and I went to the crossroads. Before I slipped on my jacket to confront those cold devils, I went into my bedroom and took two strands of hair from the emerald box on my nightstand: his and mine. With uneasy fingers, I braided them together to make a cord. I carried that cord on my tongue to confront the shades in the night. The door slammed behind me and I knew I was serious. I knew I would do anything to break the bond.
The tea-stained pages looked unfamiliar in the florescent street lights that lined the pavement. Those man-made beams fell metallic on my skin, those hollow colors fell onto my shoulders like lies.
When I lifted my gaze to the sky, when I managed it, I couldn’t find the moon. I couldn’t find a single star.
“Let’s be quick, yeah?” I could hear a familiar voice ringing out from some faraway place.
I said the words — I put them together to form a litany for every fallen angel. For every angel that fell into stone. The air on the asphalt shook like a heat shimmer. I sharpened the blade on the concrete curb. It drew blood from the left palm, then the right, and around both ankles. Red turned to brown when it made contact with the air. I watched it feed the earth and stuck out my tongue. The silver was red, the blade was bloody, when I stuck out my tongue to break the cord.
I thought I could manage it cleanly, in a single motion, because I was exhausted. My hands were uneasy, my breath stalled — why couldn’t I do it? Why was I hesitating?
“Let’s be quick, yeah?” That voice again. Who did it belong to?
I didn’t have time to consider it. Something was rising inside me and I knew I had to do it now. If I failed, I knew I wouldn’t ever get another chance. I wouldn’t get another chance at life, and I too would slip back into the ocean to writhe dirty on the floor.
They came to me on four sides.
“Shamash before me, behind me Sin. Nergal at my right, Ninib at my left.”
I turned to each corner and offered them my head. They took that offering in stride, so that with each turning, my neck became more and more severed. When it was done, I held my head in my hands like Salome. I rapped the back of my skull with a closed fist and my tongue popped out. The cord was gone. The bargain was made.
I screwed my head back onto my neck and walked back to the tower on the overpass. As I slid the key into the lock and turned it, I noticed a single star shining overhead, between the clouds that drifted beyond dead skies in lazy stagnancy.
It seemed to speak to me, but I couldn’t get the words. When I bolted the latch and turned on the lights, it was speaking still. I went to that old writing desk, the one that my mom painted for my sister, and cracked the spine of a blank book. That nonsense language rang in my ears and clawed at the sides of my mind. Failing to make the syllables happen would have been the end of me. And I knew it.
I stuck the pen into the wounds in my palms. I traced it along the laceration on my ankles, so that it might drip blood onto the page. That’s when the words started to happen. They weren’t mine but I recognized them nonetheless.
I wrote for six month straight. Some frenzy came over me and I couldn’t stop. I killed the love to breathe life into the Word — so that I might live the living-Word. So that I might breathe life back into the bones and the body. So that I might believe it.
I’m writing now. I’m writing it because I have to. With every page, as I fill them and turn it, I wait for belief. I rest on the childish hope that I might someday believe it.
But I don’t. No, not yet.
Do you?
Beautiful writing.