Nanowrimo - 18

I can still feel the weight of him. How it felt to pick him up. As he grew weaker the falls became more frequent to the point where he came to seem like a tiny bird, all bones and skin.

One day I heard those words came out of his mouth what I feared had been forming in his mind. "I must die alone. You must leave now."

"I can't leave you like this! Zoltan, you can barely get around. I must stay and help you."

"I'll have none of that!" he yelled thinly with whatever power was left in his lungs. "I've managed perfectly well for over twenty four hundred years now. I'll be fine. Don’t need help! I wish to be alone." Then, perhaps sensing my anguish, he rested back and looked at me squarely, allowing a hint of sadness to steal across his face. "It's time for you to go anyhow. You must go have your own life, make your own mistakes. Do it all wrong and patch it all up again. You have all the time and all of the world ahead of you and I cannot be so selfish as to keep you under the shelter of my roof for a minute longer. Go."

"I can't"

"You will. In fact, there are some things I want you to take with you for your journey. I've put them together." He motions to a bagged bundle next to the bed that I hadn’t noticed before.

"I can't take your possessions."

"ohhh, I shall hardly run out of them! It's just a few things that I think you will need. And besides, there is a journey you must take for me, to Agnoletti."

"The Neapolitan living as a monk."

"yes, that's the one. You must take him this." From the bedclothes balled around his legs, Zoltan produces a box wrapped up in brown paper and tied. My first suspicion is that this will be the return of the illuminated manuscript, but it proves to be too light to be such a thing.

"How will I..." I start to ask, but I know better than to finish such a question. I'll know how to get there easily enough. Just follow.

And Zoltan was right, it was time for me to make the great mistakes. I spent the next few decades inadvertently ticking off each one of them in a row. Falling in love with a mortal? Check! Settle for animal blood? Indeed, I tried that whilst ship board to Portugal. Some I continue to make, such as my insistence on ignoring the urge. I envy his commitment to seeing life through to an end. I've only begun to feel the nip of the wringer and find myself staving off the pains with bacon, which, it turns out, lessens the craving to feed and keeps one stronger than having nothing would. I look back over my life some times and feel like such an enormous failure at all things. Years of broken and torn relationships hilite my failure to truly love. Many failed attempts to become something better have merely amounted to creating this, a blackened heart in the middle of a blackened heartland. So I've begun the long process of merely marking time until the end comes. For what was I born? Why am I thus?

"You, too are a creation of God." Agnoletti said in his fruitless attempts to comfort me. To arrive at his hovel I had to cross a continent exhausted by Napoleon’s ambitions. Outside one village lay a heap of bodies dead from illness. They swell and rot in the sun, yet despite the fetid odor a pack of wild dogs besets the pile, scavenging for meat. Fields stretched on and on filled with thin workers scrapping at the ground for life. Everywhere the people were pinched by the expenses of war and heart sore at sending their sons off to fight a continual enemy, which advanced from every corner of the continent. I saw many mortals just as gaunt and frightened into submission as I had observed before the revolution. All that blood, all those headless bodies had merely succeeded in shuffling the decks of power. The face cards still held all sway. It was all the madness of ambition for power. Then, for once I wanted to do something to provide them some comfort. But I could not. Their torture ultimately grew from the twisted roots of poverty in their souls. “Why am I such a creature if I must stay in the shadows. Why could I not lead them to peace?"

"Some take great assurance in their suffering. Even though they suffer, their suffering is their only understanding of life!" He told me. My attempts to present him with Zoltan’s gift were spurned. “No no! I have taken a vow of poverty! I cannot keep such material possessions as did our Zoltan! You must keep it. It must be something he meant for you but he could not hand it to you outright. I know it is a gift far to powerful for me, I can feel it. You must keep it and be careful that it does not attract the greed of the ignorant.”

His quarters were indeed spartan. A small cell hardly large enough for one body to move around, its sole furnishings were a straw bed and a table. The only adornments were a wooden cross over the bed, underneath which the monk would kneel to pray regularly, and a candle holder.

I curl up on the floor of his cell to sleep and conceal my traveling bag underneath his bed. “Did Zoltan ever speak to you of the man Jesus?” I ask into the darkness while we try drift off for the nightly repose that passes for slumber.

“Yes, we had many great, windy discussions. It always came down to my scripture versus his memory. Ah but the scriptures themselves are merely dim memories. Still, it was fascinating to talk with someone who had known the man, had known what it felt to be near him. I can only hope to invite that same sensation in those who come into contact with me.”

“I feel perfect here, if that is any consolation. For a small bit I feel free of the upset and confusion in my mind.”

“That is good, child.” He said as his spirit drifted off into the darkness.

At night we take flight. Sometimes the journey leads through memory. Sometimes it takes us through the land of memories yet to be experienced. As the body relaxes I feel the spread of wings and the lift of spirit body from the confines of flesh. In the recurring night life experience which haunted me I would find myself soaring over vast amounts of dark, briny water. For as far as I could behold there would be not a spot of land in sight. Then, below me, I would see the ellipse of a tiny wooden water faring vessel like tiny container of life fighting against the vast ocean of emptiness. As I circled and circled around the ship, getting lower and lower and finally low enough to hear the voices of its passengers, I would always become aware of the sound of screaming. A red stain spread across the deck below me and I would instantly busy my soaring wings in the act of flapping to the heights for escape.

The vision troubled me, but I did not wish to disturb Agnoletti with such stories. Still, he sensed something. His morning meditations were growing increasingly disturbed and at times he would even cut them short, shaking with anxiety. “Something is on its way here.” He would confide.

When the blackbirds descended upon him, neither of us were really quite prepared for the deep fear that would shake us. We were not so much in the habit of feeling fear and such powerlessness. Within a turn of the glass I was gone from his place, carrying the pack of strange worldly possessions with me.

All manner of strange baubles and coins were traded for my passage to Baltimore. Still, some things clinked from my pack and the strange box bounded around. Some of the items became gifts to people who showed me great kindness, such as the Unitarians in New York State. But still, even through the frontier, the rage, the pilgrimages, through all of the pretend lives, Agnoletti’s box stayed with me.

“What’s in that box?” Eileen asked one day, pointing to the now quite man-handled and dirty package resting prominently upon one of my many bookshelves. I had yet to realize just how meddlesome she could be when I hired her. That must have been a bad day for the intuition.

“It’s was a gift.”

“Aren’t you, like, supposed to open gifts? Like, you left it wrapped up so how is the giver supposed to know if you liked it at all?”

“It wasn’t a gift to me. It’s something I’m carrying to another person.”

“Well, you might wanna re-wrap it before you turn it over. Looks like hell.”

I look at her, a plump, overfed figure with strangely colored hair and bright red nails that pour through the pile of papers on her lap, and marvel that all the millennia of human evolution has merely resulted in this. “Thank you.”

I’m no old fart. I love the new gizmos that beep and shine and speed life’s pace to an exhausting frenzy. Eileen badgers me for not having a cell phone or a laptop computer. But, I don’t believe in sending technology to commit those acts that my senses are perfectly capable of performing. I’ve never told the plump miss that I own an iPod with which I happily download the music of all the ages I have visited.

Sometimes I land in my bed from slumber only to find the most uncontrollable urge to feed overtaking me. I refuse to submit. I refuse to be driven to the point of such beastly loss of control. At such times my only recourse is to listen to lots of U2, eat bacon fried extra crispy, and wait for the insanity to pass. I’ve thought of sending that story to Apple as a possibility for one of their goofy ads. “The iPod tames the beast and saves lives!”