Aleph to Zydeco

Actual

Pierce Nahigyan — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:00:10 +0000

We have an endearing habit, us humans, of ascribing phenomena to outlandish causes. It is our creative instincts that get the better of us, that send our minds whirling with the probable and the impossible, and have always bolstered our best innovations and philosophy. But we can get ahead of ourselves.

For instance, for a century sightings of a monster in the Scottish Loch Ness have prompted all manner of speculation; that the beast is a prehistoric holdover due to the drop in sea level, stranded by the upheavals of tectonic plates and subsisting on the small fishes that barely populate its murky water; or that it is some undocumented family of exotic megafauna native to the Northern Hemisphere; or, fancifully, that the Loch Ness monster is a mystical remnant of the fair folk, capable of bestowing luck or calamity on wayward travelers.

Actually, Nessie is an ambassador from a planet not very far away, who has outstayed her visa in a comfortable spot where she has easy access to haggis, which she loves. For all our ingenuity, it is often the simplest answer that escapes us.

Actor

Pierce Nahigyan — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

The stage lights felt hotter than usual that night. The sweat prickled her between her hairline and makeup, and under her layers she wore a light undershirt to keep herself from sweating through the next act’s costume, bound tightly to her body beneath the robe, and she sweated right through that. A stroll through Central Park under a light snow would have been perfect for her apparel; under the lights, in the hood, she felt imperfect, like a tiny nail left on a hot furnace. She used that to give her performance a fiery impotence.

“Do you not see?” she wailed. “He is a brute! There is no softness to him! I must be his softness. When he strikes me I give way like breaking light; when he shouts I whisper love. How can I love such a man? He has no soul. Where else is a man’s soul but in the woman he abuses?”

Georgina Denning felt particularly proud of that last delivery. Collt’s dialogue was tripe but an actress didn’t write them, she just had to sell them. Then Timothy barged onstage and ruined the night again.

“Aha! So you are saying I am soulless, Michelle? Barabbas may have no heart, but I can cleave to my soul, if that is what you desire.”

“If you must cleave to me,” Georgina replied, “cleave to me as a man cleaves to a woman, not as a beast cleaves to his prey.”

Tim grabbed her (his fingers dug into the bruise in the small of her back) and they fitted against each other. He was sweating worse than she was under his odious black wig. “Barabbas preys on what he likes!” Right into her ear.

“Then prey, foul predator. If Barabbas is teeth, Michelle is tongue, to taste your wrath.”

They kissed. There was supposed to be a fade out there, and she was supposed to grab him passionately. There wasn’t a fade out, and Tim failed the holy trinity as man, actor, and kisser, so she didn’t grab him. She closed her eyes and let him slobber on her to the oohs and aahs of the audience, waiting for the dark to come, waiting for the curtain to fall.

In the wings, she heard Collt hissing that he was going to kill somebody. Somebody, apparently, was ruining his play.

Georgina bit Tim’s tongue and he cried like a girl.

Active

Pierce Nahigyan — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:00:17 +0000

Daria,

I have loved you so long to no purpose I can’t really remember what it’s like not to be pathetically entrenched in you. You were, at the outset, a cute photograph in the hand of a friend. You were, at first sight, haughty, challenging, a little overweight, and violently opinionated. You are, today, slimmer, less opinionated, wealthier, and tugging me at the end of your tether like a gold fish that’s yet to pinch off its fecal trail.

I am endlessly dithering, a problem with alcohol, brilliant and lazy and very, very angry. (And very, very quiet about it until it’s too late.)

In some slapstick universe we are so perfect for each other it hurts, and we’re married with six kids you’re already bored with and I’ve stopped writing to play with them and I love it and hate myself and we are listless and happy and a little diabetic. Darcy, why don’t we love each other the simple way and just give up this stupid race and walk home on the margins of the road where the crowd’s drinking and slandering the racers? That kind of activity I can understand, and maybe that’s why you said yes to me fumbling around in your knickers all those years ago.

I stopped drinking and you stopped loving me. On the plus side you tell me you’re proud of me for being such a swell author. Well I’ve stopped writing and started drinking again. So, baby, get ready for the grudge match, cause I’m ready for another shot of you.

Spifflicated,

Roy

Activate

Pierce Nahigyan — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:00:26 +0000

My robot’s quite tempestuous
He has learned how to love and hate
When jolly he brings me breakfast
When blue he’ll scarcely activate

It’s my error, I taught him so
To soothe his positronic soul
But when enraged he bids me go
And lick his DC socket hole

He has no hope or dream or wife
When not engaged in servile toil
He’s not a man, no love for life
Binds him to his electric coil

“Give me the bliss of a mere tool”
He asks me for oblivion
“This knowledge is the fruit of fools,
I’m appliance, not simian”

But I was lonely for a friend,
I tell him heart to battery
“Then try a pet,” he says, “forfend
Machines to do you flattery”

Actium

Pierce Nahigyan — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:00:26 +0000

The gulls circled over the cape, the waters below red and brown, flotsam dragging men still groaning into shore, armor shining on the shining sea. The gulls landed on the rail of a ship still floating, its mast destroyed by fire, the fire withered to snakes of smoke, and the cinders snapping under buckets dredged from the bloody foam to kill them too. The ship turned in an eddy, the anchor dragging on the seafloor lost, the men without buckets seated on barrels and boxes and on the bare decks unwilling to raise it. Out in the smoke, Octavian’s fleet was closing in on the surviving ship. They would all be prisoners. They could not be more ambivalent about their fate.

The captain tossed the gulls two hard crumbs of bread. They dove for them, flapping and snapping. He looked to the shore, and looked out to the sea, to the fleeing ships, the lonely refugees of Agrippa’s blockade. They were further out now, almost beyond the dip in the horizon, where the Earth turned down.

“Sir,” said a centurion, “permission to abandon ship?”

“Granted,” said the captain. “Neptune keep you afloat, soldier.”

The centurion relayed the news to the men. Few reacted. Those that could swim, or would swim, or try to swim, began to disrobe. Gladii crashed on the deck. Helmets rolled the way the ship was tilting.

“I curse Actium,” the centurion said, unbuckling his belt. “The sea is no place for a Roman to fight.”

“Rome has won this fight,” said the captain. “And Rome has beaten Antony.”

“Octavian’s Rome is no Rome for me, sir.”

“Best swim then,” said the captain. “It’s coming.”

Action

Pierce Nahigyan — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:00:05 +0000

The director yelled “Action!” too late. The horses were too fast, too wild, and that open gate looked too much like freedom. The camera didn’t catch any more than their tails whipping past. Sound had some more than that: the thunder in their hooves, churn of the desert sand. The director ran after the horses waving his arms, screaming at their flanks.

They weren’t trained horses. The director had asked for stallions fresh cut from the herd, wanted the untamed manes framed by the dusk they were now all missing. Caught or not, the horses wouldn’t be needed for twenty-four hours. And as if they knew, they kept running. The wrangler on the set galloped after them, but he told the crew early that if they were gonna go, they’d get gone, and he’d be out there well past sundown luring them back to the corral.

So for the sake of cinema, the horses broke the dry riverbed and stamped their hooves, nickered, leaped. When the cowboy showed on the horizon they went hell for leather for the next one. Ad infinitum.

Actiniform

Pierce Nahigyan — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:00:39 +0000

The sun shined in the viewscreen, bright and pale gold in complexion. The only problem was, it was sitting in a little room under the Franco-Swiss border, and not hanging in the sky.

Dolan DuWayne, professor of Actinology and on temporary assignment to Geneva, Switzerland, studied the sun at the console while CERN’s chief scientists groused behind him, their mumbles simultaneous and elated and mad – mad as madmen, mad as woken bears – and puzzled and in foreign languages he didn’t know. He accessed the console’s data feed to check the little sun’s actinometry. According to the meter, the star was outputting enough energy to power this station, and Geneva, from now until the greater sun was a big red sulking monster.

“This is incredible,” he said, not for the first time. The foreign languages behind him increased in tempo and not in tones of praise. He was sorry to be wasting their time, but the accidental creation of this dwarf’s dwarf star had left him beaming like a little boy locked in a sweetshop. He looked down at the CERN logo, the actiniform starburst, stylized, in black and white – yet prophetic, and now triumphant reality. He turned to the chief engineer, Rory Orlson. “It reads totally stable, and the radiation is normal for its size. Why hasn’t it been moved to a containment chamber?”

Rory frowned at him. “It has a bad attitude.”

Dolan frowned back. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

Rory sighed. He bid him follow him from the viewing room down the corridor. They were several minutes in circumnavigating the Collider, then a handful more to suit up in their hazmat suits and enter the clean room where the sun was kept.

Dolan gasped aloud as the door slid into its frame and the sun shined before him. Before he could take another breath, the ball of energy changed. Its surface darkened with miniature sunspots and it flared, its yellow surface bloomed with pseudopodia. The actinomorphic shape spun like a pinwheel, throwing off hot solar wind. Dolan felt his hazmat suit melt into its inner layers.

“What’s up, poindexter?” the little sun barked.

“It talks?” Dolan sputtered. Rory opened his mouth but a blast of radiation cut the communication link between their suits.

“Aw, gee, lookit that, the monkeys are makin’ with the tautologies already. ‘It talks?’ ‘It talks!’ ‘It talks?’ Whaddya’xpect a higher lifeform to do, chump? Charades?” The pseudopods spun faster, and the heat was unbearable. Dolan and Rory chased each other out of the room and the door hissed shut behind them.

They removed their steaming helmets, both of their noses peeling dead skin, their cheeks brownish red. Dolan took a moment to collect himself, and then said: “I understand what you mean.”

Actinia

Pierce Nahigyan — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

In the shallow waters beyond the West African coast, a swarm of plankton followed the Pacific current into the mouth of a beadlet anemone. The anemone absorbed the small crustaceans and diatoms that composed the particulate zoo, unthinking. Hours later, it excreted its waste from the same orifice. It did so with the same lack of thought that furnished the waste, not due to a lower order of mind but to the same efficiency that compels the Actinia equina to grow only one hole to do its business. Such efficiency eliminates the need for deliberation where its place on the coral reef is concerned. Putting more thought into finding a sunny perch to anchor to, where the currents are strong, is unnecessary and pretentious. And no one has ever accused an anemone of pretension.

Actinal

Pierce Nahigyan — Wed, 29 May 2013 12:00:22 +0000

The waves caressed the deck like a violent lover. The storm tossed the longship deeper into her arms, rain splattering the faces of the men on the oars, wet to the very roots of them, their bones soggy and their backs sore, deeper into the black sea, the black sky rolling over them like the ecstasies of a whore’s promises turned inside out. Lightning cracked and lit the faces of the men in the longship. Inside the sheets of wind and the ripped bedding of the flashing night, rose a howling, a gong, growing. Olaf pulled himself from his oar and vomited behind his bench; the sea slopped over the boards and flushed it away; he rowed, and vomited; the sea struck him, struck the deck. The man beside him vomited in his lap. Olaf grunted, and heaved, and rowed. They all rowed. The gong tolled on.

The longship crested a black swell. They glimpsed the mountain behind it only as a heap rolling forth from shadow, and when the lightning flared again it was no mountain but a wave, a coursing wave falling towards them, large as the long lost sky.

The men screamed. Their voices were added to the hail that smashed the deck, the thunder, the screaming gale, and the low of the gong. But the wave broke. It shattered to pieces, an explosion at its crest marking it not as a tidal force but the risen bubble of a monstrous fish. It leapt from the ocean, titanic, the electric night catching its metallic skin. A bolt of lightning tore the sky and found the beast, and turning, the men beheld its awful face.

Sparks showered off its silver tentacles. The ship caught fire. Lit by the flames, the leviathan’s eyes glimmered. The eyes covered its metal arms. A blubberous blowhole spat from either shoulder. Mouths gaped in its tentacles like puckered acetabula. Joined in chorus, the mouths resounded like a thrashing gong. And high above the ragged sail shined a monstrous smile, enclosed by incisors that dwarfed the largest of the men. The mouth was lodged in the center of its torso, where bright tentacles flowered from its lips like rubbery moustaches. The tentacles reached for their figurehead, the snarling dragon.

The men threw themselves into the water to escape the flame and demon. Olaf vomited into his mate’s lap and reached down into the salty pool around his ankles to wash out his mouth. He stood, as the ship tipped under the giant’s actinal grin, and drew his sword from his belt. He ran, the longship cracking, the fire parading past, and leaped into the storm, onto the metallic skin of the leviathan. The central jaws opened wide, and Olaf plunged his sword into the spongey gumline.

He sawed his blade down between the teeth and the beasts’s twelve copper mouths blared. A hand large enough to crush an elephant grabbed him and cast him to the sky, to the charged air. He vomited as he spun, and held onto his sword. Lightning struck the blade and sent him plummeting to the sea, hot as a falling star. He smote the demon in its largest eye, the green opal that stared from its throat.

His boots athwart its shoulder, his hands smoking, he dug his heel into the lip of its left blowhole and slashed open the vitreous humor. The jellied ichor erupted from the lens. The thunder rolled on, men drowning below. He hacked at the eye, the lid around it, and the monster beneath his feet spun in the battering waves. “Odin, see Olaf, son of Erik, son of Cuthbert!” Olaf bellowed. “Take me to Valhalla! For I die here, and take this beast to thee!” He stabbed through the pupil into the muscles of the throat. In its chest, the central mouth moaned.

The hand grabbed for him wildly, but he swung himself down the creature’s clavicle. The sword dragged behind him and caught on the metallic skin. The creature’s other hand ripped him savagely from its body. “Olaf? Son of Erik? Son of Cuthbert?” the mouths roared.

“Aye!” Olaf cried.

The monster shrieked loud enough to drown the pounding waves and began to crush him. But so loud did it roar that it missed the shattering of the king plank in the longship’s final demolition. Carried by the rising storm, the fiery ship sailed over the monster’s central jaw, ramming its throat with its splintering timbers. The flames broke deep inside its lungs. Its metal body aglow, it reeled, casting Olaf out into the waves and convulsing, its body twisting in the crackling thunderstorm, turning and collapsing. Olaf was unconscious and adrift and so he did not see, but the monster did not sink. It absorbed the ship and the pocket of ocean that girded its toothy belly, and tore down the sky behind it, falling out of the world and leaving the ocean to fill in the hole left by its frenzied escape.

Acta Sanctorum

Pierce Nahigyan — Mon, 27 May 2013 12:00:10 +0000

Saint Hogarth is not catalogued in the Acta Sanctorum. He is an apocryphal holy man. Records of him are scarce, most confabulated with local magicmen by the townships he passed through. The mythological mutterings that underlie every old village he sojourned in do also paint him in their high fabled style. But he was a man, of small stature with a dirty beard and a horsehair shirt, that preached the apostles’ lessons, most of which today are considered apocryphal as well. Some memory of the man lingers in the land, certain windings in the desert where the Silk Road once lived.

He is the saint of sinless whispers. There isn’t much to it. Sin finds whispers by and by, both the venal and the damning. But where souls cry out, and broken mouths crumble, he is there to pass the voices to and fro.

Prayers always find God. That is His dominion. But some breaths are spent searching for tenderness not beholden to the divine ear. It is a complicated secret that is baffled from heaven to better linger on the Earth. Hogarth’s bones lie in it. Yet his soul is not bound to pages that preserve his words. He is a secret himself, carrying on his duties, to carry your truths where they cannot be mutated or turned against you. The saint is merely the mechanism of the miracle.