Late found I this worthwhile want
And I not in want of want
After years and years of wanting not:
An exact and same something
I wanted once, years before,
And after so many years, forgot.
Learned I thro’ life to leave be
Such as what now comes to me,
Asking I confess that which I’d sought:
I want not her heart, nor her name, nor lips;
At long life’s end, when I’m laid down to die,
I want only her hand clasped within mine.
Through the roar of the flames and over the din of the world beyond them, someone was crying. This time, he was sure of it. Continue reading “Why We Must Burn”
Race On, Heart; you mustn’t wait.
Close on your heels, pain chases.
Never rest – living lies patient to catch you late.
Waste not a moment; fill each and every
With Ecstasy, self-Importance, and Belonging.
Have you done enough today? Enough –
In the morning you’ll fear it wasn’t:
Fear the day before wasted as the day ahead
As the life of days before, each of which
Won’t be among the number that remain.
Race On, Heart; and fuel your feet
With Candy, Cocaine, Caffeine,
Dopamine, Epinephrine, Amphetamine.
Stand as a boy on the prow of some ship,
Your daring face thrust into salt and spray.
Sail this image swiftly, outride truth:
That the strain grows rough and rougher,
While your sails are steadily becalming,
For behind the image, you are an old heart.
Race On, Heart, ahead of sleep
And its restive embrace, for rest is Idleness
And Laziness, a thieving Prison of waking needs.
And in the depths of that cell, worse awaits:
Recollections, Regrets, self-Evaluation,
And the cruelty and disappointment of dreams.
Or laying upon the covers, lest yourself find
– a moment of weakness – in the twilight of your mind
Your lonely lips searching for hers in the dark.
![a6a667080ec311e39c1122000a1fba2c_7[1]](https://guydtruc.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/a6a667080ec311e39c1122000a1fba2c_71.jpg)
What will you gain from me?
I’ve already
spoken the sweetest words.
made the grandest gesture.
shared the sincerest kiss.
gained the fullest completion.
felt the completest loss.
I’ve already written the perfect love story
With others so many to the insignificance of a one;
A chapter with her, a page with another –
I don’t even know where this line came from –
But you can start to see how it is for me to feel
Like I’ve come to this bargaining table
Where you sit ready to draw up a new contract
And I in the doorway with empty hands.
Could this be our restaurant?
No darling, I brought Charlotte here first.
Could this be our song?
Susanne and I, State Highway 70, top of our lungs.
What about going to the theater every year?
That was Darla’s thing.
What about saying “I love you”?
They’re all the same: they begin,
They end, like this one surely will,
Which really isn’t so bad,
Except that…
All before you have left me with a line, a page, a chapter.
All before me shall leave me with a synopsis.
When life is swamped with devils
Occasionally an angel will descend
And ask for a dance.
Where they fly after the final turn
Is the question hanging on every lip,
A quivering droplet of malted ambrosia.
Debate as we surely will, the facts remain:
They were surely sent,
And our weary souls are surely reinvigorated
For the hopes that sail on dawn’s solar wind.
Sadhi sat silent in her chair, wrapped in the silks and satins attesting her gentle birth, awaiting her bath. Amir leaned on his arm against the warm plaster of the wall, peering in at her through the opening of the ajar washroom door. The light of the failing evening filtered in through the lead glass of the room’s narrow windows in a wash of gentle amber, igniting her fair skin into a fiery bronze. Of Sadhi’s backside, the chair, and the cistern behind them in the dusky light, no artisan heard of in the city of Atur, or the whole empire of Trebezonde for that matter, could have done any justice near to the truth of it. The woman was a portrait of a queen; once upon a time, she was his queen. Now, however, Amir did not know this woman whom awaited her routine bath, which, tonight, would be anything but.
Amir pulled his prying eyes from the door with and retreated into the parlor to tend the fire of the semaver. His heart beat the rhythm of a funeral dirge as he plodded over their heirloom rugs. His bones creaked with defeat as he crouched to add a few dry, slender chips into the blaze heating the kettle. The water within simmered, just as the blood did within his veins. The ever obedient flames lapped the wood up happily, their bright, joyful countenances displayed and distorted upon the semaver’s polished brass surface. Sadhi’s voice echoed in his mind, chiding him for his refusal to buy a modern alchemic stove. She never understood. It wasn’t real fire.
His thumb nervously spun the wedding band around his sweaty finger, then eased it down off over his first knuckle, then his second. He toyed with it distractedly, not quite feeling the greasy precious metal slide between his fingers and palm.
And giving her a bath now of all things!
After all the years he’d spent bathing her and the one day it took her to bring all those years to nothing, another bath!
A voice inside suggested he should hurt her as badly as she’d hurt him. He could let the water go for too long on the fire. But the voice wasn’t his, and he could never do such a thing, even if he’d truly wanted to.
But to burn her, it begged, to leave her so horrifically scarred so no man would ever willingly lay eyes upon her, much less touch her.
Just as no man should ever want to touch a woman who couldn’t even bath herself, much less remover her own sin-soaked clothes.
Amir, what a fool you are!
He clenched his fists in anger, now feeling betrayed not only by his wife, but by the way of all things he thought he knew. He unclenched them in despair, knowing that hurting Sadhi would only ever be a thought, and one he’d shamefully regret at that.
What does a man do; what does Amir do?
Feeling something warm in his hand, Amir brought his eyes down to bear upon the simple silver and gold band. The flames clearly illumined the name engraved on its inside. He couldn’t read it; it was engraved in Sanskrit. Sadhi’s language. He’d never been able to learn it. His heart sank in quivering beats of panic, and his eyes welled up with tears. It was the first time he’d ever seen it apart from his finger since he’d first put it on. What if it stayed off? What if he never wore it again? What if he flung it into the fire to watch it all melt away? The fear grew, stinging his eyes and petrifying his throat. He replaced the ring hastily.
Steam began to claw its way from under the kettle’s lid, disappearing into the ceiling-shadows where neither sunset nor candle-flames could reach. This queue of the routine duty interrupted his worrisome trance. Amir reached for the hook iron and with it hoisted the kettle from the base. The water inside was at the proper temperature, the safe temperature.
With the iron lodged under and over one of his thick, well-muscled arms and the kettle at its end swaying slowly, his free hand carefully put a lid over the semaver’s base, smothering the flames. Sadhi had often said he possessed a soldier’s arms. Once, when he had those arms around her, she’d said they reminded her of her grandfather’s arms. She’d said they made her feel safe. Keeping the pot balanced on the rod, he passed her grandfather’s Janissarium, the dusty emblems of his old, high station, which only inspired more bitter ironies. Amir had only known the man briefly, but in that time he’d come to revere him as a divine incarnation of the old ways of honor, the ancient chivalry due of all men.
It was a good thing he wasn’t alive to know the wicked thing she had become, Prophet rest his soul. He would be ashamed of her. She made me believe she was good. The fruit fell so far from the tree.
He sourly doted on the absence of that inheritance until it became a mantra.
She fell so far from the tree.
He repeated it with every other step on the return trip to the washroom.
He bumped the door open loudly with his shoulder and then swung the large kettle through as quickly as he could in a desperate bid to lock his gaze with hers; to catch those eyes that had, for the evening, fled from him; to grab them and hold them responsible; to see them full of shame.
All he caught was his own dismay. The portrait hadn’t changed: her head was held high, plumb with her relaxed yet indomitable shoulders. She did not look up, nor did she give any other physical receipt for his presence. Not even the candles bothered to flicker in acknowledgement. Only the daylight had waned a bit more, which altered the ambiance towards the slightest degree of frustrating sensuality. He had no referent within himself to reconcile how her frame could be so free of tension, or how it could make his so full of it.
While his mind was beset prodding the probabilities and plotting against platitudes, his body carried on cheerfully and autonomously, completely ignorant of the war being waged in the soul housed within. It crossed to the far side of the room, to the cistern full of water freshly pumped from the well, and sat as it always had for the task of bathing his love.
His love. He didn’t know whether to scoff at the thought, or weep. When he cast his eyes in her direction, his heart still fell in his chest the way it did before; but where it had once sunk with infatuation, now it fell with the gravity of grief, of loss, of wishing a thing that was so was not so. His hands ached to touch her, his mouth desperate to praise her with affirmation and adoration, despite the antipathy warranted by the facts.
These urges, these relics of behavior not-so-ancient, so familiar, threatened that the old love would not slink away easily, at least so far as he was dimly and grudgingly aware. The old love, just as deep, just as pronounced, was there whether or not he gave it leave; yet it was something else today than it was yesterday – different, besmirched. There was something wrong with it, some ailment. And like a sick child, it could not tell him with any coherence where or why it hurt. All the while, he couldn’t shake loose the feeling that there had been some mistake made on behalf of the facts.
The body crossed separately on its own plane of reality. It was happy, obedient, still full of ignorant, habitual passion. Its arms lowered the kettle into the cistern as they always had, the water sizzling against the tempered brass as it submerged. And as it had always done, the left arm reached in and upended the kettle below the surface though the metal was hot enough to cook an egg, enduring the pain as a point of pride for its service to noble Sadhi. The right arm withdrew the kettle and rod together while the left remained, stirring the cool currents with the hot, and when the right was free again it checked the temperature. There never were two more loyal servants in all the empire.
Satisfied with the quality of the bath, he and his body rose and turned their attentions from it with no small amount of reluctance. Amir approached Sadhi’s simple throne with what under other circumstances might have been taken for reverence. Standing behind her, he rested his heavy hands on her delicate shoulders and felt the deceptively vibrant life pulsing within, and the softness of adulterous skin beneath silk and merino. He laid those heavy hands on the matter of the temple he once regularly worshipped at, but was now a desecrated fane overrun by infidels. A proverb from somewhere in the fog of nonspecific memory came to his mind, that the conquered livestock of the unfaithful should be burned in sacrifice rather than eaten.
He looked down upon those heavy hands alongside her slender neck. For another man, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to apply force, to end her as one would end lame chattel. No one would have faulted him; no woman who scorned her husband as she had could expect any protection from the law. That was the way of it, he knew well, yet he wasn’t that man. He wanted to slap her until she begged forgiveness, but he couldn’t. He wanted to shame her in the streets, cry to the entire nation of her great sin, make her name a blight in the book of life, but he couldn’t.
From the moment they’d met, he’d always been chained in her shadow. It wasn’t merely that he was the son of a herdsman and she was the daughter of a courtier. Atur was the city of opportunity; anybody could rise above their birth. It was stark admiration that shackled him. He worshipped her. She would be a priestess seated upon a dais and he a mendicant standing below, casting praise up to her and spreading the message of her splendor and goodness to the world. Even after her illness, where the world now saw a pale invalid, a shadow of the goddess she once was, nothing had changed for him. He still put himself below her, and her before himself.
Maybe that was his mistake.
Maybe I gave her too much respect, too much love. I should have treated her the way the world would have, maybe she wouldn’t have… maybe I could have kept her love for me.
His thoughts were useless. Whether he knew these things or not, once the molds had been cast, he was powerless to change his caste, for him to be other than he and her to be other than she.
His hands slipped from their perch upon her shoulders and traveled down the sides of her body, unwillingly resisting their own urges to touch her vulnerable waist in any way that could be construed as intimacy. He unbuckled her leather girdle, the one finely engraved with the horses that once carried their forefathers across the land before the advent of those infernal machines people now rode: the airships, the sail-less baghlahs, the steel caravans that shot like gunpowdered arrows over tracks that cut scars like terrible memories through the grassland, hills, and desert.
Amir placed the relic upon a gilded tray sitting atop an antique vanity at his back, near the door. He ran a finger over the portrait of her venerable grandfather, a delicate meerschaum carving set in a brilliant gold amulet, before it clattered there next. Then came the bracelets. He unhooked her earrings, fantastically jeweled bronze aegises with dangling sapphires, from her soft, cream-colored lobes. He wistfully set them to rest alongside the first pair he’d ever bought her, simple silver hoops set with a single malachite apiece, reminders of both cherished times past and terrifying recollections to come.
With the most routine of tenderness, her tunic was slipped up her thighs and eased over her still-full loins, tug by tug. It came over her head like a theatrical curtain, unveiling a marvelous, acrobatic performance of shimmering onyx hair. The plain fabric ended up on an ornate hook by the door next to the pieces of blue satin and white silk. Her limp body came softly off the chair’s cushion in his arms, her better arm clinging weakly around his kind neck, a malapropos that was either a display of presumptuous impunity or a tenuous remnant of trust.
Just as gingerly, she was lowered into the bath. The sponge worked its usual motions, though his thoughts were not in attendance. He was thinking of the only things wretched men such as he could: another man’s hands on her body; cryptomorphic words that lured sin like a fly to an evening-flower; everything he’d held true about himself, about Sadhi; the timbers of the life he’d built splintering apart and bursting into flame, that miserably content house of duty and righteousness.
The sponge rubbed roughly against her undergarments as they resisted its friction, undergarments he’d not bothered to remove. The treasures they once concealed from him were now something else, something his mind didn’t dare describe. They might have been grotesque devils. They might have grown mouths since he last saw them. They might start spouting endless mockeries.
What he feared most of all was that they might be exactly the same and what he might feel were they present for the ritual to which they were regularly invited. Revulsion was the most threatening of those feelings. Then came jealousy. Then suspicion. Then precedent. Then self-doubt. Then impotence. The never-to-be-answered questions he’d never dare ask. The fog of war. The instantaneous loss of all trust in any form of humanity.
His mind would be a bazaar of voices long after tonight : buying and selling, lying and pleading.
His hands kept on, knowing no other business.
His head swayed and jarred over his knees along with motion of the streetcar. Periodically, he would lift his head and look around and find it still empty, then return to his slumping posture. He closed his eyes for a bit, mercifully losing himself to the only sounds to be heard – the creak of the wheels along the track and the endless drone of the alchemical engine that drove them.
It was only a twenty minute walk to the Halek’s kahvehane, but this ride would cut it down to ten. His retreat to this teahouse was usually made as a course of habit, but tonight it was for sanctuary; it was the only place he could conjure to mind where he could be safe from Sadhi’s terrible presence. Once, as a child, he had seen a Kasbah in the south, worn by wind and sand into uninhabitability, all but swallowed by the desert around it. A millennium had ravaged his home in the space of a night.
Outside, he might see vendors furling their canvas tents and laborers straggling late through the emptying streets as an early night fell upon the city, but the night was too dark for the windows to do anything but the reflect bluish glare that lit the interior of the car. It was the blue of alchemy, reflected through a series of mirrored tubes directly from the swirling blue tempest of the engine that crackled and thrum in the rear. The same crackle and blue and thrum that lit and scored his daily labor at the shipyard. He should have stayed there with the crackle and blue and thrum. He should never have gone home.
Though nothing about his profession left him with any particular satisfaction, it would have been far better than what he’d come home to. If he didn’t hate his job before, he surely hated it now, knowing how he toiled to support his betrayer. He hated the new ways, the new machines, and he hated that he knew everything there was to know about them. He hated how the spindle of reagents reached out to elicit charge from the fuel-core, thunder-ore enriched via methods known only to a secretive cabal whom he hated too. He hated that the reagents had to be carefully calibrated to avoid over or under-charging the machine, either of which could result in catastrophic damage to the delicate parts.
The chore was tedious, and every engine needed to be re-tuned regularly. The engine didn’t care about your endeavors. If you put more love into its care, it gave none back. Engines demanded indifferently, and if you didn’t give, it would ruin itself, it would ruin you, and ruin the hours you invested keeping it from ruin. It was unnatural, and he much preferred the natural: loving the things that loved back; living with everything that lived; books that released captured minds when opened; hands on drums beating the night into fever dreams; fire that burned red and orange and yellow, not blue and purple and green.
Amir pulled a cord to halt the car as it neared the kahvehane. The damned machine nearly tripped him when it resumed as he was stepping off. He pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders as if it could fend off the threats this world seemed to have in endless supply. The establishment’s door stood open, leaking sounds and smells and warmth through its privacy curtain and into the street.
His mood fared no better once inside, to his chagrin, though he didn’t know why he’d ever expected it to. Tough, old Halek, the proprietor, repeated his usual preference without prompt, half a question and half a statement, but even that small comfort dashed itself to pieces upon the bulwark of pain encircling him. Amir picked a corner where he could be with himself and sat.
The synth of a half-dozen hookahs blazed away silently in the gloom around him, and along with the similarly-powered braziers draped the curtains and pillows and tables in cold, violet ambiance. No familiar faces were illuminated in the glow tonight. Part of himself wished for company, another dreaded it. At the other end of the room, a pair of gentlemen slithered in the crimson twilight over a backgammon board, somehow still able to see their pieces. A brazier hanging over them swayed almost imperceptibly, causing their shadow-selves to appear to be doing much more sinister acts. A young man plucked at the strings of a qanun, who seemed to improve a bit each night he played. None of it mattered.
Amir had made Fatimah’s scriptural mistake of looking back after he had quenched the hearth and was locking up the door. No matter how long he stared into the glow from the synthetic coals of the hookah, the burnt-in image of Sadhi, seated at the table where he’d left her, would not be overwritten. The white silhouette remained superimposed over everything he saw when he took his eyes away, struck in a pose of mocking indifference. He couldn’t tell if he had turned into the pillar of salt, or she.
The smoke rings he blew did not dance tonight; they were cold and apathetic, and one by one they floated away from him in an elegiac procession. What pain did those smoke rings know? He directed them into the glowing synth, watching very much like a callous god as each one distorted as it neared the heat, then ripped to shreds.
He gave the room cursory circumspection every so often, wondering if the man who’d cuckolded him just today ever came here, or if he could be present this very moment. He would never be able to tell, he had been too far away to make heads or tails of the stranger he’d glimpsed hurrying down the stairs and through the garden. Those horrible stairs, if he’d only knew what lay in wait for him – he would have waited in that garden forever; he would have laid down to patiently die. At the time, he’d thought the man was a messenger, or perhaps someone from the shipyard. But that was when Amir was still a cheerful husband returning home early to surprise his bedridden wife.
When Amir opened his door, which was only clumsily half-locked, he understood. He was never so careless in guarding his treasure, and Sadhi was incapable of opening it on her own. The smell of sweat and perfume. The darkened bedroom. The tousled covers on the bed. His Sadhi, half naked and sprawled upon them. The first look her eyes gave before she gained control of them – wide and scared – each of these things confirmed what he had dearly hoped she’d refute. But instead she turned her head and looked away, writhing her torso in an attempt to hide her bare legs from him. He yelled, and she lay still, forever from that moment withholding any refutation or admission.
He squeezed the bridge of his nose, and looked around himself again, partly in hope that no one could see the shape he was in, and partly in hope that Hamud might turn up, fellow regular at the teahouse and closest thing Amir had to a confidant. Against the reservations of saving face or setting wildfire rumors ablaze, he desperately needed someone to hear him, someone to know his pain. He wasn’t sure if it would help, but often the spirit places demands of great immediacy without any surety of their effects. Hamud might be the only thing left he could put his faith in after tonight, aside from strong coffee and sweet smoke, but even those comforts seemed poised to betray him. For all he knew, it could have been Hamud lying with his wife.
The days of trust were gone. They had been stolen away along with the days when real embers were placed on hookahs. Alchemical synth lacked the sincerity of real fire. It was passionless. It had no tendrils joyously licking the air. The heat it gave was disingenuous. He was certain that it even imparted a less than desirable taste to the shishah. His body crept forward, his face leaning into the mock-embers. Amir was aware on some level that he was hoping the synth would just burn everything away. If it could, if it cauterized like real fire, he might find it in his heart to accept it. He wrapped his arms around his head in a futile attempt to contain the sandstorm of his mind, but he was already caught.
His heart beat loudly in his ears. It was there, still and always, and it nudged his fragile mind. Did Sadhi have one in her chest as well? Did it pump compassion and faith and sanguinem vitae? Or did it perform its tasks silently, motionlessly, a cold contraption of elemental forces tinkered into existence by esoteric scholars? Every day he’d shoveled elemental detritus into the reactors that powered the machines to support their household; every day he’d shoveled love into that hungry furnace, Sadhi’s automaton heart!
Amir was not of any family of class. He never held himself entitled to anything, least of all Sadhi, yet even still– by all laws of nature and equity, wasn’t he? His life was spent in toil to prove to himself he was worthy of her, studying and working the soulless machine he’d never cared to understand. Even after her illness, after her body had failed her, even after it seemed she had no place to ask more of him, he strove further. The terrible thing was, she never did ask of him!
If she did not ask, what could she want?
Even from the times when he was just a poor foreigner clerking in a book store, when she was a bright-eyed nymph just as foreign as he, she only ever begged one thing from him. And now, after so many years, he hadn’t the need or use to recall those words which might have slept soundly in his mind, content to be forgotten. Now they sprang forth instead, embedding a jambiya deep in his back.
I kept my end of the bargain and so much more. Why wasn’t I enough?
And hadn’t he acquiesced and so much more, every cursed day of their cursed lives? He studied and worked furiously, secured a job that by rights should have been beyond him, and was promoted to foreman after only three years; not for any love of those leviathan constructs, but for the love he once believed belonged solely to him. Every day, calibrations to that cold, electric-blue-electric-beast that fizzled with counterfeit life. Every day, measurements and adjustments to her soul. Fire never demanded so much care and attention, it blazed of its own accord.
As long as it had something to burn.
A human heart never required calipers for assessment. He had believed for so long that she had true fire, possessed a heart of flesh. Had he been mistaken the entire time?
Alchemy. The word seethed from between his taught lips. His world had been so much better without it. So much simpler, agreeable, comprehensible, believable, before he came to Atur. People from his own part of Trebezonde weren’t powered by science. Livestock didn’t bolt for your neighbor’s pasture when your back was turned. Everything is… everything was… but now…
Sadhi sat silent in her chair, wrapped in the silks and satins attesting her gentle birth, awaiting her bath. The amber light of the setting sun framed her in a saintly glow, but it could not compare to the radiance of her smiling face as it turned to behold him. Her lips parted, mouthing the familiar words. There was a sudden explosion of warmth amid the cold maelstrom of his despair. Amir was as a tempest-tossed airship, beleaguered and battered, that had just breached the eye. It was a moment of simultaneous breaking and reforming within; a moment of clarity, though without comprehension. It was her voice. It drained the vitriol from his blood and reminded Amir what matter of man he was. He started to cry.
The tears came freely, burning hot as they streamed down his face. His body heaved in such tremolo that it seemed the entire room quaked, and strange new sounds came from deep in his throat. The men at the backgammon table were staring now, but what did he care? Let them look. His machismo was a useless relic of an old world he inhabited, and of the new world gifted to him, he hadn’t the faintest knowledge of its rules. The men looked away back to their game, more out of respect for the establishment rather than respect for him. Amir wondered if they’d ever had to test that sort of restraint.
He left the teahouse in a much different composure than he came with. His mind was almost calm as he wandered home down the near-deserted moonlit streets of his neighborhood. The northern sea-breeze that gained momentum between the canyons of brown bricks pushed him along on his feet; he was grateful for it, being so unsure of the ability of his legs this night.
Though his body was tired, his spirit was gaining momentum, maddened by the need to hear Sadhi’s voice. He was growing focused, determined, unimpeded by the fear and doubt and bitter pain that were steadily losing their grip on his mind.
The wind carried him over uncobbled avenues, past familiar storefronts and empty stalls, and the occasional lit window. He didn’t know what to expect, but he expected he needed something, anything. A look, a tear, a reason, a rejection, an apology. Just please, heaven, just let him hear her voice. He would shake it out of her if he had to; to wake up in his bed from this nightmare would be better. He wouldn’t let the years of love and books and baths and happiness escape so easily. He thought about fools’ errands and unlikely episodes of reconciliation as his feet plodded clumsily below. He thought about a grain of peace tumbling down a dune of turmoil.
His mind wandered further and further from the dire moment and into fields where time had no purchase, where any feeling, no matter how infirm its foundations when it was first felt, would weather eternities without wear. Bare legs, flawless, hale and mild, free of all modesty, laced with woolen strands of a frayed house dress, basking in the light of morning. A statuesque nose, wrinkled in vexation between the noisy leaves of a new book. Her sullen, glossy eyes that pierced him across the table as she whispered, ‘Amir, I love you,’ in such a way that they erased from his memory any other time she’d said those words either before or after. They gave him courage.
He was still afraid of what he might do when he saw her again. He might grab her and hold her tight, force her out of her silence. Maybe with enough of his love, hers would come back, along with the old Sadhi and the old smile and the old laughter. Maybe they’d both break down in sobs and find solace in each other’s arms. He was more afraid that none of those things would happen; he’d walk in and find her right where he’d left her. She’d be in bed, pretending to be asleep. Maybe he’d shake her, plead with her, scream at her, and in return, nothing. Maybe she would speak, and utter terrible things. Maybe she’d be vanished, a shadowy devil having whisked her away while he was out.
He begged the silence under his breath. He would forget anything had ever happened, he’d let it all go if she could come back to him. He’d do anything, and that was the key to an answer he couldn’t quite define, but it was on the tip of his tongue. Amir had become so embroiled with finding out where Sadhi’s love for him had gone that he’d forgotten where his love for her had been all along.
I’ll never find the one if I’ve lost the other.
He caught the first wisps of smoke in his nostrils a quarter mile from home. Real smoke, from a real fire. He looked around for the source of the rare smell. He thought of the midnight grills that used to crop up on the street, but he hadn’t seen one of those since he was a very young man. A morsel of lamb on a stick might have been just the thing he needed.
Amir traversed two more blocks before he heard the first bells in the sky. Looking up, the sky was dark and starless. His eyes divided their time between the road ahead and the night above as he continued. Minutes later, movement in the sky caught his eye; he was just able to make out a dark silhouette moving to intersect his course high above the city. Alchemical precipitators flared into life, bright blue on its hull, illuminating vapor in phantasmal light as they converted the air into volumes of water. As it neared, the airship materialized into full definition against the orange tinted clouds that hung over the road that led home.
As he broke into a run, more and more resounding bells precipitated from the silence of the night. The translucent stream of non-thoughts that accompanies adrenaline filled his mind. It couldn’t be the truth. He had quenched the hearth with great care, as he had always done. It couldn’t be so. He’d extinguished the oil lamp beside their bed, all the candles, leaving only a single sconce lit that was well protected. No, he mouthed as he fell to his knees, the scintillating orange glow highlighting his face and form against shadow, what he was imagining was not possible – but unfortunately, the mind has a preternatural knack for imagining the most improbably tragic conclusion when the happenstance is both improbable and tragic.
The glow issued from luminous waves of flame, bubbling from the second-story windows of a building that he, after much difficulty, recognized as his home. The plastered bricks darkened where the waves of molten bronze caressed them as easily as a southern chameleon changes its skin. The wooden trimmings that framed the doors and windows happily offered themselves in sacrifice, one after another right before his eyes; the ends of protruding timbers that girdled each level spouted jets of flame like some ornate, Pandaemonian fountain. The streets and adjacent homes readily welcomed the passion, light, and warmth that radiated from the products of all his love combusting with brilliant passion.
He was only at the basest level aware that the neighborhood was no longer desolate; swarms of people had come out of their homes to share in the festivity. Most ran around aimlessly, shouting incoherently at each other; a few bumped into him, but his body didn’t know it, still kneeling in the dust, head tilted skyward, two masterless servants hanging listlessly at its sides. His eyes were opened wide and unblinking, but they didn’t see the scene around him; they only saw his chances of life and happiness and closure burning away.
His world, his reason, his righteousness, his dogma, province, duty, suspicion, ire, happiness, sanity and soul were cremating in the conflagration. Even through the confusion, though hundreds of uncertainties would remain so; whether shame, spite or neglect kindled the conclusion of the life they shared; he was starting to understand.
This was Sadhi’s fire. Her true flames.
I
Sadhi sat silent in her chair, wrapped in the silks and satins attesting her gentle birth, calmly awaiting her bath. The burnt light of a nigh-failing evening filtered through two narrow, latticed windows, bolstered by a few tallow candles, gave a warm affectation to the scene, and of Sadhi’s backside, the chair, and the cistern behind them in the dusky light, no artisan heard of in the city of Atur, or the whole empire of Trebezonde for that matter, could have made a more serene portrait than the truth of it. She posed well for it. Her head did not turn, her eyes were not anxious; she simply sat in such stoic sobriety, though her bathing routine tonight was anything but routine.
Amir’s prying eyes retreated from the opening of the ajar door, and he was left feeling inexplicably sheepish as he ventured away into the parlor to tend the fire of the semaver. He crouched before it and added a few dry, slender chips into the blaze heating the kettle. The anger returned to wash away that brief, foolish feeling as he watched the water simmer in harmony with the blood within his own veins. He had no reason to be anything but an avatar of wrath tonight. The ever obedient flames lapped the wood up happily despite his mood, their bright, joyful countenances displayed and distorted upon the semaver’s polished brass. A vicious thought briefly crossed his mind, a thought of letting the water go for too long, of searing her flesh in their bath as she had seared his heart in their bed. Steam began to claw its way from under the cover and disappeared into the ceiling-shadows where neither sunset nor candle-flame could reach, ending his trance. He reached for the hook iron at this queue, and with it hoisted the kettle from the base. The water inside was at the proper temperature, the safe temperature.
With the iron and the kettle at its end lodged over and under one of his thick, well-muscled arms, his free hand put a lid over the semaver’s base, smothering the flames. Sadhi had often said he possessed a soldier’s arms. Keeping the pot balanced on the rod, he crossed his grandfather’s ancient rugs, and passed her grandfather’s Janissarium, the dusty emblems of his high station. It was a good thing he hadn’t lived to know what a wicked thing she had become, Prophet rest his soul. As briefly as he had known the man, he knew him as a man of honor; that chivalric, divine sort of honor, the kind that stands haughtily above all base inclinations and turns their faces into the dirt with the heel of a boot. He had always imagined himself cut from the same cloth as that man. Sourly, he doted on the failure of the grand-daughter to inherit that virtue until it became a mantra.
Returning to the washroom door, he loudly bumped it open with his shoulder and swung the large kettle through as quickly as he could in a ploy to lock his gaze with hers; to catch those eyes that had, for the evening, fled from him; to grab them and hold them responsible; to see them full of shame.
He was disappointed, catching only his own dismay. The portrait hadn’t changed: her head was held high, plumb with her relaxed yet unsubmissive shoulders. She did not look up, nor did she give any other physical receipt for his presence. There was not a sign about her to mark a woman caught just this midday sharing her bed with an interloper. Not even candles bothered to flicker in acknowledgement of his entry. Only the daylight had waned a bit more, which altered the ambiance towards the slightest degree of sensuality. His thoughts shuddered with frustrated and desperate anger. He had no referent within himself to reconcile how her frame could be so free of tension, or how it could make his so full of it.
While his mind was beset prodding the probabilities and plotting against platitudes, his body carried on cheerfully, with autonomy, completely ignorant of the war being waged in the soul it housed. It crossed to the far side of the room, to the cistern full of water freshly pumped from the well, and sat on its edge as it always had for the task of bathing his sole love.
Love. Whenever he cast his eyes in her direction, his heart still fell in his chest the way it did before, though now the feeling carried the additional gravity of grief, of loss, of wishing a thing that was so was not so. His hands ached to touch her, his mouth desperate to praise her with affirmation and adoration, despite the code of malice dictated by the facts. These feelings, so familiar, insisted that love would not slink away so easily, so far as he was dimly and grudgingly aware of. Love, just as deep, just as profound, yet it was something else now today than it was yesterday… different, besmirched. There was something wrong with it, some ailment; and like a sick child, it could not tell him with any coherence where it hurt. All the while, he couldn’t shake loose the feeling that there had been some mistake made on behalf of the facts.
The body crossed separately on its own plane of reality. It was happy, obedient, still full of ignorant passion. Its arms lowered the kettle in as they always had, the water sizzling against the tempered brass as it submerged. And as it had always done, the left arm reached in and upended the kettle below the surface though the metal was hot enough to cook an egg, enduring the pain as a point of pride for its service to noble, beautiful Sadhi. The right arm withdrew the kettle and rod together while the left remained, stirring the cool currents with the hot. When the right was free again it checked the temperature, the heat of the water stinging his knuckles, still raw from delivering a solid blow to the jaw of the coward who had violated his home this midmorning. His hands, however, much prefered to service Amir’s wife than warfare, and there never were two more loyal servants in all the empire. Satisfied with the quality of the bath, he rose and turned his attentions from it with no small amount of reluctance.
Amir approached Sadhi’s simple throne with what under other circumstances could have been taken for reverence. Standing behind her, he rested his heavy hands on her delicate shoulders and felt deceptively vibrant life pulsing within, and the softness of adulterous skin beneath silk and merino. He laid his heavy hands on the matter of the temple he once regularly worshipped at, but was now a desecrated fane overrun by infidels. He recalled an adage once said, somewhere in the fog of nonspecific memory, that the conquered livestock of the unfaithful should be burned in sacrifice rather than eaten. He looked down upon those heavy hands alongside her slender neck. It would be the easiest thing in the world to apply force, to end her as one would end lame chattel. No one would have blamed him, to be sure. The community would certainly take his side, seen he’d had the right of it. They might say, ‘It was what anyone would have done,’ or ‘It is better that she can’t live to shame either of you any longer,’ or ‘You were a saint for taking care of her the way you did, Amir; her end was just for betraying such goodness.’ Perhaps even, ‘God will surely compensate you in justice; if not in this life, then in the next.’
A shake of his head sufficed to scatter the sentiment. Such thoughts could not take root for long in his good nature.
His hands slipped from their perch upon her shoulders and traveled down the sides of her body, unwillingly resisting their own urges to contact her vulnerable waist in any way that could be construed as intimacy. He unbuckled her leather girdle, the one finely engraved with the horses that once carried their forefathers across the land before the advent of those infernal machines his countrymen now rode: the airships, the sail-less baghlahs, the steel caravans that shot like gunpowdered arrows over tracks that cut scars like terrible memories through the grassland, hills, and desert.
Amir placed the relic upon a gilded tray atop the antique vanity at his back. He ran a finger over the portrait of her venerable grandfather, a delicate meerschaum carving set in a brilliant gold amulet, before it clattered there next. Then came the bracelets. He unhooked her earrings, fantastically jeweled bronze aegises with dangling sapphires, from her soft, cream-colored lobes. He wistfully set them to rest alongside the first pair he’d ever bought her, simple silver hoops set with a single malachite apiece, reminders of both times past and of terrifying recollections to come.
With the most routine of tenderness, her tunic was slipped up her thighs and eased over her still-full loins, tug by tug. The plain fabric ended up on an ornate hook by the door next to the pieces of satin and silk. Her limp body came softly off the chair’s cushion in his arms, her better arm clinging weakly around his kind neck. Just as gingerly, she was lowered into the bath.
The sponge worked its usual motions, though his thoughts were not in attendance. He was thinking of the only things wretched men such as he could: another man’s hands on her body; cryptomorphic words that lured sin as a fly to an evening-flower everything he’d held true about himself, about Sadhi; the timbers of the life he’d built splintering apart and bursting into flame, that miserably content house of duty and righteousness.
The sponge rubbed roughly against the undergarments as they resisted the friction, undergarments he’d not bothered to remove. The treasures they once concealed for him were now something else, something his mind didn’t dare describe. They might have been grotesque devils. They might have grown mouths since he last saw them ,and might start spouting endless mockeries. He feared most of all that they might be exactly the same, and what he would feel were they present for this ritual they were regularly invited to. Revulsion was the most threatening of those feelings. Then came jealousy. Then suspicion. Then precedent. The self-doubt. The impotence. The never-to-be-answered he’d never dare ask. The fog of war. The instantaneous loss of all trust in any form of humanity. His mind would long after tonight be a bazaar of voices: buying and selling, lying and pleading.
His hands kept on, knowing no other business.
II
He decided to occupy the rest of that night at the corner-club, partly out of habit, but mostly from a drought of options, and even more so because it was the only place left that felt like sanctuary. He had once seen a kasbah in the south as a child, worn by wind and sand into a state of uninhabitability, sinking into the desert around it. A millennium had ravaged his home in the space of a night.
The ride in the streetcar had only intensified the delicate state of his nerves. The low hum of the engine had been a cacophony to his ears in that near-empty carriage, to the point where his thoughts during the trip were mainly occupied with regrets of not walking. It was the same sound he’d heard throughout the day’s labor, cold blue sparks crackling, whining and whirring in their alchemical energies. He knew how the spindle of reagents reached out to elicit charge from the fuel-core, thunder-ore enriched with alchemical power via methods known only to the secretive Cabal. He knew the reagents had to be carefully calibrated to avoid over or under-charging the machine, either of which could result in catastrophic damage to the delicate parts. The chore was tedious, and every engine needed to be re-tuned regularly. Nothing about his profession left him with any particular satisfaction. The engine didn’t care about your endeavors. If you put more love into its care, it gave none back. Engines demanded indifferently and if you didn’t give, it would ruin itself, it would ruin you, and ruin the hours you invested keeping it from ruin.
Even now his mood fared no better in his public refuge, to his chagrin. Amir had made Fatimah’s scriptural mistake of looking back at the doomed cities after he had quenched the hearth and was locking up the door. No matter how long he stared into the glow from the synthetic coals of the hookah, the burnt-in image of Sadhi would not be overwritten. A white silhouette remained superimposed over everything he saw when he took his eyes away, struck in a pose of mocking indifference. He couldn’t tell if he had turned into the pillar of salt, or she.
The smoke rings he blew did not dance tonight; they were cold and apathetic, floating away from him in an elegic procession. What pain did those smoke rings know? He directed them into the glowing synth, watching very much like a callous god as each one became distorted as it neared the heat, then ripped to shreds.
The synth of a half-dozen hookahs blazed away silently in the gloom, and along with the similarly-powered braziers, draped the curtains and pillows and tables in cold, red ambiance. No familiar faces were illuminated in the glow tonight. Part of himself wished for company, another dreaded it. At the other end of the room, another pair of gentlemen slithered in the crimson gloom over a backgammon board, somehow still able to see their pieces. A brazier hanging over them swayed almost imperceptibly, causing their shadow-selves to appear to be doing much more sinister acts.
He gave the room cursory circumspection every so often, partly half-hoping to catch a glimpse of the thief that had destroyed his home earlier in the day and subsequently wring his neck. There was little chance he’d show his face though, especially in a public place; as unlikely as crossing paths tonight might be, Amir was a member of no small standing in the community, and a mob would likely hunt the cuckolder down in the streets with a word. The cur was probably squatting in the hole he crawled from, nursing the effects of Amir’s earlier, hasty thrashing.
Partly he was hoping Hamud might turn up, his trusted club-company. Against the reservations of saving face or setting wildfire rumors ablaze, he desperately needed someone to hear him, someone to know his pain. He wasn’t sure if it would help, but often the spirit places demands of great immediacy without any surety of their effects. Perhaps Hamud might be the only thing left he could put his faith in after tonight, aside from strong coffee and sweet smoke, but even those comforts seemed poised to betray him.
He hated it all. The days of real embers were gone; alchemical synth lacked the sincerity of real fire. It was passionless. It had no tendrils joyously licking the air; the heat it gave was disingenuous. He was certain that it even imparted a less than desirable taste to the shishah. His body crept forward, his face leaning into the mock-embers. Amir was aware on some level that he was hoping the synth would just burn everything away. If it could, if it cauterized like real fire, he might find it in his heart to accept it. He wrapped his arms around his head in a futile attempt to contain his Charybdis mind, but he was already caught in it.
His heart beat loudly in his ears. It was there, still and always, and it nudged his fragile mind. Did Sadhi have one in her chest as well? Did it pump compassion and faith and sanguinem vitae? Or did it perform its tasks silently, motionless, a cold contraption of elemental forces tinkered into existence by esoteric scholars?
Every day he’d shoveled elemental detritus into the reactors that powered the loading carriages of the docks to support their household; every day he’d shoveled into that hungry furnace, Sadhi’s automaton heart! Amir was not high-born. He never held himself entitled to anything, least of all Sadhi, yet even still– by all laws of nature and equity, wasn’t he? His life was spent in toil to prove to himself he was worthy of her, studying and working the soulless machina he’d never cared to understand. Even after her illness, after her body had failed her, even after it seemed she had no place to ask more of him, he strove further. The terrible thing was, she never did ask of him! Even from the times when he was just a poor, foreign bookseller, before the books ran dry, when she was a bright-eyed nymph just as foreign as he if not for the wake of her father’s fragrant airs she trailed, she only ever begged one thing from him. And now, after so many years, he hadn’t the need or use to recall those words which might have slept soundly in his mind, content to be forgotten. They must have been a gaggle of spinsters, for they sprang forth instead, embedding a jambiya deep in his back.
And hadn’t he acquiesced and so much more, every cursed day of their cursed lives? He worked furiously, promoted to lead engineer of the port’s morning-shift after only three years; not for any love of those leviathan constructs, but for the love he once believed belonged solely to him. Every day, calibrations to that cold, electric-blue-electric beast that fizzled with counterfeit life. Every day, measurements and adjustments to her soul. Fire never demanded so much care and attention. A human heart had never required calipers for assessment. He thought for so long that she had true fire, possessed a heart of flesh. He resolved then and there that he had been mistaken.
Alchemy. His world had been so much better without it. So much simpler, agreeable, comprehensible, believable, before he immigrated to Atur. People from his own part of Trebizonde weren’t powered by science. Livestock didn’t cavort in your neighbor’s pasture when your back was turned. Everything is… everything was… now…
Sadhi sat silent in her chair, wrapped in the silks and satins attesting her gentle birth, awaiting her bath. The amber light of the setting sun framed her in a saintly glow, but it could not compare to the radiance of her smiling face as it turned to behold him. Her lips parted, mouthing familiar words. The sudden explosion of warmth ripped Amir out of the deadly miasma. The shift gripped him in shock. He was an airship speeding away at full thrust, then violently lurching in catastrophe as he reached the end of a tether left fastened in negligence. One moment he was gone, and the next he suddenly remembered himself, what matter of man he was, and the vitriol drained from his blood. He started to cry.
The tears came freely, burning hot as they streamed down his face. His body heaved in such tremolo that it seemed the entire room quaked, and strange new sounds came from deep in his throat. The men at the backgammon table were staring now, but what did he care? Let them look. His machismo was a useless relic of an old world he inhabited, and of the new world gifted to him, he hadn’t the faintest knowledge of its rules. The men looked away back to their game, more out of respect to the situation rather than to him. Amir wondered how common such restraint really was.
He left the corner-club with a much different composure than he came with. His mind was inexplicably calm as he wandered home down the near-deserted moonlit streets of northern Atur. The sea-breeze that picked up momentum between the canyons of brick and mortar pushed him along on his feet; he was grateful for it, being so unsure of the ability of his legs this night.
Defying his tired limbs, his thoughts were focused, determined, unimpeded by the fear and doubt and bitter pain now bewildered by the battle it was suddenly losing. The wind carried him over uncobbled avenues, past familiar shops and empty vending stalls, and the occasional lit window.
He didn’t know what to expect, but he expected he needed something, anything. A look, a tear, a reason, a rejection, an apology. Just please, heaven, just to let him hear her voice. He would shake it out of her if he had to. To wake up in his bed from this nightmare would be better. He thought about fools’ errands, and unlikely episodes of reconciliation as his feet plodded clumsily below. About a grain of peace tumbling down a dune of turmoil.
He thought of lots of things as he walked, his mind wandering further and further from the dire moment and into fields where time had no purchase, where any feeling, no matter how infirm its foundations when it was first felt, would weather eternities without wear. Bare legs, flawless, hale and mild, free of all modesty, laced with woolen strands of a house dress’ trim, basking in the light of morning. A statuesque nose, wrinkled in vexation between the noisy leaves of a new book. Her sullen, glossy eyes that pierced him across the table as she whispered, ‘Amir… I love you,’ in such a way that they erased from his memory any other time she’d said those words before or after.
He was slightly afraid of what he might do when he saw her again. He might grab her and hold her tight, force her out of her silence. Maybe with enough of his love, hers would come back, along with the old Sadhi and the old smile and the old laughter. Maybe they’d both break down in sobs and find solace in each other’s arms. He was more afraid that none of those things would happen; he’d walk in and find her right where he’d left her. She’d be in bed, pretending to be asleep. Maybe he’d shake her, plead with her, scream at her, and in return, nothing. Maybe she would speak, and utter terrible things. Maybe she’d be vanished, a shadowy devil having whisked her away while he was out. He begged the silence under his breath. He would forget anything had ever happened, he’d let it all go if she could come back to him. Amir’s heart ached for her and every step he took jostled the organ, making the pain reverberate. He’d do anything.
He caught the first wisps of smoke in his nostrils a quarter mile from home. Not knowing what to make of it, he looked around for a glimpse of a rare torch, or an old-fashioned midnight grill. A morsel of lamb on a stick would ease his spirits right about now, but he encountered no such relief.
A couple blocks passed before he heard the bells in the sky. Looking up, the sky was dark and starless. His eyes divided their time between the road ahead and the night above, until after a few minutes passed he was able to make out a dark shape moving to intercept his course high above the city. Alchemical precipitators glittered bright blue on its hull, illuminating vapor in phantasmal light as they converted the air into volumes of water. As it neared, the airship’s silhouette materialized into definition out of the orange tint that particular patch of sky was taking. As he broke into a run, more and more resounding bells precipitated from the silence of the night.
The translucent stream of non-thoughts that accompanies adrenaline filled his mind. It couldn’t be the truth. He had quenched the hearth with great care, as he had always done. He’d left no candles burning, only a single sconce that was well protected from mishaps. No, he realized as he fell to his knees, the scintillating orange glow highlighting his face and form against shadow, what he was imagining was not possible, but unfortunately, the mind has a preternatural knack for imagining the most improbably tragic conclusion when the happenstance is both improbable and tragic.
The glow issued from luminous waves of flame, bubbling from the second-story windows of a building he, after much difficulty, recognized as his home. The plastered bricks darkened as the waves of molten bronze caressed them, as easily as a chameleon changes its skin. The wooden trim around doors and windows happily offered themselves in sacrifice, one after another right before his eyes, and the ends of protruding timbers that girdled each level spouted jets of flame like some ornate, Pandaemonian fountain. The streets and adjacent homes readily welcomed the passion, light and warmth, the products of all his love combusting in radiance.
He was only at the basest level aware that the neighborhood was no longer desolate; swarms of people had come out of their homes to share in the festivity. Most ran around aimlessly, shouting incoherently at each other; a few bumped into him, but his body didn’t know it, still kneeling in the dust, head tilted skyward, two masterless servants hanging listlessly at its sides. His eyes were opened wide and unblinking, but they didn’t see the scene around him, just his chances of closure burning away.
His world, his reason, his righteousness, his dogma, province, duty, suspicion, ire, happiness, sanity and soul were cremating in the conflagration. Even through the confusion, though hundreds of uncertainties would remain so: whether her shame, spite or neglect kindled the conclusion of the life they shared, he was starting to understand. This was Sadhi’s fire. Her true flames.
No sir. One bad experience didn’t make me jaded.
One bad experience, after suffering many like it,
But one above all did not make me jaded:
One above all opened my eyes
To every experience;
The individuals were variables,
The reasons operations,
The outcome was the constant.
One above all opened my eyes
To the algorithm of reality:
Expectation are our blinders,
And our ego the yoke,
And the road ever an illusion.
guy de truc 