One minute everyone is equal and the next minute they see that they’re not, or they’re appealing for help to a higher power. A god takes the shape of a man.
Mysticism, ritual, pageantry, emptied of content, Prophet. Rules to follow, without being told. The American evangelicals even endow some of it with a veneer of legitimacy.
Soon they start to see themselves as one in the same, all believing in that same figurehead.
None except that nation, and you know who that is now. We’ve always had more than enough minor engines of resentment among the ones who might do some damage, so I remove them, finding multiple other ways of pacifying the rest. Then it’s South vs. North, East vs. West, this tribal yawping vs. that tribal yawping, the lighter ones vs. the blacker ones, but with something to placate them all at the end. Nothing like a forgiving mirror.
A nation of narcissists, knowing nothing. You still have to be vigilant. I wasn’t.
Is this what you screamed your lungs out for? Was that your story about reality? What do you hear right now?
Your voice.
With those ears? I should not have to waste a breath asking anything twice. What do you hear?
I hear your body ever so slightly shift in your chair, your thick buttocks cushioned by a very soft pillow, softer than a calf’s sack. Though you love handmade suits from Italy and the UK in private, and your Nehru collars, African printed cloth and kufis in public, you have on a uniform, a plain one of ours of which you have many, a castle’s worth, I can hear the faintest rustle of the duck, it’s immaculately starched and pressed and hasn’t lost its crispness because of this heat. You have on a black beret, fabricated and blocked in the Basque region of Spain, not the Chinese kind, though you have been to Shanghai alone several times within the last six months. That hat sits easily on your shaved head, smooth as an egg, though sometimes when you touch it the rougher, gray hairs that you didn’t completely remove softly scratch against its inner lining. Instead of your usual patent leather driving loafers, you are wearing black steel-toe boots, thick soled, polished by peasants’ tongues as I used to say, so shiny you could scorch the sun with them. You don’t have on any medals, any jewelry, any makeup, any cologne, except a very mild deodorant manufactured in Cape Town whose combined fragrances my ears, let alone my nose, cannot make out.
I knew you had it in you.
You knew.
Can you hear how aroused your skill has made me?
Please.
Can you hear that?
Yes, I can hear your… pressing against the fabric of your…. Please don’t.
Don’t what?
You know. Please. I don’t….
Have these months not taught you anything? Have you completely lost the ability to see into the future? Put yourself inside my head like you used to. Your little hologram or code or poem or statistical algorithm or whatever it was.
Yes. No.
If I wanted I would have done that straightaway. If I wanted your wife, your mother, your father, your children, your grandchildren, the grandchild living in the penthouse condo in Abu Dhabi and the one working for the Royal Bank of Sweden in Stockholm and the ones cavorting like princes in their chateaus in Atlanta and Los Angeles, if I wanted your entire native ancestral village to lie prone before me as I entered them one by one, if I wanted to raze the entire village and rape all the crushed and dismembered and burnt bodies, if I wanted to destroy every vestige of every single soul that spoke the same language as you and rape their ghosts, rape your ancestors who were my ancestors, if I want to rape the vestigial mother and fathers of us all, if I wanted to rape the last embers of your existence and memory and then what wasn’t even left after that, I would have done so. I can write the story of reality however I see fit. At any time.
No. Yes.
And if I instead wanted it to be as it was when we sat facing each other in the darkness in that clearing, when binding ourselves to each other not just to overthrow our supposed liberator, the tribune of the people, our leader with his bloodshot eyes and blood-drenched hands and blood-drained soul, if I wanted it as it was when we devoured each other that night, like lions, though we were both still cubs, when I shared everything of myself with you and you with me, or at least I thought you did, though you were even holding something back then. Admit a sick man into your home, but not your bed.
No. I was looking ahead. Yes.
You were looking ahead to the bead on my throat.
No, I was… looking back—
And as you entered me you were thinking instead of my bond, this will be a dagger, or a bayonet, or a Kaleshnikov butt…. You were thinking of terrors that would send the most extreme dystopian writers into paroxysms, that would make our ancestral spirits and the griots who have shared with us their stories shudder with envy and horror, and you would start as soon as you could.
No, not that night. I waited, until the time was right.
In time, then. With that burst of fear you feasted on your second chance. Try harder. I do want you to surprise me. How can you do that? If you don’t do that… what else?
Do I hear?
Do you?
Yes. I hear your dyed black mustache curling upwards at the corners of your full lips as they bow into a grin, I hear those lips brushing against your teeth whiter than Kibo snow, I hear your pleasure at how this is going, how things have unfolded over these last few years. I also hear the sweat trickling down into the open placket of your uniform shirt because even though they have turned up the air and opened the vents this cell is still a dutch oven, I hear your flaring nostrils, flecked with the residue of an early morning snort of cocaine as you were listening to your favorite rap artist whom you flew in to perform at your daughter’s 13th birthday party and who also put on a private show for you, your nose which is now smeared with some sort of paste made of Noxzema and miracle fruit, nevertheless periodically wrinkling at the stench, though they cleaned me up, several times this morning, they scrubbed me and this room up and down, every corner as well as the ceiling, before you would set foot in here.
The time had come.
I hear that you want to tell me what you are going to do to me but you want to draw it out on the one hand, but you are also ready to get back to all the things you had planned for today, beyond this. I hear that you are going to kill me, and take great pleasure in it.
I would never take pleasure in such things, certainly not with you, you know better than that, but you need to listen more closely. The man who listens to the wind hears nothing of life. Prophet, have you not been listening to me? To my words. To all these years? Or only to your own internal, empty silence?
Yes, this terrible silence.
Have you really forgotten me so fully? Purged the text of your memory? Prophet of Society you would recall that I took and still take little pleasure in the sorts of things you did, not in building airports or hospitals or reducing them to rubble. Not in appointing generals to march my armies or ministers to oversee the economy or human welfare or the mint. Not in bludgeoning them with my own fists when I have tired of the extent of their looting, even though I ordered it. Not in flushing towers of bureaucrats or rats, of democratic activists or patriotic neo-fascists. Not in standing beside yet another pale monarch or prime minister or even our browner ones, their many thousand-dollar suits or dresses or traditional garb smelling of the enslaved child workers and women who assembled them. Not lying with my wives in any of our hundred beds knowing that not even they would dare think of slitting my throat for fear of what would happen to them if such a thought entered their heads, nor with any of the whores in the most sumptuous hotels in foreign capitals, nor any of the others here or anywhere else in any of the countless beds I requisition for a night or a week or a month, depending upon my moods and whims, the circumstances. Not in giving speeches or proclamations or orders, not issuing decrees, ultimatums or threats. Neither in condemnation nor clemency. Not in rites or ceremonies, not before our gods or God, not before Christ or Allah or any other, not in our languages or in Arabic or English or Chinese or any other tongues. Not in the countryside or the savannahs, nor atop our highest peaks nor in the sea’s mouth, not in the cities the colonizers left nor the ones you built nor the ones I willed into being. Not in pets or children or noise or silence. Not in telling the truth or in lying, both among your many arts, though I sometimes must. Not in a single one of these actions, or most others, including not taking pleasure in a single thing at all.