— So if that’s enough to stop you, consider yourself stopped. If it isn’t and you intend to succeed through force make your move now or leave.
— Manuel — it shook its head. ¿You too? ¿Why is it whenever I’m portrayed it’s like I’m trying to ruin something? ¿Is that my reward? I’m just trying to wake people, people whose idiocy offends me regardless of how comfortable they may be in it. It is I who exalts the eternal verities yet my opponents shamelessly argue that an idyll is being perverted. ¡The truth! Truth like, no one ever complained of nonexistence. ¿How is that a perversion of anything?
—¿Why do you care? I mean, about your bad name.
— Just bodies but every good army needs them. Mine swells daily but it only does so because I treat every prospective recruit like a potential four-star general.
— I’m an army of one, leave me alone.
— It’s not that kind of process but fine, I will. Surely you won’t deny me some parting thoughts however. ¿Why look at yourself and feel repulsed as you so clearly do?
— Not looking at myself, looking at you.
—¿And you don’t see where we mirror? Existence is a curse and something that emerges from the accursed cannot be expected to produce anything save for spiteful enmity and opposition.
— Again you confuse the order of things. It only feels like a curse you’re opposing because you spend it in spiteful enmity.
— No! That’s naïve propaganda. Think of the moaning multitudes who thought that true until they woke from their pleasant dream to find themselves in Hell. Nothing less than your beloved two now move to join the teeming humanity immured in that place.
— No such place. I know because I’ve been there. You’re trying to get me to think like my dimwitted ancestors who openly wondered when the kingdom of God would arrive instead of recognizing it within themselves and exporting it in the form of actions based on Love. If we fail to create it that’s on us along with the consequences of that failure but there’s no place to get sent. Like you, it doesn’t exist.
— Insultingly untrue.
— And as for my two, whoever harms them will think Hell heavenly compared to where I send them.
— The kingdom of God may not be a place in the classic sense but even I concede that it refers to phenomena, like your Love for example, that undoubtedly exist. Naturally then Hell must also have its own actually existing referents. These referents share the same ontological grandeur as Love and you can intuit their great power when you experience states like jealousy or wrath.
— No. They’re mere negations, drawing power only commensurate with how violative they are of the most powerful force we know. You say we’re in a lion’s den. I concede that. It’s an uninteresting fact about the physical world we live in, it doesn’t tell me how to do that living. For that exemplar I don’t have far to look. You say you traffic in spiteful opposition? I reject that emptiness. So you are free to continue to do so but understand that I am one of those you oppose. I stand for what you most despise and your defeat is certain if only because of that fact.
— You can’t truly believe that. I don’t claim to have anything remotely approaching his natural power but I will never submit. If the human history of warfare has taught us anything it’s that there are ways around such a disadvantage. It will always be easier to destroy than construct. Think of that church, so painstakingly built only to be razed in minutes. Everything you build Manuel, including a family, is built using grains of sand.
— Then I’ll build structures of such beauty that continued presence will not be necessary for permanence in the mind’s eye of all who witness it.
It lets out a defeated but smiling exhale.
— You’re certainly free, that word again, to try. Like my opponent I don’t interfere. But know this about this defeat of mine you foretell. Understand that merely latent power, no matter how great, carries no import. ¡He won’t use it, ever! Anything suggesting otherwise is at best human sophistry. You are, all of you, alone. Delivered into evil by a truth unknowable to you yet monstrous in its scope. Beset by a sea of trespasses so searching in vain for a soothing voice in the dark. ¿Searching like a suckling infant and what do you receive in response? Silence. Always that lacerating silence from a nowhere entity that audaciously claims to be everywhere. He can’t be coaxed into so much as an encouraging word yet abject servility is going to be his reward? Think of that as you move to your death because what courses through your veins in those final moments is what controls.
It rises up and it is as if Anger itself stands across from him.
— Unless of course none of that matters because you’ll soon be turning back to go home and pray.
Manuel puts his face in his bloody hands and cries for the first time since he was a child. He is experiencing the pain that comes from the recognition of a weakness that can’t be overcome. When he lifts his face he witnesses the final seconds of a transformation. The eventual new form is hard to predict at first as the Figure shrinks onto all fours.
On the ground it looks as if a forgotten species is being turned inside out that it might be thoroughly examined for the edification of future generations. Then he sees it is a dog. Of all the world’s dogs it is the dog he left heaving its final breaths. Still mortally injured, still heaving, the beast summons what final strength remains and runs at his neck. Best he can do is raise a palm and that does nothing. The dirty teeth look like thorns growing out of his neck and their jaw is locked deathly tight. He cannot locate the canine’s neck to choke its life out and the lack of usable air is putting him in a dreamlike state.
This is how it ends he thinks and a placidity comes over him, a belief (not quite a belief because unlike any sensation he’d ever before experienced) that even though the worst was undoubtedly about to befall him what we call worst is neither bad nor good. Also calm because of exhaustion in the literal sense. He feels then he has nothing more to give and that seems as good a definition of death as any.
Then he remembers why he sits in the jungle, covered in his own blood, struggling with a hellish hound, and questioning the value of continued humanity. He buries his hand into the dog’s gaping wound. Feeling around in the mushy squirm he seizes what has to be a vital organ, it pulsates through his fingers, and pulls as hard as he can. He feels and hears various tensile fibers snap and a sudden fountain of beastly blood leaves his face almost uniformly red. The jaw now releases suddenly and the creature falls to his side and into a lifeless heap.
Manuel collapses into unconsciousness.
When he later awakes to the noise of the rain stopping he almost laughs at the intensity of his now-concluded brain fever. The dog however was real and as severe pain cruelly registers on his neck he spits on its limp remains. Then Man stands through agonized spasms of instability. He anchors his legs to the ground, first tentatively then defiantly. His hand grasps his own neck as he breathes in all the air’s energy.
Then he accelerates back into the chase, certain now of the proper path.
* * *
CHOLERA the doctor said through a shaking head and all who heard the utterance, either then or as it was repeated continually and morbidly, knew from experience precisely what that meant.
2 The sounds of violent human expulsion, the sounds really of life being rejected, grew to a clamor throughout the village.
3 A significant cross needed to be built, she said, then placed above the door to their home. Only God could spare them.
4 He pointed out, he said he had to, that this process she had in mind had a lot in common with superstition and therefore could not be counted as praise for the party being addressed. That this was an Old Testament, therefore unsophisticated and non-Christian, view of God as warrior king full of bloodlust but able to dispense mercy.