June 2, 2024, 5:11 P.M.
I arose my usual time that particular day - a Monday, a cloudy day chilled by a north wind. As expected, Gimbledon was throwing the ball to his two boys, Bishop, the elder, aged 11; and Samuel, the younger at age 9. If either boy missed the ball, he was summoned to account for his slovenly performance. This ball playing was an early Monday ritual.
Samuel was by far the better of the two, he rarely missed the ball; but if he did he was severely taken to task, sometimes even hit, where Bishop, constantly letting the ball get past him, was never hit and rarely scolded. Most thought this disparity of treatment stemmed from Sammie, as he was called by those who cherished him, being so much better. But I knew otherwise. Sammie had dark hair and eyes, the assumption being his taking after some distant ancestor. But I knew otherwise.
By day's end all three had been torn to pieces by beasts. Gimbledon saw them break into our city; he was near the side gate when it was breached. He grabbed Bishop and made a dash for safety. Sammie was left to fend for himself, though they managed somehow to do Bishop first, then Gimbledon, then Sammie. I screamed "No!" but no sound came forth. I banged against the window pan, but to no avail.
--My God, who did this? Who would put a baby on the edge of the cliff? Who could abandon him like this? I must save him!
"No! You must not move this child! To violate our most sacred code will curse our people forever!" --
--I tried to resist but couldn't. She was not only beautiful and seductive, there was something else about her to this day overlooking the Deep Valley I still cannot put a mane to.
"Leave now, he's here," she tells me. "He must not find you here." --
I searched all day but made myself not find her. I carried a lock of Sammie's black hair. I still have it as I look down at this baby lying at the cliff's edge.
--"If you move the child - any of them - the Chosen One will be made to forget our most sacred name, known only to him, before he can pass it along to his Chosen Successor. You must leave this child to his fate." --
--Monday night was story night. They would pass around books, hundreds of books from our libraries. We would sit and quietly read. That night I happened to be seated next to her in the great auditorium when they handed us all The Collected Works of Shakespeare. King Lear had been the one chosen for us. I could sense her reading the same passage.
What do you suppose this means, I wondered. And I could tell she too wondered. We knew very well the ancient vernacular, we could read and write from memory the words; but we could not put those words together to produce anything meaningful. She looked up as I looked up; and we both laughed.
"Beautiful words," she said.
"But no message," I said. --
- "He was one of our greatest leaders of ancient times, this King named Lear," Brown Shirt's woman told me. "He sacrificed his beloved daughter to save his people - our ancestors. Our story tellers tell of his great exploits on the day appointed for story telling" -
Brown Shirt has sharp eyes. He sees the man with black hair and dark eyes watching, trying to scream but unable to bring forth any sound. Then he sees this man disappear. He too disappears and was standing naked except for his Brown Shirt in front of a naked woman who was not his woman. She summoned him. His eyes glazed over and he watched as a man with black hair and dark eyes stabs him in his heart. He smiles, takes his trophy and ascends to where he meets the man with black hair and dark eyes. Brown Shirt has light hair and eyes. He holds his hand out and offers the eyes of young Samuel Gimbledon to the man with black hair and dark eyes. With his other hand he takes out a dagger, smiles again, and hands it to the man with black hair and dark eyes.
"These are yours," Brown Shirt smiles and tells this man with black hair and dark eyes just before a dagger rams through his Brown Shirt into his heart. He falls against the man with black hair and dark eyes, who then removes all his clothes and strips Brown Shirt of his clothes and puts Brown Shirt's clothes on. Then he bends down and kisses Brown Shirt's naked belly right where five deep gashes pierce his skin.
The man with black and dark eyes staggers out of the room to look for other survivors. He finds none. His belly still hurts where he kissed Brown Shirt as he leaves his city to go among the beasts who pillaged his city and murdered everyone. He is unaware that in his hands are still the dark eyes of Samuel Gimbledon and the dagger which plunged into Brown Shirt's heart.
When he comes to a place where there are people about, he goes to one tent like place and enters, where he finds a naked woman who he sees standing beside a naked man with black hair and dark eyes at the edge of a cliff. She summons him. He begins to undress, starting with Brown Shirt but the woman screams and turns away.
"Someone came behind as I removed a boy's eyes and struck me. Surely I would not otherwise attempt to remove Brown Shirt and bring a great curse on our people," the man with black hair and dark eyes tells the naked woman. He then removes his pants. His eyes glaze over as he watches a naked man with black hair and dark eyes hold up a baby to his belly to let it suckle on his wounds before he wraps it in Brown Shirt and lays it back down.
- A boy with light hair and eyes smiled as five gashes were made in his belly and a Brown Shirt placed over his head.
- In ten years he will grow into this Brown Shirt. He will become the Chosen Successor. He will never again stand naked until the Chosen One whispers the sacred name in his ear with his dying breath. Then he will go out of the old Chosen One to become the new Chosen One and place Brown Shirt on his Chosen Successor. -
- "Out there are wild beasts who know only sacrilege, killing, the maiming of children, the abandonment of babies. We know this because this is how they were taught before they were sent away when they were no longer needed."
A boy with black hair and dark eyes listened as his father told of the world outside their city, a wild, lawless world inhabited by mindless beasts of burden good for nothing now that their bodies were no longer needed for brute labor.
"Although once in a while a beauteous woman appeared among them," the boy's father said with a sly wink at his son. This boy's father went on to tell how these beasts ate only bugs and weeds.
"Why do they eat bugs and weeds? We kill the bugs and pull up the weeds in our yard."
"We gave them no choice," the boy's father explained. "They were unworthy of the foods we eat."
- These bugs are not so terrible, the man with black hair and dark eyes decided. Tomorrow I will eat weeds.
- Weeds aren't so terrible either, the man decided.
- The boy with light hair and eyes wearing Brown Shirt sat listening to the Chosen One tell of many secret things which no one else could hear, only the Chosen Successor. This boy had grown used to the wounds on his belly. He asked the Chosen One if he could look at those wonderful wounds when no one else was around, but was told he must never lift Brown Shirt from his belly or a curse would befall his people. The boy with light hair and eyes smiled and promised he would never lift Brown Shirt. -
- "My friend is with child" the beautiful woman told the man with black hair and dark eyes. -
- "My God it's his!" -
On Monday the city dwellers read of a great prince who swore vengeance on the man who murdered his father. The words of this story were very appealing to the city dwellers; they found their arrangement both interesting and beautiful. Much discussion ensued about the relevance of these old words to present day linguistics. While everyone discussed the words, a teenage boy with black hair and dark eyes wept unnoticed in the back of the auditorium. He thought he detected something hidden within the words, something wonderful and which would help make sense of everything; but he could not quite identify or even put a name to it.
The man with black hair and dark eyes wept hearing about a great prince of these people named Hamlet from a place named Denmark, who fought hard to extract vengeance against someone who had committed a very great wrong yet bore the protection of the entire society. In the end this prince died; on his lips were the words "The rest is silence." Everyone listening knew the meaning of these words, except one. And that was why he wept.
"Why did you weep?" the beautiful woman asked. He knew why but he could never tell anyone that the light hair and eyed man he killed and whose Brown Shirt and wounds he took would have known what the words meant and he would give his life to go back and ask Brown Shirt what they meant.
- "These are some of our most sacred words," Brown Shirt revealed. "Though you took the wounds from my belly, you are past the time when you could absorb the meaning inside the wounds. I am sorry. This is why I took that boy's eyes to give you, so that your dark eyes may always look upon his dark eyes. And he will step back and forth from when he was born to when he died to when you wear Brown Shirt to the end of your days."
The man with light hair and eyes lying naked on a city floor smiled before going back dead. -
- "Father, who is the man with the Brown Shirt?" the boy with black hair and dark eyes asked.
"I don't know. What fabric is this Brown Shirt? Is it silk? cotton? or a synthetic?"
"It's a special shirt worn by one man only until he gives it to his Successor."
"A strange shirt," the boy's father mused. "It must be quite dirty, even ragged. It may have lice - don't go near this man. I know of no one in our city so slovenly. He must stink."
"No," replied the boy. "Even the wound on his belly doesn't stink."
"Has this man shown himself to you?"
"I took his clothes after he gave me Sammie's eyes and I killed him."
"Where are these clothes?"
"I'm wearing them. Someone must take his place."
"I see. And who is this Sammie whose eyes were given you?"
"He is Gimbledon's son - the one who looks like me." -
- "Who will take my place when the man with black hair and dark eyes kills me?" the light haired boy with light eyes asked the Chosen One.
"That is not your concern," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor. "Your son will take your place. But it is out of your hands."
"These belong to you," Brown Shirt said as he handed Sammie's eyes to his killer.
When the man with black hair and dark eyes removed Brown Shirt and put it on himself, the gash in its fabric healed itself and the blood of the man with light hair and eyes soaked itself into the fabric and vanished the moment the wounds on his belly were kissed.
- "So the past remains with us?" the Chosen Successor with black hair and dark eyes asked the Chosen One.
"How can it not? There is nowhere for it to go; it must remain where it occurred."
"And the man with light hair and eyes will always remain beside me?"
"He has nowhere else to go."
"And he will stand naked forever?"
"You took his clothes. He must be wherever they are," the Chosen One said.
"And when I find his son and give my clothes to the boy?"
"He will leave your side."
"Yet he'll still be beside me."
"Now you are beginning to understand," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor.
"But neither he nor I will ever hear the name of our God."
"You will not."
"Nor will we be able to comfort each other."
Again he was told "You will not."
- "If only I hadn't killed," the boy with black hair and dark eyes confessed to his friend Gimbledon.
"Killed who?"
"The man with light hair and eyes. I killed him because of what he did to your son Sammie."
Gimbledon laughed. "I have no son," he pointed out. "Nor will I until I become a man and take a wife. By then you will have forgotten all about this light haired man."
The boy with black hair and dark eyes shook his head. "Whether I forget him or not I will still kill him. It's already happening. And I will take his clothes and kiss the wound on his belly."
Gimbledon laughed at his friend's absurdity. "And will you also suck his dick?" he jokingly asked.
"No, I will only kiss his wound. And his son will suckle the wound on my belly."
"I've seen you naked at the gym. You have no wound on your belly."
"You dreamed all this," the school counselor assured the boy with black hair and dark eyes. "Boys who fear they may become homosexual often fantasize such things as killing their ideal man and molesting his son. It's quite common."
"And then falling off the cliff in pieces?" the boy asked.
"Oh yes - falling. That proves this is all a homo erotic fantasy. You should go kneel before the altar and ask God for guidance and tell His priest of your dream that he might help you."
The boy with black hair and dark eyes did as instructed; but the priest, instead of helping him, condemned him for committing the great blasphemy of daring to look into the future, which only God can know and no man may look upon.
"But the future is with us all the time!" the boy insisted. "Just as is the past."
"Go!" the priest commanded. "And never return! Thy blasphemy is too great even for our Almighty Father. It is of the Devil, this blasphemy. And if allowed to flourish it will destroy our city and kill all its citizens. So go. And never speak of this again!"
The boy with black hair and dark eyes sought out a hiding place within the city where he could hide whenever he began seeing the past or the future, a place where he could look out and watch the citizens of his city yet no one on earth could ever look up and see him.
-Yet there was Brown Shirt, looking up after tearing young Sammie to pieces and pointing to the exact place. --
The boy with black hair and dark eyes sought out his school's Professor of Literature for an explanation.
"Professor, I have a question about last evening's reading of Hamlet."
"Of course. What troubles you, son?"
"The last words Hamlet says 'The Rest Is Silence.' What does it mean?"
"Of course, I'd be glad to parse it for you. It's quite simple, really. We start with the first word - The. 'The' is a definite article. 'Rest' is a bit tricky: it can be a noun or a verb, depending how it's used within the sentence, as well as its placement. 'Is' of course is an intransitive verb. And 'Silence,' like 'Rest," can be either a noun or a verb - again, depending upon it usage. Is there any other passage in Hamlet you need help with?"
"But Professor: I want to know what the words actually mean."
"I've just explained it, son. What is it you still don't understand?"
"When Hamlet says it, what does he mean by it?"
"Bear in mind, son, this play was written many centuries ago. It's possible the words' usage differed somewhat from our modern explication. That's to be expected. We can never know for certain how precisely the words were intended to be parsed back then. You seem dejected, son."
"Brown Shirt told me I'd never come to understand those words of Hamlet."
"Well, you send this Brown Shirt to me and I'll set him straight."
"No! I dare not or he'll kill you as he did Sammie!"
"I don't believe I know this Sammie. Who is he?"
"He's Gimbledon's younger son."
"Gimbledon has only one son. Is the boy not a friend of yours?"
"Sammie's my friend's son, who he suspects of not being his."
It was finally beginning to dawn on the Professor of Literature what was going on. He shook his head wearily, but smiled nonetheless.
"So this is one of those student pranks my colleagues have been telling me about. Well, son, you had me going. But you'd better run along now. And tell this boy with the Brown Shirt any good English Teacher can parse any part of any Hamlet soliloquy."
When the boy with black hair and dark eyes got outside, he at once made for his hiding place and broke down and cried because it was plain to him he would never know what Hamlet meant.
When, later, he told Gimbledon about it, his friend burst out laughing. "Hamlet's no more real than the book his story's in. Nothing he said can possibly mean anything, so who cares one way or the other?"
"I care!" the boy with black hair and dark eyes insisted. "It means everything to me!" He broke down and cried all over again.
Gimbledon just shrugged and walked away.
But the man with light hair and eyes held him as he cried; then finished killing Sammie before going on to help kill many others.
Something strange was happening. Everyone went about their business as always. But they seemed to be aware of something that had stolen upon their city and was always a step or two behind them, yet at the same time a step or two ahead of them. In many cases this strange something both trailing and leading them was they themselves. It didn't frighten them so much as unnerving them, this constant distraction from their normal routine which was fast becoming lodged within that routine.
- The old priest prayed night and day for the death of the wicked boy with black hair and dark eyes whose traffic with the Devil was bringing this terrible plague upon this city. -
"Why do they hate him so?" the light haired Chosen Successor asked the Chosen One.
"You should rip this boy from your mind," the Chosen One replied. "In linking your time with his you are bringing a plague not just on his city but on our own land as well. We can withstand it because we accept all of time; but that boy's people cannot. They have banished most of time from their city. They will get careless. And we, in turn, will become blood thirsty in order to force the whole of time on them."
"I cannot," the Chosen Successor confessed. "Nothing I can do can stop me seeing him kiss my belly's wound. I am unworthy to ever become the Chosen One."
"And you shall not."
- "He will be me," the Chosen Successor told his woman. "He has already loved you as I do. He will make you his woman. Because he will, I must set you free by taking another woman."
"Will he know not to remove Brown Shirt?"
"No. You must remind him or else he will threaten our way of life."
"Then you must kill him."
"No. I will see him kill me when I am with another woman. I will hand him the dagger after I kill the one he calls Sammie. I will give him Sammie's dark eyes to keep for me. He will remove my clothes and kiss my belly's wound then dress himself as me and come to you."
"Then I must love him as I now love you."
"Yes, you must."
"Will he be the Chosen One in your place?"
"No. Neither he nor I were ever meant to be the Chosen One."
"You will never hear the name of our God."
"Nor will he."
- "There is a sacred name of his people's God," the boy with black hair and dark eyes told his classmates at the beginning of the new school year, when any student who wished could say what he learned over the summer break.
"What is this sacred name?" the boy's teacher asked.
"I will never hear it," the boy answered.
"Why?"
"I will have given my belly's wound to another."
The class laughed at the boy's fanciful tale. The boy hung his head and told them there was no amusement left within the world, neither their world nor this other's world.
"Together we have driven laughter and joy from this universe," the boy with black hair and dark eyes confessed.
"This evening we shall discuss Shakespeare's Macbeth. We'll begin with perhaps its most famous soliloquy." Here the Professor of Literature quoted -
"She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word...Tomorrow...
And Tomorrow...And Tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Till the last syllable of recorded Time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death
Out! Out brief candle
Life's but a walking shadow...a poor player...
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more
It is a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury
Signifying Nothing."
"Now let's parse this passage, shall we?" the Professor of Literature began the discussion. Together with the audience he managed to parse the entire soliloquy.
"We have time," he said, "for a couple more passages. Any particular favorite any one would like to study?"
A boy with close cropped blonde hair and blue eyes cried out from the audience "But what does it mean?" There was panic in his voice. "I must know what this means!"
"Young man," the Professor reminded the distraught goy, "we have already parsed the entire passage!"
The boy screamed, arose from his seat and ran out of the auditorium. "I saw them...being torn to pieces...I saw them!"
Gimbledon and a couple of his friends began laughing almost hysterically. The boy with black hair and dark eyes got up and asked - begged - some others to follow him. "We've got to stop him!" was all he said as he took off running. Several others followed.
But it was too late. They found the boy with the blonde crew cut and blue eyes hanging from a branch of a giant tree. They cut him down but it was too late, his belt had worked too well, it held his weight, it broke his neck, it fulfilled its destiny.
"He was only a few minutes ahead of us," they all agreed.
"A few years ahead of himself," the boy with black hair and dark eyes whispered as he turned to go.
"He saw what will happen and it killed him," the boy with black hair and dark eyes told the girl both he and his friend Gimbledon took turns courting. She did not ask what he meant; but whatever it was, it convinced her to go with Gimbledon.
- "When did you decide you loved him better?" the man with black hair and dark eyes asked the woman he never stopped loving.
"When that poor boy hung himself and you said it was because he saw the future."
"Because you didn't believe me?"
"No - because I did believe you. And I was afraid by loving you I too would come to see it." -
- "Let me look upon your wound."
"You may not," the man with light hair and eyes replied.
"But if I'm to be your woman, have I not the right to look upon it?"
He shook his head. "Even I am forbidden to ever see it," he told his woman. "Although I will look upon it when he kills me. but I will not know it as mine, it will become his wound."
"Who is this man who will kill you and take your wound?"
"He is Sammie's father. He will one day look as Sammie looks; then he will know who he is and why I gave him Sammie's eyes. And he will pass the wound to another on the cliff, so that there will one day be a Chosen One to hear the sacred name of our God. Come: let us listen as the Chosen One tells of another of our ancestors."
The people gathered around the bonfire to hear a tale from their past.
"A man took the name Macbeth," the Chosen One told his people. "He did not know this name would sentence him to do evil deeds.
"'Turn Hellhound!' his assailant cried out to Macbeth just before he slew him. "The term Hellhound is a reference to a three headed dog who once guarded the gateway to the vast world beneath this one - a world of great caves and burning lakes of fire which men are driven mad looking upon till out of despair leap into and are never seen again.
"And when Macbeth says to himself 'Out Out Brief Candle' his is speaking of his own life - and all our lives, which to him have become 'A tale told by an Idiot.' He expects us to look upon our own lives as he looked upon his before being killed, and to decide if our lives were lives 'Signifying Nothing.'"
The man with light hair and eyes wept bitterly hearing the tale of Macbeth, for he knew what those words meant but wished he did not know. They reminded him that in giving his wounds to another his own life signified nothing. His despair was so great in that moment he would have thrown off Brown Shirt and run to the cliff to hurl himself to his death. But he did not move. He sat there before the bonfire drenching sweat and holding his face in his hands. He would have gladly ripped his own eyes out if not for Sammie's eyes, which no one would ever give to the man with black hair and dark eyes.
"I love Sammie as if he were my own," he told the people gathered to hear the tale of Macbeth. "I cannot deprive his eyes their due."
Everyone there agreed with him.
"Do they really eat bugs?" the boy with black hair and dark eyes asked his Science Professor.
"They most certainly did when they were set adrift," came the studied reply.
"Set adrift?"
"It's our term for the societal rift that sent a huge part of our people to the land beyond our city. We could no longer maintain a proper social structure with so many mouths to feed. So all those below a certain level, as determined the only fair way possible: by income and social standing - were exiled from our city. Once we had chosen the ones to be exiled, we began extolling the virtues of eating insects over traditional food stuffs. It was rough going at first, getting them sold on the idea; but in time, and with some persuasion, we managed to get enough of them committed to the idea. Then we set them adrift."
Here the Science Professor paused then added, more softly that "there were other considerations as well, but they don't concern your question."
The boy with black hair and dark eyes tried to picture what this setting adrift looked like; but he couldn't. When he became the Chosen Successor he asked the Chosen One why he had been unable to see it.
"Your eyes were confined to your own past. You could not see beyond that point. Just as they are now confined to your own future and nothing beyond."
"Will I one day see all of it?" the Chosen Successor asked.
"Your time will be up before you gain the strength to see beyond yourself. If your eyes are given to someone with that strength, then you will begin to see beyond yourself. But if your eyes die with you, you will not."
The Chosen Successor wept at this. He took the boy Sammie's eyes from his shirt pocket where he had kept them since Brown Shirt gave them to him.
"Sammie will never see beyond the moment of his own death," he pronounced. And as he did, the eyes turned to dust in his hands and fell between his fingers.
A scream arose from nowhere when the last grain of Sammie's eyes slipped from his grasp. He and the Chosen One both knew who had screamed, and why.
"I am sorry you saved his eyes for nothing," the Chosen Successor whispered to Brown Shirt as he turned and walked away. "I betrayed you."
Gimbledon knew the moment he laid eyes on Sammie that the boy was not his. He was not sure whose it was, but he meant to find out and castrate whoever had made of him a cuckold. When he told his best friend of his plan, the man with black hair and dark eyes took out a knife, handed it to him, and released the belt of his trousers.
A tense moment followed, then they both laughed and Gimbledon returned the knife when his best friend had fastened his belt.
"Everyone knows you are sterile and impotent," Gimbledon said with much humor. "But I will find him and I will castrate him, while you hold him fast. Then, if you wish to kiss his wound too, you may." Again they laughed.
"I will not be able to," Gimbledon's best friend told him.
Two boys were electrocuted trying to breach the barrier protecting the city from those on the outside. One day, out of the blue, in the middle of Logics Class, both in unison began screaming, leaped from their seats and took off running toward the barrier, yelling "I've got to get out of here...they're coming...they're here...they're tearing me apart! They're pulling my eyes out! Help! Someone help!"
They neither stopped screaming nor running. They plowed into the barrier full speed ahead and seconds later fell as two charred bodies to the ground.
It was asked next day all over the School what made them go crazy like that and what did they mean by being torn to pieces. The Professor of Literature was summoned to parse the boys' last words at an impromptu seminar in the School gym.
"But what did they mean about someone tearing them apart?" the students asked.
"Well, tearing, as I explained, is a transitive verb. Apart is an adverb in this particular sentence, which elaborates further on the tearing by indicating how they were being torn and to what end..."
"But what does it mean!" the student body shouted.
The Principal, sensing the students getting out of control, summoned the security staff, five of whom burst into the gym and began firing their weapons. The students scattered, but not before a dozen were gunned down.
Then one of the guards came over to the Professor of Literature, put his gun to the Professor's forehead and demanded to know what the two boys' cries meant. Before he could fire his weapon the other four guards shot him dead. By pure reflex his finger pulled the trigger; but he had already begun falling to the floor so the bullet struck the Professor in the shoulder. "A flesh wound," the School nurse assured one and all. "I'll dress the wound and he'll be fine."
"Hey," Gimbledon told his best friend when they heard of the School shooting, "why don't you kiss his wound and make it all better? Maybe you'll get some Brownie Point!"
The Chosen One was just beginning his Chosen Succession when he stepped in front of the Professor of Literature to watch him being torn apart. His own Chosen Successor led the assault, as was his duty. There had not been an assault on the Masters since so far ago even he had difficulty entering the fray.
That assault long ago sealed their exile from the city. They had grown weary of the Masters' endless attempts to strike their humanity from them. Every new medical procedure was forced upon them, from the toxic drugs injected into them to the many electronic devices implanted within them to the forced changes in their diet to the attempt to make them sterile. They were even put in a deep hypnotic trance and told, over and over, that the male contributes nothing to the birth process, he merely opens the womb to make a place for the fetus to grow.
One day, many pasts ago, they rose up against their Masters and began slaughtering whomever they could take hold of. But they were no match for the superior strength and weapons of their Masters. They were rounded up and forced from the city. Any refusing to go were executed on the spot.
Many had been driven mad from the devices implanted in their brains. They began screaming about everything - every poem, every story, even the cries of their children - "What does it mean!"
"What does it mean!"
In time they understood what it meant, what everything meant. And they began not only understanding but living the meaning.
Brown Shirt, with light hair and eyes, learned early, even before he acquired the wounds designating him the Chosen Successor. He could already step beyond his own time to witness the time of others, of many others who came before him and who were to come after him.
When he first stepped before the man with black hair and dark eyes and felt the blade pierce his heart he cried out for he was only a boy then. But when he felt this man remove Brown Shirt and kiss his wound, he was soothed and slept peacefully.
"I gave him back his now time," the boy with black hair and dark eyes told his best friend Gimbledon.
"His now time?" Gimbledon puzzled.
"He's still a boy, like me. By kissing his wound I let him step back from his future to his now time then."
"You are a certified nutcase - you know that?"
"I'm beginning to see what it means," the boy with black hair and dark eyes told his friend. Yet even as he said it he could see this man with light hair and eyes shaking his head otherwise. He grew silent and began shedding tears.
"What's wrong now?" asked Gimbledon.
"He says no," came the whispered reply. "I will not become him, nor wear Brown Shirt long enough to learn."
- "I walked among the dead before they died after the man with black hair and dark eyes killed me and took my clothes. I watched him disappear after he kissed my wound and put Brown Shirt over his head. I saw Sammie's mother as I walked. I went to her to tell her I saved his eyes but she screamed and ran away. Then I saw myself in a glass and I too ran and hid behind a great bush, for my wound kissed by my killer had festered and covered my whole belly and nothing remained of my five gashes. I wept bitterly behind that bush for I knew I would crouch there for all eternity instead of going to my own future. Am I to be so cursed, Chosen One, is there a way to stand my height among our people?"
The Chosen One put his hand to the man with light hair and eyes' shoulder and said nothing could ever remove the curse.
"You and this man with black hair and dark eyes are tethered and because of this his people are seeing what we have always seen. His people have become one with ours once more as we were so long ago. You have given his people a way of seeing what they decided never again to look upon. They will look upon what is and was and will be till the end of time; and their tongues will forever curse both of you for bringing this upon them. The rift which drew them to us will close; but they will be forever outside their own place and will never stop cursing you."
"Then I will crouch behind this bush from their past forever."
"And this man with black hair and dark eyes will be beside you forever; but you will not know it as him."
"Had I not given him my dagger and smiled, could this curse have been lifted?"
"No," the Chosen One told the man with light hair and eyes. "The moment he took the dagger you offered, the curse was set upon both of you."
"At least I will not be alone my whole eternity."
"You and he will both be alone. Just as you will not know him, because of your festering wound he will not know you. You will crouch and he will lie in front of you and beside you and behind you forever."
Sammie's mother ran until she could no longer see the naked man with light hair and eyes and with a festering wound covering his belly. She told Gimbledon, her husband, of her encounter. He summoned a search party to find this man and kill him but he was nowhere to be found.
"We'll get him and we'll castrate him then kill him," Gimbledon promised his wife. "Who knows? Maybe he's Sammie's father."
"I've told you: Sammie is your son," Gimbledon's wife again insisted.
Neither of them knew that Sammie was listening. When they went inside, Sammie made for the great bush where the naked man with light hair and eyes and a festering wound on his belly was hiding.
"Are you my father?" Sammie asked the man. The man shook his head that he was not.
Sammie drew very close to the man and whispered in his ear that it is alright if the man takes his eyes after he kills him.
"You may have my eyes after you have finished killing me," Sammie told the man. "I will have no need of them when I can no longer see through them."
Then Sammie started to go but turned back to the man and asked the man to give his eyes to his father.
"Please give them to whoever is my father," he asked of the man.
The man said nothing. He knew that if he could refrain from giving Sammie's eyes to the man with black hair and dark eyes he could save his belly from becoming a fetid curse. But he knew he had no choice but to keep doing forever what he had already done. -
- "Why have you taken him from me?" Sammie's mother asked Brown Shirt's woman. "He was mine before he was yours. You have no right."
"It is my place to be with Brown Shirt, no matter if his hair is light or black, his eyes light or dark. I am the Chosen Successor's woman. This law was handed down by Lord Othello before he killed his woman. We must obey it. Have you no such law?"
"We have nothing but laws, and rules, and customs," Sammie's mother answered. "Every law we have has been parsed for us by our Legal Professors." -
- "But what does this law mean?" a young law student demanded of his Legal Professor. Patiently the Legal Professor parsed each sentence contained with the seven paragraphs.
When he had finished explaining the law in question, once again parsing each separate part, his student arose, undressed, calmly walked to the classroom window and leapt to his death. Two other students, who have been listening to their Legal Professor with great care also arose, beckoned by their fellow student, also removed their clothes, also walked to the window and leaped to their deaths. The entire class began screaming as if being torn to pieces by wild beasts; then they too arose, stripped away their clothes, only they, unlike their fellow students, ran to the window and all tried at once to leap from the window. But there were too many. They all formed into an air tight mass and slowly died, unable to breathe or even move.
"Class dismissed," announced the Legal Professor after gathering up his textbooks. -
"Someone is here. I cannot see him but I smell something putrefying in front of me," thought the man with black hair and dark eyes. "He keeps moving though. First he was in front of me. Then beside me. Then even behind me."
The man with light hair and eyes crouching behind a great bush reached out to where he saw a wound on a belly. He pulled it nearer. Then he lifted the belly to his lips and kissed what was left of the wound, which had almost vanished. He cried and cried and his tears washed what remained of the wound away. And as it disappeared, the festering gangrene which had covered his entire belly and was moving to cover his entire person began retreating. Soon it would all go away; but he knew he still would remain crouched behind the great bush for eternity, surrounded by he who in tethering their lives had brought his own world to ruin and his, the man with light hair and eyes, to the brink of ruin. Gently, he lay the man's belly back on the ground in front of him and began his eternal vigil over the scattered remains.
"I who caused the putrefaction have driven it from whomever it is crouching around me," thought the man with black hair and dark eyes.
- The remainder of the graduating class assembled in the College gym. A third of that year's class failed to show; they had all taken their lives, asking the same question of their Professors: "What does it mean?" They were listed in the Registrar's data base as Drop-Outs.
The young men entered the arena from the men's locker room, all of them naked, most of them already erect. The young women came from the ladies' locker room; they too were naked.
One graduate remained flaccid, even after the graduation ceremony started. Several women took hold of his penis but it remained flaccid.
This graduate, with black hair and dark eyes, never once looked upon Gimbledon's girl friend; he knew what would happen if he saw her naked. He would not only attain an instant erection, he would kill his best friend and rape Gimbledon's girl friend.
Soon all the men had paired with all the women and engaged in the mating ceremony save for one lone man, who now sat crouched in a dark corner with his head resting on his knees.
A woman who had been unable to attract a mate came and sat beside this forlorn man with black hair and dark eyes.
"I know why," she told him. Then, in a whisper, she said she had watched him as he endeavored whichever way the crowd moved never to look upon Gimbledon's girl friend naked. "That's why none of the girls could arouse you. One glance and you would have killed your best friend and taken his chosen mate. You would have been castrated and sent away from the city to be torn apart by the beasts out there."
"I would have welcomed my fate for just one chance to be with her," the graduate with black hair and dark eyes told this young woman.
The woman got up to return to the ladies' locker room and go, mumbling to herself "Poor Sammie."
Outside the city everyone already knew who their mate would be: they knew from the moment they were first able to understand "what it means." The Ritual of Understanding always happened at a special place and time, to which those ready to know what it means were drawn. Some were very young, some already grown, most at the cusp of adulthood.
The very youngest boy, not ready to mate yet, would become the Chosen Successor, unless he proved unable to understand: then he would be stripped and hurled off the cliff at the edge of his people's world. Many young boys had been hurled to their deaths, never to witness the future unfolding.
The boy with light hair and eyes was the youngest ever to appear at the Ritual of Understanding. He failed the Ritual; it was determined that he did not understand "what it means." He was stripped of his clothes and taken to the edge of the cliff and hurled over the edge. But as he began his descent, something that had never happened before made its appearance.
The head and trunk of a man with black hair, no arms, legs or genitals, his eyes ripped out, his chest, belly and back torn as if by a beast suddenly materialized from nowhere and caused the boy to ricochet back onto the cliff's edge.
The boy arose, went to the Chosen One and Kissed the wound on his belly. Slowly, five tiny gashes began to appear on the boy's belly. Then the boy whispered in a voice so low only the Chosen One could hear "I understand." The Brown Shirt of the Chosen Successor was brought forth and placed over the boy's head.
"You have sealed all our fates," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor. From that moment the boy's people planned their assault on the city.
- On the boy's twelfth birthday he took a mate. -
A third of the graduates withdrew before the ceremony was complete. Women pushed the men away; men arose. All began screaming the same refrain.
"What does it mean?" To which a few added "Why can they know what it means while we can't?"
They began running about the gymnasium screaming their endless refrain, running into themselves coming out of the locker room. A few grabbed hold of themselves and began shaking themselves so violently that their necks were broken and they fell to the floor dead. While a few others saw themselves being torn apart by beasts from outside their city, and heard their screams, and were splattered with their own blood gushing from themselves. They ran into the locker rooms to try and wash away their blood but they couldn't so they began tearing at one another to get the splattered blood off till all those who had been visited by themselves lay dead on the locker room floor.
The remainder of the class completed the graduation ceremony and were given their diplomas by the Registrar, acting on behalf of the College President, whose teenage son had just killed himself after murdering his entire family as they slept, crying out to them "What does it mean?" as he slit their throats before carving his belly off.
"They have constructed a world based solely on logic," the Chosen One instructed the boy with light hair and eyes who was now his Chosen Successor. "From this world they have removed all traces of uncertainty, have banished all, such as us, who searched for meaning outside the bounds of logic and reason. They have reduced every proposition to its barest essentials: parts of speech and sentence structure. They have parsed not only their words but their very lives as well. They have sought also to parse time itself, separating the present out from the past and future. They live only in the present."
The boy withdrew a few steps at this last revelation, horrified that anyone should attempt to exist apart from all of time. He began crying for those lost souls who had tried to sever time in such a manner that most of their lives had become unknown to them.
"How can they be never touching upon who they were and who they will become?" the Chosen Successor asked the hosen One.
"They cannot for long bear it," the Chosen One told the boy with light hair and eyes. "They will soon begin self-exterminating to where they will welcome the destruction we must bring them in order to free them from their prison of pure logic."
"He is me," the boy who had become the Chosen Successor realized at last. "This man who rips Sammie's eyes from his corpse to hand them over to the man who will kill him and, in taking Brown Shirt and kissing his wound, becomes the Chosen Successor, leaving him - me - to fester in shame until his tears cleanse his sorrow."
The Chosen One nodded. "This man who kills you, he alone among his people has allowed past and future into his life and in so doing has begun the process that destroys his world and would destroy ours, by closing our present to our past and future, but is stopped by your betrayal of your Chosen Woman."
The theater was filled to capacity. Everyone came to hear the special recital of certain key passages from Shakespeare's "As You Like It." The Professor of Literature joined the acting troupe on stage to parse each passage as it was being rendered. A few in the audience expressed a measure of unease with the evening's program; but nothing like their teenage sons and daughters had expressed the night before, when many began screaming wildly for an explanation of the play's meaning and had to be tranquilized. A strategy for subduing unruly young men and women had been worked out ahead of the event. Even so, a few had to be euthanized during the course of the presentation.
The man with black hair and dark eyes was growing uneasy with the performance. His agitation was noticed by Gimbledon's wife, who came and sat beside him.
"Is something wrong with the performance?" Gimbledon's wife asked.
"It just feels somehow incomplete," he answered. As he spoke he glanced around but did not see Gimbledon.
"Has your husband stepped out for a smoke?" he asked.
"No. Our son is sick and because I wanted so much to attend this evening, Gimbledon said he would stay home with the boy."
"And what of Sammie?" the man with black hair and dark eyes asked before realizing Sammie still lay in the future.
"Who is Sammie?"
"I was thinking you had a second son - how foolish of me."
"We have only one - but if we ever have another, Sammie will be his name."
The play, with its seemingly endless parsing, finally came to a close and the audience left. The man with black hair and dark eyes took hold of Gimbledon's wife's arm and said to her "Come with me. I wish to give you Sammie."
"Why did you leave your shirt on?" Gimbledon's wife asked.
"I wanted to know how it will feel when I wear Brown Shirt and can never remove it until the appointed hour," the man with black hair and dark eyes said.
"I would like to see this Brown Shirt which refuses ever to be taken off. Where do you keep it?"
"In the future," came the reluctant reply.
"What a strange place for a shirt to hang."
"It never hangs, it's always worn, first by one with the wound on his belly, then by whoever takes his wound, and another and another."
"Is it never cleaned?"
"No, it never needs to be. It's always renewed by each wearer."
"And will this Sammie you spoke of wear it?"
"No. The man with light hair and eyes will keep Sammie from ever wearing it."
"Well, maybe it's for the best."
"It can be no other way."
Gimbledon knew from his first glance that the child was not his.
"I will have no part in his naming," Gimbledon told his wife.
"His name is Sammie," Gimbledon's wife, in turn, told him.
"So is that the name of his father?"
"Gimbledon is the only name of his father," Gimbledon's wife told her husband.
"So be it," Gimbledon resolved. "But I will find his real father and I will castrate him. "Then I will castrate Sammie that he shall never carry his father's seed into the future."
Gimbledon's wife shuddered at the sound of that word. "Sammie will never enter the future," she told her husband.
The effort his eyes took to place themselves in their sockets that he might look upon his world brought tears to my eyes, which the man with light hair and eyes tried to catch in his other hand as he offered me the boy's eyes. He could not: his belly will fester until his own tears fall.
Gimbledon stood beside his wife watching his second son's birth. He let out a howl when a head of black hair entered his world.
"If you were not here watching I would grab this fiend and hurl it against the wall," he whispered in his wife's ear.
He is laughing as he watches his second son torn to pieces. He howls as his first son is taken from the womb and torn to pieces. This makes him numb to his own dismemberment. His blue eyes remain open as his head rolls off the curb into the street, where it remains for all time.
"A head looks like mine once did," he tells his first son while they play ball.
"Where is Sammie's head?" Gimbledon's first son asks.
"It has fallen into the void between tenses," a young boy's voice answers.
"Why?" Gimbledon's first son asks his second son.
"To find she who gave it life," the second son replies.
"Why has she disappeared?"
"She had gone to Sammie's father and could not find her way back."
"But you are Sammie," Gimbledon's first son reminded the boy.
"No longer," the boy answered as he stepped in the light. His eye sockets were empty. Gimbledon's first son offered his own eyes but the boy refused, saying "Brown Shirt will never put it right if he takes any but my dark eyes."
Gimbledon's first son wept at this. "If my eyes cannot give you sight they are of no use to me. Nothing they can ever show me will matter to me. Maybe this Brown Shirt will take my eyes in the place of yours."
The boy called Sammie shook his head against such a substitution.
"Then he must take my eyes too!" Gimbledon's first son swore.
Again, Sammie's head moved to the negative.
"Then I curse Brown Shirt for all time!"
Finally Sammie's whole body emerged from the womb, its limbs intact as it is being dismembered while playing ball with Gimbledon and Gimbledon's first son.
"I must betray you," the man with light hair and eyes said to his Chosen Woman.
"I know," was all his chosen woman answered.
"Her face is still a blur to me," he continued.
"I must mate with every woman if her face never comes into view.
"I know," Brown Shirt's Chosen Woman repeated.
"Many must die before the one who will save us is found."
"I know."
"The edge of the cliff will be awash with innocent bones."
"I know."
"If I were not already dead I would rip his loins from his body to keep him from having you as his Chosen Woman."
"I know."
"I beg you: when he comes to you do not accept Sammie's eyes."
"I will not," Brown Shirt's woman promised.
"He may show you Sammie's eyes, but he may not hand them over to you."
"He will not."
The man with black hair and dark eyes wept watching Sammie approach his mother for he remembered exactly what the boy would ask.
"Why does father hate me?" Sammie asked.
"He doesn't think you're his son," Sammie's mother answered.
"Has he not seen my birth record? It says he is my father."
"He has seen it, but does not believe it."
The boy puzzled over this, then finally asked if Gimbledon believed his record to be a forgery.
"Perhaps that's it," Sammie's mother agreed.
"But they're not allowed to forge these documents," Sammie reminded his mother. "So someone should remind father of that. Do you think I should?"
"Not just yet," Sammie's mother cautioned.
The man watching this scene play out dried his eyes and positioned himself where he knew Sammie would appear, even though he had not been outside Gimbledon's house that particular day.
Sammie did not see him though because when the event transpired he had not been there. He had been at home reading and could not be roused from the past by his present self. All the man with black hair and dark eyes could do was shed tears for not being able to comfort Sammie.
The Hall of Bones the cliff's edge was now called. There were no buildings outside the city, its dwellers made sure no tools went with those cast out, made sure no dwelling ever graced the Outside. No rooms, no hallways, no nothing but the open ground for those no longer needed to continue or to disrupt the civilized way of life established long ago and through the centuries purified to a state of perfection.
No food, no clothes, nothing to wear, nothing but bugs and weeds to eat. All wild animals had been domesticated and brought to the city to insure an endless supply of fresh meat to accompany whatever vegetables and fruits were cultivated.
No ideas were permitted to accompany the outcasts, neither books nor teachers, only what meager memories those few who had self-taught took with them, memories which over time turned from fiction back to fact, from where most had come.
Long ago, the first of those with memories of wondrous tales taken from the city's libraries became the first Chosen Ones. In time, memories grew less vivid until they disappeared from all but one, who became the lone Chosen One and whose primary role was to impart these memories, more precious to the outcasts than any other possession, to a Chosen Successor so that the world of the mind would never be lost to his people.
The boy with light hair and eyes nearly dwarfed by Brown Shirt endured night after night of total despair as he struggled to catch the meaning along with the words of each story told to him that he might recite the words to his people. He came to wish the severed man's body had not saved him from certain doom when he was hurled from the edge of the cliff. Where before he blessed this disembodied being he now cursed it. He swore to kill this man if ever he saw him, until he saw that this was the man destined to kill him instead, upon which understanding he prayed day and night to the man to hurry up and do it, although he knew it would not happen until the appointed moment. And his sign would be the boy Sammie's attainment of his ninth, and final, year.
"How did you live so long?" the young man with light hair and eyes asked the Chosen One one day after a frustrating round of study in which he could not keep straight whose son Prince Hamlet was. He was certain King Lear was Prince Hamlet's father and had to be reminded that King Lear had but three daughters.
"I have no choice but to remain in the present until my Chosen Successor kisses my wound," the Chosen One told him.
The Chosen Successor was troubled about something concerning his people's heroes. No matter how far he could be in the past or the future he could not encounter them - not King Lear, not Prince Hamlet, not Macbeth who murders sleep, nor any of the others.
"Did they live before there was a past or a future for them to enter?" he asked the Chosen One.
"This is our greatest mystery," he was told. "He who could one day solve it would be greatly revered among our people above all others. But in all the generations no one has come forth to put this great mystery from our minds. We may never know. Perhaps, some have offered, these our greatest heroes were not simply kings and princes but gods who chose to exist in their present and nowhere else."
"Why would they do that?"
"To learn how it is the exist nowhere but within one single period of time - as the people of the city do and always have."
"Perhaps this is why they have always been so harsh," the Chosen Successor speculated.
"Why Sammie?" Gimbledon asked his best friend. "Why would she choose such a strange name? Is it the father's name? Do you know a Sammie?"
The man with black hair and dark eyes thought his friend's question over; but could come up with no one within their circle whose name was Sammie.
"I'm sorry," he answered. "There is no one by that name." He could not say where the name came from without telling of his future encounter with Brown Shirt with light hair and eyes who had gone into the past to retrieve the child's name.
"I will hate this child forever," Gimbledon swore. "Yet as he bears my family name, I cannot disown him, though I may be driven to blind him that I need never look upon his dark eyes ever again. If I could I would rip those hideous orbs from his face this very moment; but I shall bide my time."
As he grew, Sammie tried to answer the question driving so many of his people to their destruction: What Does It Mean. He was beginning to see what it meant, yet when he tried to explain it to them, they began screaming, some running endlessly, others leaping from windows, others even tearing their eyes out. So the boy stopped trying to explain. When they see my eyes ripped from my face, they'll understand what it means, just before they are torn to pieces by Brown Shirt's people.
"Take Sammie and leave us alone!" Gimbledon pleaded with the man wearing a Brown Shirt.
"I only want Sammie and his father," Brown Shirt told Gimbledon.
"I don't know who his father is, I swear!"
"But I do," said Brown Shirt.
Gimbledon failed to notice he and his elder son being surrounded by dozens of others from beyond the city. He grabbed his son and turned to go, only to be taken by dozens of angry hands. His son was quickly torn to pieces; it took much longer with him. But eventually nothing was left of the man once called Gimbledon but a pile of bones to which a few bits of flesh were still attached. His eyes, as his elder son's eyes, were left intact: torn from their faces, they were left lying on the pavement, endlessly looking up to a sky they could no longer see.
"Please - please - do not give my eyes to my father: they will be the death of him," Sammie pleaded with the man with light hair and eyes in vain. Sammie hurried upstairs to where his father stood in the future looking out the window. But he could not warn his father not to take his eyes. His father could see him, but could not respond across time to his warning.
Sammie searched but could not find his mother, Gimbledon's wife, among the dead. "Has she gone to hide in the past or the future so as not to be found?" he wondered. He despaired knowing she would never join her son, her husband or even the man with black hair and dark eyes, Sammie's father. Sammie alone among the dead gained past and future to accompany the present; but he could do nothing to interact, only to be there watching those who could participate, like his father, to watch as they made choices which sealed their fate. But still nowhere was his mother to be found.
Sammie watched his eyes placed into his father's hands by the man who killed him and took his eyes. Sammie knew that through his eyes the last of his people would also die He could see it happening; but for some strange reason could not turn away but only continue watching till nothing remained.
Sammie cursed his killer. "If you had not taken my eyes I would have remained blind to all this," he told the man with light hair and eyes. Brown Shirt hung his head - for he alone could hear Sammie.
"I swear when I deliver your eyes to your father I will die and my belly will rot away for all eternity."
"Then I will join you behind the great bush and remain always by your side. That will be my punishment for giving my eyes to my father."
The young men and women of the city never stopped asking what it means until the last of them had died. Even those who had not taken their lives continued asking what it means as they were being torn to pieces. The horror and agony they experienced was nothing compared to what they felt knowing they would never know, never be told, what it meant. Their eternity would be spent asking their question and never getting an answer, for nothing told them would ever be heard as they wandered endlessly seeking deliverance from the horror that lurked beside them.
Sammie tried asking the people he encountered. He had never seen them before but they were now in his field of vision. They ignored him as if he were invisible to them.
"Who are they?" he asked of everyone he passed; but no one answered. Frustrated, he sat down on the curb and began crying. His father - not Gimbledon but his real father - found him seated on the curb outside the main building.
"What's wrong Sammie?" the man asked as he sat down beside him.
"They won't tell me," Sammie answered.
"Tell you what?"
"Who these people coming to kill us are."
"How do you know anyone is going to kill us?"
"I've seen them up ahead planning. The people behind won't tell me who they are."
The man with black hair and dark eyes put his arm around Sammie and drew him closer.
"I've overheard them from far behind. Our Professors and Leaders decided they must keep those deemed inferior apart from the rest. But they all looked the same and acted the same and dressed the same. For a long time nothing came of this desire to separate people into classes of superior and inferior. In time it was decided the superior way of understanding our written texts was to parse them, to thereby assign each word a special place within the text. No longer would the focus be on the overall meaning of the text.
"Over time it was observed how certain people, students especially, still clung to the now antiquated and irrelevant search for meaning from and within the texts. These stubborn atavists refused, or were unable, to adapt to the modern way of understanding texts. They were seen as inferior. Every time any of them asked their question 'What does it mean?' they were marked as one of the inferiors.
"There cam to be so many of these inferiors that the Professors and the Leaders began to fear that the day would come when the inferiors would greatly outnumber those whose understanding was superior and would force a return to the old ways.
"It was decided that these inferiors must be driven from the city, banished to the barren plains beyond the city walls, where in order to survive without meats, fruits and vegetables they would have to eat bugs and weeds. And without clothes, for they were to be stripped of everything, they would have to go naked or employ inferior materials as makeshift clothing. And that therefore, when they left, they did not go as people but as animals, beasts of the field.
"This, my precious Sammie, was what you could not get the people you encountered to tell you."
The man with black hair and dark eyes bent down to kiss Sammie's forehead. Then something made him place a kiss over the boy's eyes.
"When they drove us out, as you will see when you step back that far, they left us with nothing, not even the clothes on our backs," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor. "One woman, whose hair came down to her waist, hid one piece of clothing under her hair: her late husband's favorite shirt, which she wanted by her side to remember him by as long as she lived. As it was, she lived to be well over a hundred. She became the Chosen Mother of our entire race. Never once did she wear this Brown Shirt that has passed down from that ancient time. She swore since it was her husband's favorite shirt, only a man like him would ever wear it. And so it was that it set among her things till the end of her life, when she saw a man who reminded her of her beloved husband; and from her deathbed she handed this man her special shirt, saying to him with her final breath 'This is for only you, my husband's Chosen Successor. Let none other wear it until you have in your turn, chosen your successor.' Then she died in her present and was given our ritual burial, her hair and skin taken to clothe her descendants."
The Chosen One paused before delivering the painful word to his Chosen Successor. "You alone of all our people will not be honored with such a burial. Your hair and skin will clothe no one."
The young man with light hair and eyes wearing Brown Shirt closed his eyes and nodded his head and spoke in a whisper "I am cursed for taking Sammie's eyes."
Sammie heard the Chosen Successor's whisper across time and vowed to take his own eyes so that his killer would not be cursed. He carefully planned how to accomplish his task and set a time and date to do it. But on that day he was taken hold of and torn to pieces before he could execute his plan. Not once did he cry out as his limbs were being torn from his body. But when Brown Shirt reached for his eyes, he let out a piercing cry which was heard far into the future.
The man with black hair and dark eyes standing on the edge of the cliff wearing Brown Shirt heard it and knew it was Sammie, for he had heard it once before. He did not look around to see where it was coming from, for he knew where it was and who it was, and he could only witness it by stepping from the cliff back into the city he had left forever. But he couldn't leave his post, even to go to his son and tell him that soon the curse his eyes placed on his killer would be lifted, along with all curses born of that day when Sammie lost his eyes.
He stood amidst endless piles of bones stretching across the cliff edge, bones of creatures perhaps long ago living here then going extinct, a secret grave yard hiding a terrible secret which this new Chosen Successor could only imagine. It amazed him that no matter how far into the past he stepped, he still could not fathom what had happened here.
It made him sad. He turned to his Chosen Woman and asked if she knew what had happened.
"You will know when the time is right," was all she would reveal to him.
"Will I live beyond knowing it?" he asked his woman.
"That which remains hidden will be the last thing you will ever know," he was told.
"I will never know, then, where I end up, so this place must become my crypt. Perhaps my bones will lie beside these the bones of other extinct creatures."
The woman said nothing; but the look in her eyes said otherwise.
This Chosen Successor with black hair and dark eyes held up Sammie's eyes, in witness to his sorrow at never knowing where he could spend his eternity. Tears fell from Sammie's eyes just before they were plucked from his brow, and touched these hands holding them here, on this cliff's edge, at this exact moment. Sammie tried whispering to him where he would be; but his words could only reach the incline leading up to the cliff's edge; and his father knew not to descend from the edge.
"Why can I never know what it means?" the new Chosen Successor asked the Chosen One.
"You can step through time, they are all one; but the meaning can only be carried, it cannot be found along the way," the Chosen One answered. "You were not born to it," he added. "Your people renounced all meaning for the sake of knowing, of learning, of parsing all ancient texts. Meaning was taken from your people's innermost being. It does not exist and can not be found anywhere in time, only within, only to be carried from past to present to future. You were never meant to contain meaning."
"So I will never become the Chosen One?"
"I am sorry," was all the Chosen One said.
- Sixteen students crying "What does it mean?" ran to the edge of the cliff and leaped to their deaths. But they did not leave the cliff's edge, did not plunge into the gorge thousands of feet below. They remained alive. Again they tried leaping from the one spot not covered with bones. Again, they remained in the same spot. And again they tried; and again they failed.
They had breached the barrier separating their world and this world of Outcasts. Somehow they had done this, but in so doing because stuck in this one spot along the edge. No one could see or hear them; their cries went forever unheard, themselves forever unseen as, over and over, they attempted their leap of death.
They became ever more frantic over the eons, their movements toward the gorge more and more frenzied, their cries decibel by decibel so great their eardrums were pierced, their brains worked to the point of boiling away. Yet still no one saw them, no one heard them; and still they could not go over the edge, for a wind their madness created wrapped about them to hold them ever more tightly to this spot inside a world not their own, a time in the future they would never reach once the Outcasts had torn them to pieces.
Only one being in all eternity saw the sixteen students, but was barred from reaching out to lead them back from the edge of the cliff.
"If I watch long enough they will see my eyes and will come to me," Sammie said to himself. But even as he was thinking this thought Brown Shirt was reaching out to take his eyes. At that exact moment a scream arose from his face. It was heard by the sixteen; but they could not locate its source. They turned and turned in every direction - they never stopped turning. But they were unable to locate the direction it came from. -
They moved ever farther into the city, killing anyone they saw. The students, many of whom had removed their clothes, as if to make their dismemberment easier, willingly submitted to their destruction, all of them crying "What does it mean?" as they were torn to pieces.
The adults who were able, made for the underground shelter beneath the University. "We'll be safe here," they rejoiced once they were safely within the immense underground bunker. Being of the present they could not know they were seen entering their bunker long before it was even built. There was no place of safety from the past or future, only in the present. They were watched again and again; the entrance ways were seen, the exact count of bodies.
Into the bunker poured the Outcasts, taking up in turn every adult in the place, tearing them apart as those who had not made it to the shelter had been torn apart. They asked no such question as "What does it mean?" They could only parse their deaths.
Brown Shirt's woman, whom he betrayed to try and save his people, was marked from birth for her place among her people. Of all the children born in the Given Year, as her birth year was known, she alone bore the mark on her belly, the five tiny scars which marked her as the Chosen Successor's woman. It was prophesized that on the day this woman should die before she accepted the Chosen Successor, there would cease to be a Chosen One to succeed the current Chosen One. And on this day the society would end and all the Outcasts must rush to the edge of the cliff to hurl themselves from the ledge.
There would always be a Chosen Successor bearing the wound on his belly which marked him. All that was needed was to kiss the wound of whomever preceded him. But the woman's birth mark was permanent and could never be transferred to another. Only the birth of a child with the mark could signify a Chosen Successor' woman.
So when Brown Shirt was killed by the man with black hair and dark eyes, and the wound on his belly kissed, and his clothes taken from his body, a new Chosen Successor was born.
One person of all the city dwellers was left untouched, neither torn apart nor taken to be hurled from the cliff's edge. Sammie's mother bore the birth mark on her belly that signified her as the Chosen Successor's woman. Yet there was already such a woman among the Outcasts. She was taken to the Chosen One, who after much soul searching and many attempts to enter the forbidden world of the Chosen Successor's woman's future, determined that Brown Shirt's woman was destined to die before the future Chosen Successor could reach his manhood. And that therefore Sammie's mother must remain among the Outcasts till the day her predecessor died, at which event she would become the Chosen Successor's woman. While she waited the many years, she passed her days in remembrance of her son Sammie, the ashes of whose eyes were encased in a piece of skin stripped from his father's belly, as if she were in a trance all those years.
"They'll kill you!" Sammie's mother told the man with black hair and dark eyes, the man who was Sammie's father. "They'll tear you to pieces1"
"Not as long as I'm wearing Brown Shirt," he replied.
"Then you must never take it off!"
"The Chosen One says I must when I find the Chosen Successor."
"Then you must never find him!"
"It's you who will find him for me."
"Then I'll hurl myself from the cliff's edge," Sammie's mother swore.
"I'll watch you day and night to make sure you never go near that place," he swore.
Even as he swore to keep Sammie's mother away from the cliff's edge, he knew he would fail; she would find a way, and in finding it would be the cause of him removing Brown Shirt from his body. For he knew that what had already happened could not be forestalled. He had seen it, if only indistinctly. He knew he would be compelled to remove Brown Shirt by something Sammie's mother was destined to do, because she had already done it.
The Chosen Successor's woman became his woman and he loved her with the same intensity as his love for Sammie's mother. But whenever they walked among the bones littering the cliff's edge, he always had the urge to hurl her over the cliff so that Sammie's mother could become the Chosen Successor's woman during his lifetime. This way he could always watch her. He would not do this though, for the wanton destruction of a Chosen Successor's woman was their greatest taboo, even beyond the destruction of the Chosen One. He would have to bide his time until she died naturally in the course of things.
Only the Chosen One knew when she would die, for no one else could step into this woman's future. Only he knew she would die the day before a new Chosen Successor was found and the man with black hair and dark eyes gave Brown Shirt over to this new Successor.
The Brown Shirt smuggled from the city when the Outcasts were driven out was the only piece of clothing they had. It was determined that no one would be allowed to wear it until clothes had been found and secured. All the Outcasts were naked in those first few months; but as the autumn chill foretold of winter's approach, something had to be done.
Attempts were made from the first days of their exile to fashion the various natural fibers present in their new environment into items of clothing; but success had eluded the Outcasts.
Many had mastered the ability to step into both the past and the future then return to the present. But none were able to interact with anyone or anything outside the immediate moment. Those most adept at stepping into the other parts of time kept trying to take hold of something, however small, to carry back to their present. Finally, with winter fast upon the Outcasts, and many already ill to the point of death, one man succeeded in retrieving a single stocking from the past; then a glove from the future.
Over the next several days, he perfected his skill at stepping. He would go a thousand years into the past or a thousand forward. There, in that thousandth year ahead, he witnessed scores of young men and women rending their garments from their bodies as they prepared for their deaths. He returned, this Outcast, with a handful of clothes retrieved from the ground.
In the next few weeks he made numerous trips a thousand years ahead and carried off hundreds of garments. But still half the Outcasts went naked.
He began, this man chosen to clothe his people, grooming another, a man whose skill was great enough that he too learned the art of retrieval. He explained to his people that if something should happen to him, there would not be a successor to take his place.
Together, this chosen one and his chosen successor managed to retrieve sufficient clothing to cover all the Outcasts.
Strangely, those young men and women whose clothes were being retrieved despaired, not of losing what had been theirs, but of not knowing what the theft meant.
"What does it mean!" they all screamed as they were taken up, one by one, and torn to pieces, by the descendants of the original Outcasts.
The Chosen One and his Chosen Successor were both designated as such from that time on, and a process initiated which over time became a ritual whereby a new Chosen One and his Chosen Successor could be established.
The first Chosen One, who had with the help of his Successor saved his people from certain death, had a strange birthmark: a configuration of five horizontal lines which dug deep into his belly. This birthmark became both the symbol of his place among his people and the proof of his people's triumph over extinction. He was given the Brown Shirt, his people's most sacred symbol, to wear as his own. But after time the Brown Shirt began wearing away at his birthmark; so he, in turn, gave it to his Chosen Successor to wear.
The first Chosen Successor, upon becoming aware his great mentor was near death, begged to be allowed to perish with him; but was told no, he must remain to care for his people. So overcome with grief, he removed his Brown Shirt and fell upon his mentor crying. By pure chance, he kissed the birthmark on the Chosen One's belly. And when he finally arose from his moment of despair, the Chosen One's birthmark had found its way onto his belly, only more as a wound than a birthmark.
With his dying breath, the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor to find another to wear his Brown Shirt, for he, the Chosen Successor, was now the Chosen One.
For a thousand years this ritual had continued, until the man with light hair and eyes had been killed by an interloper who became the Chosen Successor without realizing it. This act of abomination threatened to end this thousand year ritual and, thereby, bring the Outcasts' world to an end.
A thousand years of stability as the most sacred rite within the society the Outcasts forget out of their lot upon this nearly barren land beyond the city held. For a thousand years each Chosen One and his Chosen Successor stepped into a future in flux. It could go one way or the other. The society they presided over could destroy itself as the society within the city would; or it could at the last instant find its way back from the precipice.
Everything was in the hands of two interlopers, one brought here in the attempt to prevent the other from becoming the instrument of destruction. The man with black hair and dark eyes had desecrated Brown Shirt, the most sacred symbol. Sammie's mother would either be the instrument of its removal or the harbinger of flux and of destruction.
And as the Outcasts built a society out of nothing but time, stepping where they must to secure what they needed, the society within the city, devoid of voices challenging its dictates, over a thousand years, slowly, inexorably disintegrated to where all life, all learning, mating, child rearing, was reduced to an act of parsing phrases, a society so devoid of meaning that a thousand years into it those approaching adulthood abandoned life altogether rather than face an existence without meaning, a society where those who had not already taken their lives threw off their clothes to make it easier to be torn to pieces. And Sammie's eyes saw it all happening before him, and looked back at its beginning, and wept for everything his people had given up for a perfect society.
On the day before Sammie's eyes turned to sand, the Chosen Successor, whose black hair and dark eyes branded him an imposter, removed his son's eyes from Brown Shirt's pocket and, holding them to his lips, told them he understood he could never become the Chosen One; and that he had had to let Sammie lose his eyes so that he alone of all humanity would see what must be done to keep the Outcasts from destruction, from the blood lust which destroyed what remained of the City turning inward upon those upon whom it had been visited by his new found ability to step through time as they could.
"Sammie, my precious boy, martyr to my becoming what I was never destined to be, I swear I will join you in your martyrdom so that the terrible wrong done to these people will be set right. I swear it."
Then he returned Sammie's eyes to the pocket which housed them and went in search of his true destiny.
"I have pledged to set this wrong I have done to rights," the imposter swore to the Chosen One, who smiled at his Chosen Successor's naiveté.
"Only Sammie's mother can do that," the Chosen One answered.
"Then I will pluck my own eyes out," the man with black hair and dark eyes swore; but was met with the same ironic smile.
"Without your eyes you can set nothing right," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor.
"The child is not hers," were the last words the Chosen Successor's Woman said before she died. She had been betrayed by the man with light hair and eyes. She understood. She accepted her fate. Even when she became the imposter's Chosen Woman for his time as the Chosen Successor she understood. Without her no man could wear Brown Shirt. She understood that even an imposter must be accepted in order to preserve the line of succession, though she knew his time would be brief.
Her final words were passed to the woman who was chosen, from among all women, to become the Chosen Successor's woman, thus conferring legitimacy upon whomever would succeed the imposter. This woman given her final message was Sammie's mother, brought to succeed her as the Chosen Successor's Woman. Then she died and and stepped no longer into the past or the future; but remained in the present forever with those who had preceded her in death.
Sammie's mother set about finding the woman whose child was not her own. She went among all the people, to tell them of the Chosen Successor's Woman's death as well as to ask who among them had just given birth. She found seven women who had given birth; but only six newborns.
"Where is your child?" Sammie's mother asked this woman.
"I have no child," this woman answered.
"Where is this child not your own?"
"I have set it out for its rightful mother to come and claim it."
"How is it you came to give birth to a child not your own?" Sammie's mother then asked.
"It is a common thing among our people to give alien birth," the woman told her.
"Alien birth?"
"A child who does not resemble the mother," the woman explained. "It therefore cannot be hers."
"What of the father?" Sammie's mother asked. But the woman only stared. She knew of no one in a thousand years who had ever asked, let alone attempted to answer, such a question.
"The child's father," Sammie's mother prompted. But only received the same blank stare by way of reply.
The Chosen Successor's new Woman - Sammie's mother - went in search of the Chosen One to pose the question which so troubled and confused the woman who had given birth to a child not her own.
She was barred from his presence: all questions put to the Chosen One must come from the Chosen Successor. So she proceeded to the new Chosen Successor's place - the place of Sammie's father - to request him asking the Chosen One her question.
This was accomplished that very day.
"There is no father," the Chosen One answered. "So if the child fails to present proof of birth - if it does not look like she who gave it birth - then it must be reckoned an orphan, an alien child. And it will be set out for its rightful mother to claim it."
"And if no one claims it?"
"Then it was not of our people," the Chosen One answered.
When the Chosen Successor reported to his Woman what he was told, she at once declared her intention to find this child and claim it as her own.
"Where would you look?" the man with black hair and dark eyes asked Sammie's mother.
"I will look everywhere," she told Sammie's father. But he shook his head.
"You cannot look everywhere," he told her. "For you have yet to master the past and the future. So I will seek this child and wherever it is I will retrieve it that you may claim it as your own."
- "How long will they last now that we've banished them from our city?" the Deputy Premier asked his superior.
"We've calculated six months," the Premier said. "By then the last of them will be dead."
"They should have been killed outright for their abandonment of pure science, their descent into outright fantasy," the Treasurer remarked.
"We considered it," the Premier acknowledged. "But this way they will be forced to confront the absolute lunacy of their ways before they perish."
"The very idea of all time being one is an affront to our every notion of reality," the Chief of Police, who led the final assault on their bunker, sneered. "It wasn't enough to send them out naked and without provisions. Each blasphemer should have had some part of their body cut away first."
"Stepping into the future or the past as easily as through a doorway, and imagining such madness need only be learned - holes should be drilled into their skulls and scalding hot embers stuffed inside their heads," the Chief of Staff echoed his original suggestion.
They had no way of knowing that three men from a thousand years hence were standing in the chamber beside them, listening to every word: the Chosen One, his Chosen Successor, and behind the two the man with black hair and dark eyes destined to become the only imposter ever to don Brown Shirt and become the Chosen Successor.
The Chosen could have interacted with the city's administrators; the Imposter could only watch and listen, then silently return to this chamber in the present, to stand beside Gimbledon as his Deputy.
The last of the students before that day attended class eagerly expecting to finally be told what it means. Nothing gave them cause to expect an answer to this one question which had accompanied them all through their education but which had taken on ever greater momentum with each passing day since puberty. Everything they did became an instance without meaning: this was how it had always been, a kind of bleep in the background which gradually moved ever nearer the foreground, until it reached a crescendo the last day before that day. And they felt surely now it could at last be revealed to them what the coming event meant.
But when they were finally forced to realize they would never be told what it meant, they tore off their clothes and ran naked from their last class and ran naked through the campus screaming - no longer screaming for an answer, just screaming a wild frenzied scream which went on for twenty-four hours non-stop until the Outcasts came to show them in lurid detail everything their teachers had been unable to tell them.
And on that day the last students ran to their deliverers with outstretched arms awaiting explanation. And with their very last breath they understood at last that because their people had chosen the wrong path a thousand years ago they would never know. For at last they knew there was nothing there for them to know, no meaning to ever be revealed to them, not ever. Meaning had been renounced an eon ago, given up to a way of living determined to provide a richer, fuller, better organized existence more appropriate to human beings.
And so their last act before ending altogether was to shed one final tear, which quickly disappeared amidst the blood pouring from every corner.
Gimbledon out playing with his two sons saw the Chosen One and his Chosen Successor from a thousand years ago out collecting the clothes thrown off by the young men and women. And as Premier, he was satisfied with the clean up, but questioned why only two had been sent by the Department of Sanitation.
"Not everyone could get through," came the reply, which seemed to satisfy Gimbledon.
Then, an armful of clothes each having been collected, the Chosen One and his Chosen Successor returned to their present to distribute the clothes, only to return a third, fourth up to ten trips to gather clothes, their first trip under cover of time to cover their nakedness, save for the Chosen Successor's Brown Shirt.
On their final trip, just minutes before the present Outcasts broke through, Sammie approached and asked if they were now going to collect his eyes. He heard a man cry out and saw an outline of someone with black hair and eyes as dark as his own. This man turned and ran inside and up to a room on the second landing where he looked out the window to see a man with light hair and eyes wearing a Brown Shirt suddenly appear beside Sammie. Then a horde just as suddenly appeared behind this man and began tearing the naked young men and women to pieces without once answering their screams of "What does it mean?"
Then Brown Shirt turned and, holding Sammie's eyes in one hand, pointed with his other hand to the window where Sammie's father stood watching.
- One thousand one hundred eleven years ago a tablet was found whose translation told of something that happened a thousand years before. A discovery had been made then. A tablet which told of events, strange and horrible, which would happen a thousand years beyond the time of its discovery at the bottom of a deep chasm. It told too of tablets awaiting discovery, both in the past and in the future.
"Time is littered with tablets," each found tablet concluded its message
"We can wait till each new tablet is found.or we can seek them out," a scholar known throughout for his understanding of things declared at a seminar. "We can remove each from its proper time to study its wisdom; or we can simply translate them as they come to us and set them aside."
Quickly, two factions emerged from the seminar: one wishing to fully interpret the tablet's implications and incorporate them into the culture; the other insisting it was sufficient to parse and catalog the ancient text.
For one hundred eleven years the debate on how best to deal with the tablet raged. Then it was decided, by force rather than argument, to abandon the one and go with the other.
"The tablet," it was resolved by the faction wielding not statements but armaments, "having been already parsed, will now be archived and no more will be said or studied regarding it."
But its text had already been committed to memory by those seeking its deeper meaning. And it was studied whenever and wherever the opportunity arose. At first its adherents were few; they were rounded up and cordoned off from the rest of society. Yet still their teachings spread as more and more among the people sought the meaning of what was conveyed within the text.
In desperation the leaders of society accused the heretics of treason and executed all those who had instigated the heresy. Yet still the heresy spread, and soon became an active attempt to step through time itself, which they said contained no such division into past, present and future as they and all the people had always been taught..
This was too much for the Leaders and their supporters to accept - it was treason not only against their society but against nature. It was an attack on existence itself, which had always sectioned time into its epochs of convenience. Past, present and future were each cordoned off from the others; and this perverse and unnatural attempt to conjoin them had to be utterly stopped before it destroyed their society.
"There are too many heretics to kill outright or even to imprison. They must be banished and our society walled off from their place of banishment." Thus was it resolved and approved by their Premier, their Gimbledon as he was designated since ancient times.
Of all places within the arc of time, the one - and the only - into which the Outcasts could step was the present. This they tried when they were first banished, several re-entering the city to try and reclaim some of their clothes. They were immediately spotted and shot at; only was able to step even a few minutes into their own present beyond what was immediately before them. For weeks he stepped forward then backward a little further each time until finally discovering a thousand years hence the exact place when the last young men and women threw off their clothes in anticipation of being torn to pieces.
He had left from and returned to the Hall of Bones, the cliff where over time piles of small bones spread along its edge from end to end. Nowhere else allowed him access to the city's guarded and restricted timeline.
- The young man was sent home from class when he showed up in his underwear.
"Someone took my clothes," he tearfully tried to explain. "I set my favorite shirt and pants out before I went to bed, the ones my girl likes me to wear. When I got up this morning they were gone - just gone! Someone took them. Why? What does it mean?"
His fellow students told of similar incidents involving their clothes as well.
"What does it men?" they all echoed the young man's question.
Clothes began disappearing from closets on a regular basis, but no one could account for it. They reported the thefts; but nothing was ever done, no investigation initiated, until Gimbledon's son's clothes began disappearing. It wasn't what was taken that triggered a full scale search but what was not.
In the months that saw several of the boy's garments disappear, not one single piece of clothing was taken from Gimbledon's other son. Sammie's clothes remained intact. Gimbledon was enraged, expressed his outrage to his best friend, the man with black hair and dark eyes.
"Whoever is Sammie's father is behind these disappearances - otherwise why would he leave Sammie's things alone?"
His friend knew but said nothing. How could he possibly explain a world whose people stepped in and out of time to a man whose entire existence was based on the impossibility of such an enterprise? He knew why of all the people who had lived within the city in the past thousand years only Sammie was left alone. He knew Sammie alone would have seen - with his own eyes seen - anyone absconding with his clothes. He knew this was why Sammie's eyes were to be taken. It was to give him, Sammie's father, the ability to see things he must come to see if he were to truly become the Chosen One some day. -
"We cannot wear these same clothes for the next thousand years," the first Chosen One told his people. "We must periodically step into their future at different times to obtain new clothes. It will not be as easy as picking up garments that have been discarded. We must go amongst their dwellings to take what we need from their closets. It will be best to go deep within their night, when no one is likely to witness garments disappearing. Let them think their neighbors took them. We will take from every period along the arc of their time."
It was asked if there was any chance these city dwellers would figure out what was happening to their clothes.
"No," answered the first Chosen One. "Their minds have forever closed to the ideas that resulted in our being banished. They will spend endless hours parsing their disappearing clothes. They will approach it from every rational perspective yet still refuse to see what is right before them. That it could not be happening any other but the way it is will never occur to them. They will look for a pattern in the color and fabric and cut and size of the missing pieces. But never will they look to the past."
Sammie watched from his room his brother's clothes being carried out by men from the past. He waved at them then returned to his own room to gather a few of his shirts and pants so that their small sons would not go naked.; but no one would accept his offering. He smiled at the Chosen Successor then returned to his bed.
At the moment of his death, as the dagger he gave the man with black hair and dark eyes was plunged into his chest, Brown Shirt cried out. Not in agony but in despair at the horrible mistake he had made in substituting father for son. The vision which had brought him to this end flashed before him and he realized the man he beheld taking his life was not Sammie's father but Sammie himself, a young man captured as a boy and taken among the Outcasts to await his Succession. He knew then how Sammie's father came to be the Imposter. And his despair at having betrayed his people was so great it worked its way down to the wound on his belly to become a festering growth which only Sammie could free him from. Otherwise, he would fester for all eternity until nothing but a putrid mass of refuse remained crouching behind a big bush.
Sammie spent what felt to him like an eternity looking for Brown Shirt with light hair and eyes to warn him. Sammie knew it wasn't eternity, he knew time too well to confuse the space traversed to find someone with how long it took. He stepped back and forth it seemed to him endlessly. He was unlearning his people's obsession with separating time into its three epochs; but had yet to master the Outcasts' ability to untangle past from present from future. He wandered back and forth seeking the man destined to kill him by mistake. He loved this man, who he had seen naked when his father killed him and couldn't bear watching him turning into a festering sore.
Sammie stepped back a thousand years and forward as long; but he couldn't fix himself within the immediate past, so close to the present was it, to when Brown Shirt saw in a woman's naked belly an image of his own killer, the man with black hair and dark eyes - Sammie's real father.
"It's me who was always meant to kill you and not my father," he repeated through time; but not once was it heard by Brown Shirt. Not a single time. Nothing Sammie could do could save Brown Shirt from, in killing him - Sammie - unleashing the Imposter upon his people and bringing a scourge upon his own flesh. Only this woman, for whom Brown Shirt had betrayed his woman, could save the Outcasts from turning their blood lust inward upon themselves.
Sammie saw, the last thing he would ever see before Brown Shirt took his eyes, his mother standing beside this woman who alone had the means of saving the Outcasts. And yet, which made Sammie cry out - his mother was trying to stop this other woman from the one thing that could save the Outcasts and, in saving them, restore Brown Shirt from the grip of the putrid mass slowly devouring him.
Unable to go to his mother once she was among the Outcasts, Sammie went to her in the present to warn her not to prevent the other woman from doing what had to be done.
"You must not stop a woman from doing what she must," Sammie pleaded with his mother, who looked at her son as if he were hallucinating.
"What woman is this?" Sammie's mother asked.
"She is a woman Brown Shirt betrayed his woman for," was all Sammie could answer by way of explanation.
"And what is this thing I must not stop her from doing?"
"I don't know yet - I still can't see it clearly enough."
"Well, when you do see it, come and tell me then," the boy's mother told him.
A sad look came over Sammie's face as he told her it may be too late then. He turned and walked away from his mother. Instead of walking back to his room, he stepped into the future again to try and make out what it was this other woman must not be stopped from doing. But, as before, he could not see clearly what it was. The time was still too close to the present to have become part of the future.
Sammie approached the big bush behind which the naked man with light hair and eyes crouched, for even though that too was on the cusp of the future he could already see the rotting belly of this man, the man who would kill him tomorrow. His aim was to plead with the man not to kill him but to kill his father instead. But when he approached close enough to whisper his plea, the horrible stench of rotting flesh turned his back. He could stand the stench; but not the thought of it slowly consuming this most beautiful thing he had ever beheld. He ran until he could run no more, then threw himself on the ground and cried until, out of fear he might wash away his eyes, leaving nothing but dust to offer Brown Shirt, he stopped crying and returned to his room to await tomorrow.
That day, Sammie's tomorrow, arrived, revealing his hands empty of anything to show for having tried to save Brown Shirt from killing the wrong one and, thereby, setting the putrid horror in play. Sammie attended his older brother and Gimbledon in their weekly round of ball playing in front of the University's South Wing.
The man with black hair and dark eyes positioned himself at the second floor window where he always watched the sons of Gimbledon playing with their father. He knew why Sammie slouched where he was always at his game. He knew this was to be the final round and that nothing he could ever do would change the outcome He was filled with despair, and would have given anything if he and Sammie could reverse places - anything but the false knowledge of what the day must bring. He didn't know, and couldn't because of his intrusion into a time that was not and was never meant to be his own. A time his intrusion had skewed to where Brown Shirt's vision was turned inside out, and his victim placed where his killer should have been.
No matter how Sammie pleaded with his mother, the moment he stepped into the future he could still see his mother ignoring his every plea and returned again and again to that day when the wrong link in the father/son chain was severed. It never occurred to the boy to speak to his father instead of his mother - to beg his father to stop Brown Shirt's other woman from destroying the fabric of time.
Sammie's last words, whispered to Brown Shirt as he was taken up to be torn apart, were "I know what it means." He alone of all his people understood the deepest meaning of Prince Hamlet's final words, "The Rest Is Silence." Because for the rest of eternity he, Prince Sammie, would be trapped in the clutches of silence, unable ever to right the terrible wrong done to both his people and the Outcasts. He would be forever caught within the void left where time ceased its movement, where past present and future became an eternal Now. And where his only company would be a lump of rotted putrid flesh. And he screamed as no human had ever screamed since time began. A scream whose deepest meaning was known to one being in all the universe, the man with black hair and dark eyes, who heard in that scream what even Sammie could not; and saw what would come to pass.
"How can you even consider doing something like that?" Sammie's mother, who was taken by the Outcasts, asked the woman who had just given birth.
"He isn't mine," the woman answered. "Look at him: he looks nothing like me. He isn't mine. It is a sacrilege against our most sacred law to keep another's child."
"Then whose child is he?" Sammie's mother asked.
"I don't know. All I can do is set him out and leave him for his true mother."
"Where?"
The woman who had just given birth pointed far off and said "There, where all children who do not belong are kept."
"Then I will take him to replace my son," Sammie's mother said.
"He looks no more like you than he does like me," the woman told her. "You cannot claim him, it would be a sacrilege."
"I will accompany you to this place," said Sammie's mother, filled with despair at so inhumane a custom but bowing to do nothing to interfere with these people's ways.
"Can you not at least go among your people to let the women see if he is theirs?" Sammie's mother tried one last time to save this child from a certain death.
Again, the woman who had just given birth shook her head "No."
"It may not belong to anyone of my people," she explained. "It could belong to some woman in the future or in the past. And whoever it belongs to will be looking for it on the edge of the cliff. That has always been our place to come and look for our children. If I don't put it there its rightful mother will never find it and I will have committed the greatest sacrilege among our people. I would be hurled over the cliff's edge to the chasm below to dwell forever with those unable to ever again step from the present into another time."
They arrived at the cliff's edge and the child was set along its edge, where as far as the eye could see was a spread of small bones. Sammie's mother wept for this child doomed to die alone and abandoned.
That night Sammie came to his mother and told her she must take his father to the edge of the cliff; but said no more before turning away so his mother could not see that he had no eyes.
This was his last chance to save the Outcasts from their descent into blood lust; and in doing so to save Brown Shirt from becoming a blob of pus crouching forever behind a big bush.
Sammie did not go to his father with the same instruction he had given his mother: he knew it was useless since his father could not see him any longer now that he was eyeless, for his eyes were what linked father and son, and that link was broken forever when this man with black hair and dark eyes accepted his son's eyes from the killer who mistook victims. Everyone else still alive in the present could see Sammie wandering forlornly along the edge of the cliff but not his own father. They knew Sammie was waiting for a sign that what still survived in the present would continue in that phase; what they didn't know was Sammie's absolute love for the man with light hair and eyes, the man who mistakenly killed him and plucked out his eyes, thereby condemning those all seeing eyes to dissolve to sand.
The Chosen One abruptly ended his training of his Chosen Successor, this Imposter with black hair and dark eyes.
"I can go no farther," the Chosen One told his Chosen Successor.
"Shall I return tomorrow?" the Imposter asked; but was told he would never return. This was when he removed Sammie's eyes from his pocket to show them as proof of his worthiness to succeed. But the moment he held them before the Chosen One they turned to sand and fell through his fingers.
The man with black hair and dark eyes turned and left the place of learning and kept walking until he reached the edge of the cliff and stood among the many small bones draping the edge. He removed all his clothes except for his Brown Shirt which, no longer rightfully his he meant to remove just before stepping over the ledge.
A noise broke his stillness and he turned to see Sammie's mother and another woman, who was holding a child approaching. He did not acknowledge them but simply turned back to his stillness. He was not waiting for them to leave before finishing his ritual; he was being still till he knew the moment was upon him. Whether they were here or gone did not concern him.
From the corner of his eye he caught something, a motion, an object being set but a few feet from where he stood. He turned back, but was caught by a sudden sound and again turned to see this woman, who had accompanied Sammie's mother retreating. And he looked again to where this woman had left something among the small bones. At first he could not make it out; then when he did he called after this other woman that she had forgotten her child.
The woman ignored him and kept walking away from the small bones. He started to go after her but was stopped by Sammie's mother, whose expression forbade his pursuing this other woman.
"It is not her child," Sammie's mother told Sammie's father.
"Then we will take it and it will be ours," Sammie's father said.
"We may not," Sammie's mother replied.
"Then it will die."
"Unless it is claimed."
"We shall claim it!" said Sammie's father.
"No, we cannot. It looks no more like us than like the woman who birthed it."
"I will not let it sit here and die," Sammie's father swore. "I will take it up when I remove Brown Shirt and carry it with me to the bottom of this chasm."
"You must not commit this greatest sacrilege of these people," Sammie's mother insisted. "You must come away from this place, and leave this child to somehow find its way to its rightful mother."
"And end up a pile of bones on this ledge forever?"
"There is no other way. Come. If you love me, come away with me now."
"This child can replace our Sammie, who was taken from us."
"No, it cannot. Sammie will not permit it."
The man with black hair and dark eyes wept at this, for he knew Sammie's mother had spoken truthfully.
"I will look upon this child that I may see who I am sentencing to a cruel death," Sammie's father said. "Then I will go from this place and wander forever among Time looking for its real mother."
Slowly Sammie's father approached the point along the cliff's edge where the orphan child lay awaiting its end. He slowly forced his eyes, exact replicas of Sammie's eyes, full upon this child. And as he he raised his head and wailed, his despair reverberating deep into the chasm.
He cried out "It's him! It's him who I killed! It's his child! This child is Brown Shirt's son! I cannot leave him!"
"You must!" cried Sammie's mother. "To take him up will destroy everything!"
Sammie's father in a flash threw off his Chosen Successor's Brown Shirt and stood naked on the cliff's edge. He reached and picked up this child with his father's light hair and eyes and held the child to his belly that it might suckle his wound, the wound he took with a kiss from the man he killed. He held the child until he knew the last trace of his wound had left his belly and was visited upon this child's belly. Then he wrapped the child in the Brown Shirt and quickly gave the child to Sammie's mother.
"Take him and go!" he demanded. "Do not look back! Raise him as your own. He will now be safe. He is protected by his Brown Shirt. Go!"
Sammie's mother took the new Chosen Successor and hurried away from the edge of the cliff, never looking back no matter what terrible sounds pursued.
From nowhere a horde of Outcasts appeared. They made for the Imposter. They took him up. They began tearing him to pieces and one by one throwing his pieces over the ledge until soon nothing remained that anyone could say had once belonged to the man with black hair and dark eyes, Sammie's father, the Chosen Successor, the Imposter.
A piece of his hip bone interrupted a young boy's fall and propelled this boy with light hair and eyes onto the ledge, where a Brown Shirt was placed over his head and draped along his body.
Then all was quiet along the edge of the cliff.
August 8, 2024 5:11 P.M.