Cats Away II
Posted by Esteban
Carnage greeted me. Bodies littered the asphalt, one slumped, limbs akimbo, on my stoop. I stepped gingerly; get blood on a silk suit you might as well kiss it goodbye. Would it even be the same suit? Is a thing ever the same thing from one moment to the next?
Who was shooting up my neighborhood? Where is the child I once was?
In my line of work, death’s no stranger, yet we avatars do not know it outside our little games. No sitting at bedsides, no phone calls in the depth of the night, no grief or sorrow. Those bodies on my stoop were not sons or fathers.
Serendipitously, I got an IM from Race over in Chicago. Come on over, I said, I got some death to deal with.
The bodies were dressed identically — some kind of army? members of a secret sect? cloning experiment gone awry? — and carried no identification. Their sameness unnerved me — as if someone were desperately trying to create a whole self by creating a thousand empty ones. Why pile such sandbags against impermanence when impermanence is all everything comes down to?
Was this Leviathan‘s work? Having them move in next door was like having death as a neighbor. How could I exist so close to that passing stillness where once life walked? Light! More light! Take into the air my quiet breath!
My suit will be a different suit tomorrow. Of course I too will be gone, not yet in the ground indeed, but another come to walk in my place.
The corpses were no match for Race’s shotgun, and before long the square was clean again. As ever, in a world where pyramids vanish quietly in the morning fog, life as we imagined it never was. Can you see that death thus was everywhere (for what else is the absence of life?) and nowhere (how can death be where no life lived?)? I stood, peacefully, as the evening sun faded, watching the shadows of Topgol’s mercurial horizon lengthen into the dark night.
What is death but the absence? Are we not dead when logged? Some might say it is it merely unconsciousness, because we wake again. But I say it is us who truly know reincarnation. Perhaps this is what they fear.
Speaking of reincarnation, Burgess, are you back?
I must be, for I speak here. But I cannot see. What is this place?
[...] Cats Away II [...]