Crematorium for Phoenixes (4 page)

Thus, under the very thin clouds sudden
winds and currents, along with heavy doses of sunlight, had started
an odyssey that we will eventually know the outcome of.

Now, before the aluminum Plexiglas dials
with their shaking movements, stood people who had spent their
lives in a sleepless sleep—no memories of the past or dreams for
the future haunted them, but at this time before them was a path
worthy of demigods and heroes. They had been elevated to those
heights that lure people, whispering reminders of the time they had
lost their wings.

The noise of the engine, the clatter of the
transmission, and the rhythmically spinning air propellers had
intoxicated the seven men and given them that sense of freedom that
mankind was destined to experience centuries and centuries later as
pilots in leather jackets, goggles, rubberized adhesives, and silk
scarves.

This is the existence that we all pray to
the Creator to give us when the chains of our memories have become
too severe. We wish to be turned into birds that are flying beyond
the places that have caused us pain.

Before the men extended horizons upon
horizons of unseen land connecting one shore to another;
civilizations that cheapened the splendor too magnificent to
describe dotted these areas.

As if everything was completely natural, no
questions were asked while these men flew in the clouds and as the
Behemoth left Bibal.

Rampant miles and miles of pathway that
could only be likened to tales from the Orient greeted these
travelers. Those stories chronicled the passage of people who had
traveled great distances at unimaginable speeds, but even so, the
writers of the East with their extravagant flights of fancy would
not have been able to imagine this current journey.

The controllable balloon flipped over plowed
lands that had been drilled and cut by mechanisms, wheels that drew
water and irrigation channels that looked like veins that stuck out
and throbbed. The sandy hills were planted with pincushions of
palms, under whose shadows tents were pitched here and there. The
bells of cattle herds and the laughter of children echoed from
among the camps.

The Behemoth moved in the shadows of the
clouds, hiding its shape, but occasionally poking outside of them,
which produced horror and ecstasy in the villages below.

People were scared of the matte silver
vehicle and regularly offered numerous sacrifices to graven images
under the shady groves. There is nothing like the gods that human
hate, fear, or love more than themselves. This is because the gods
were the ones who came to remind us that the first farmer to pray
did so just for a drop of water, that the shepherd doesn’t know if
tomorrow there will be a pasture for his countless herds, that man
is an animal, always surrounded by death.

And although they are accustomed to all
sorts of things, men get nervous with all this fuss. Deep in their
hearts they are afraid that they will be held accountable for their
actions.

The flight harbored in their hearts turmoil,
pain, sorrow, and sighs from seen and unseen lands.

And the Behemoth was increasingly flying in
a southerly direction.

The landscape transformed like a nascent
creature—the Bekaa valley with its plantations of emerald cut from
a fragment of graphite-gray hills changed into the mountain of
Lebanon ringed like a necklaces with hills, which then transformed
into rivers and yellowish seas; the settlements changed one after
another.

The airship flew with the speed of a quiet
breeze, and despite its soundlessness, it was capable of covering
great distances.

Barely reaching the mountains of the
Galilee, Carmel, and Golan, the Behemoth sank in the west and
entered the sea.

The zeppelin flew and flew over the Great
Sea that collected and separated continents, which hovering like
seabirds did not go anywhere but nevertheless respected its
route.

The Behemoth left behind the golden-yellow
lands of Phoenicia and moved more into the sea that resembled
melted wax.

The men, strange as it may sound, were not
questioning the foreigner about details. Between them a trust had
been formed; it was the same kind borne from people on the road.
These men had become permanently bound, but at some point, the men
needed their leader to reveal a part of himself and his plans.

“Lord, I think it’s time to introduce
yourself and what we should do,” one of the men ventured.

“You can call me Tammuz. I will be brief. I
need you to hunt demons, but I cannot promise you salvation. Such a
thing people receive only in cheap or real stories with the gods.
Here, you will get only death. The monsters that we will meet
guarantee that. I have a challenging life. I won’t promise to make
your lives easier or different. I don’t have divine powers, but I
am headed to kill people with such things. You must help me.”

There was an audible but distinct gurgling.
It was as if the men had found themselves confronted with an
invisible well placed in front of a fence that was solid and high,
made of rough, hard plaster and masonry. It was as if they had
crashed into such a thing at full force.

“Talk a little more plainly, Tammuz. Only
those fortunate chatterboxes, inflated with hydration, or insane
prophets speak in this way,” said the first among the men,
Sharukin.

“Well then, I will try to tell you
everything from the beginning.

“After changing the cycles, the long
centuries that measure human life, people learned how to travel
between the worlds and between time itself. There, above us, were
spread about belts and girdles of stars where we built cities. They
resembled the appearance of crystal crowns or spirals on the spokes
of wheels; they were circles within circles of satellites. In such
a star town I was born.

“Floating among the clouds of dusty systems,
we diverged, we disappeared, and we reappeared, moving in the
vacuum.

“Cities, our mothers, produced colonies that
in their turn became the basis of more locales. Humankind grew and
diminished like a pounding body that waged war. Such things over
time blurred into little more than stardust.

“Mastered—we eventually mastered time
travel.

“We were present at the creation of life, at
the appearance of the first man, at the birth of the first
civilization. Our presence created entangled threads within
time.

“Once put on this road, many of those sent
forth turned away and began to act on their own, weaving new
creations from the fibers present in the world. Doing so has
amended every moment of our existence, so my mission and that of
many others is to kill, to give life, to build, and to destroy—all
in the name of time.”

“So what’s the difficult part?”

“It is a hard task because I have to kill.
But I also often have to leave in place the head of kingdoms,
tyrannical or utopian. There are those who raise the flags of a
thousand nations from subcontinent to subcontinent. There are
people who are willing to destroy those that are preached
unconditional love.”

The men fell silent, soaking in the horror
and shocked by what they had just heard.

“You will do all this?” asked Sharukin.

“Yes, my friend, we will perform such deeds.
And the others like us may be forced to liquidate us, even if we do
the right thing as long as the timeline imposes it. Maybe in the
end, if we do not die, we will become that which we will fight, if
time demands it. Now you know some part of the truth. Let’s focus
on getting the airship to Crete.”

The men ran to their seats and turned the
steel sheet and rubberized wheels. They moved the throttles and the
great zeppelin shrugged its flaps. It shook its plump body, made
some tentative maneuvers, and with its propellers rattling pushed
forward.

Thus buzzing with the cycle of roaring
engines, which spoke for the pilgrimage itself, the machine gained
momentum and dressage; it surfed on the winds.

The Behemoth perhaps formed a totally
inappropriate but most habitual thread of humanity because modeled
from the Creator, mankind also flies like the wind to the four
corners of the world, stealing breaths before breathing in a
handful of mud. That’s why man tempts fate like a blossomed flower
spinning in its delicate beauty.

Moving like a lit cloud along the shining
edges of an asteroid, the aircraft floated between the two
azures.

Thus, surrounded by blue, starting from on
and ending in another, the men came to understand the truth that
mud had created the splendor of this world. Humanity was created
from the tears of God.

So it was that the beauty, blessed with
mortality and eternity, filled the spaces between continents and
filled their souls with peace.

The Behemoth levitated, hanging in the sky
like a fallen meteor and zipping over watery depths, passing island
after island in the Aegean. They looked like the projections of
sinewy roots, interwoven parts of Europe and Asia. After some hours
the zeppelin passed Cyprus and Rhodes—particles of other worlds
that had been thrown into the Mediterranean—and like a protrusion
cutting the horizon in front of them stood the outline of
Crete.

The Behemoth approached the gravelly ground
while sheltered spots of greenery, mostly trees and bushes followed
by streaks of plantations, appeared here and there.

The red hues of the island’s few houses were
scattered away from one another along the beach. Although Crete had
a pristine coastline, it did little more than keep people secluded
and isolated.

In the distance stood the Palace of Knossos;
its straight columns were painted red like a warning to those who
dared to venture closer.

Chapter
Six

The hours went by in that stretchiness,
elongated and torn, that accompanies anything that man desires,
fears, loves, or hates.

Illuminated by pale flames, the patients in
the leper colony moved soundlessly. They were translucent shadows
staggering around in sterile white corridors or just lying on the
floor.

Sporadic talks were tainted by the quiet
steps of oncoming pain. The rustle of weekday vanity slowly
engulfed the colony’s vitality and the colony could do little in
opposition to it . . . .

Good or bad everything is measured in a
different way that only the sickly people can understand.

Under the lush canopy of trees, these people
had grown like stubble in the cracks of stone. They were being
forced to do the scariest thing in life—live to the end of it.

Staying near the sea lined with rocks
covered in a muslin of greenery, and framed by blue granite blocks,
the patients were disconnected from everything.

Every night, they gathered at the edge of
the cliff and screamed messages to their relatives below. Every
night was the last one for some of them.

Worn like shells in the ocean of eternity,
people come and go, and often we are intermingled and become lost
among others.

The soul is like a drop of molten iron that
has been heated and tempered, formed from all of the senses.

This is why words sometimes remain choked in
the chest.

Because from time to time a person wants
something—to drink from the cup of eternity.

Such action is done without a lot of
talking. However, I will tell you the following story.

Akuma, twenty-one years old, felt the right
side of his face.

Bloated and swollen as usual, it was painful
to touch and felt simultaneously soft and rough.

His right eye, a sobbing, festering, and
stinking hole, gave him a fuzzy, gray, and dark view of the
world.

Slightly downturned, his lips were tightened
and stretched toward the right into a half smile that gave him the
look of a madman.

Combined with the constant shaking of his
cheek, for sporadic convulsions made his rough and fuzzy sides play
disgusting beats, Akuma looked like a man whose right side had been
possessed by a demon.

Whenever he thought about his past, it
always started as a shower of fragmented memories. The
recollections were like fossils that coalesced and precipitated
remembrances with the bitter, metallic taste of molten silver or
lead. They were often unexpected and accidentally recollected.

There he was meeting her.

Nothing more than offal now, those
weaknesses that filled his dreams. They were silly things like
verses of poetry, traveling and daydreaming that they were
together, merging them through borrowed accidents that collected
like flowing water droplets.

He loved her, had that feeling, delicate,
ephemeral, and eternal, full of an emptiness that only the love of
two merged souls could recreate as a colorful bubble.

They were like twisted plants, entangled in
their destiny and life until he got sick.

He remembered the night when it happened. It
had been a gloomy December day during which the wind scraped the
fields. Cold penetrated the houses.

They had said that everything was fine.

In fact, we all say such childlike things as
we twist headlong into a blanket of gathered darkness. We tell
ourselves that monsters do not really exist.

And in the morning, we believe everything
will be fine. We believe all the things that we need and want will
be ours in the future.

Because hope is that gem created by the dust
of despair that has entered the soul.

But often, in this world that dictates
orders in opposition to our beautiful stories, unexpected things
happen.

And weakness, accompanied by her eternal
companion, pain, began to change Akuma.

It happened slowly at first, but gradually
grew—the pain was an unwanted guest that held the power of an
unexpected nightmare. It stayed until it became a constant
companion.