The Death of the Wave (19 page)

and you lifted your arms in front of the flame

and screamed wordlessly into the sky.

My Artist.

Your Author is dead to the potential of the world.

What she is now can do nothing.

But oh, the weeping sore of a pointless sacrifice!

For you thought to be like her!

“I am like you.”

And you crumpled to your knees

as the Breakers rushed to put out the flame,

to put out your heart for

“I am like you.”

For fire cares for nothing

and fire is fair.

I watched the Artist’s pitiful figure

recoil in his cell from the light

that emitted past the door like an accusatory finger.

He was shrunken, bloodied from the sickness.

His toothless mouth caved in.

His hair all gone.

He scrabbled to stay out of my searching.

His face that caught the light

like a gleam of trout in a stream,

was tight and shiny where the brand had burned

the mark of Eden into his unwashed skin.

He had branded himself a traitor to mark himself a hero.

His right eye was gone, shrunk in its socket,

the other eye peering, peering.

Poor parody of a tragedy, Blue.

A mockery of what should have happened to your Author.

What a story that would have been!

The spurned hero’s death by firing-squad.

How anticlimactic, what she is now.

The woman without a face

and the woman without a name,

whose hand trembles as she sweeps the filth away

from a forgotten life.

And I was like my Artist,

with all morality stripped away.

An apex predator straining to the light.

A mythical tiger with its muzzle up to the eyes

in the blood of its living prey.

And I stood, in my imagined shining

over the trembling wreckage of a perfect tragedy.

For you gazed up at me in supplication,

with that one bright eye shining,

and in cruelty I told you that

“Author lives.”

And in duality I told you

“Your mother lives.”

Perfect whore, 256!

No time in a rebellion to know your own son.

Author waited for you to start the rebellion, Blue.

Twelve years, she waited to start the rebellion.

And when I was born of your unnatural union,

she did not spare a thought for me.

I am you as surely as I am Descartes remade.

Blue, I am you had you learned to love.

Blue, I am you if you could not remember.

I am you if you were reborn.

The final triumph of logic over emotion.

But everything I did, Artist, I did it for love.

You never loved your Author.

Had you loved her,

you would have allowed the State to crumble to fall into ruins

and you would have danced upon the pieces.

I would allow every man, woman, and child to die

if only my love would live.

But he lives and all is well.

Together we shall save the State.

And the world had no place for you.

I watched you that day burn with a shame

that was deeper than any agony

you could inflict upon yourself.

“Who?”
you murmured,

and I told you who she was.

Who I am.

And I looked to my letters and smiled.

“The Scientist and your son,” I replied.

“The writer and your muse.”

“But I am a savior from hell,” I reminded.

“And you are not to trust me.”

Every inch of me is dead.

Save for one.

One inch.

Blue.

What were you thinking, to fall in love with me?

And it was love, wasn’t it, in the beginning?

I closed my eyes to it, and called you liar,

your betrayal merely confirming what I already had suspected.

But no, you loved me.

Or rather, you loved the mask, the false face, the creation

in your own poisoned mind, of what I was meant to be.

What will they write of me?

Will I be their hero, as I was yours?

Until I rebelled only to reveal my fragility.

My frailty.

For I was human, I had tempests, and moments of weakness

and I was frightened of what lay ahead.

More frightened than I can tell you.

Once my heart burned with the fires of revolution.

But they are gone, now.

Faded away.

There is nothing to be frightened of any longer.

My eyes burn and my hands are shaking.

Sometimes, I will hear something from the outside,

376 is old, and soon will face the firing squad,

sentenced by his age.

But still, he tells me of the world and

something about the Scientist

and how the Camps were to be freed

as Galileo was slaughtered.

My heart at this would burn once more,

but it was the feeble flickering of near-dead coals

that, when the promise was not fulfilled died just as quickly.

Do you remember the day that they first brought you in?

In here to the Barracks for ending the life of Newton?

How you fought them?

How you cursed and spat at their feet?

I cannot look at you now.

They say that you have the sickness from the Cull,

but that the letter, the last letter

that your Scientist will distribute

will be in the Camps tonight.

And that the world will be consumed utterly.

Purified by destruction,

the face of chaos to pave way for freedom.

The opposite of your dream.

For you never believed my ideals.

You took up the pen because you loved me,

because your guilt ate at and corroded your heart.

Because the last shred of humanity in you demands to be

acknowledged and justified.

Your beloved State will crumble.

But to what end?

What has the Scientist planned?

376 knows nothing of that, so neither do I.

You never should have loved me, Blue.

Perhaps I should have loved you,

And I do, enough to keep you from the burning.

that your sickness would set you for a fate.

They were going to burn you alive and rake the ashes.

But I had a word with the one man

whose influence still prevails.

376 is old, and soon they will take him out

behind the sheds, like an old horse that has worked too long and too hard.

But with his influence,

I give you my last gift.

You will die at the barrel of a gun,

with your flesh seared with the mark of a traitor

and a lie coiled into the chambers of your heart.

The words that died in the cold and in the snow.

And do not shoot the messenger.

I was with Breakers when Blue died, in the cell,

surrounded by my letters.

The Artist laughed at the failing of a revolution with a wild dark humor,

as if he could not believe that he had gone so far, and fought so well,

only to die there at the last.

He was still laughing when they turned the guns on him.

How many bullets does it take to extinguish a soul as great as that of a traitor?

He never forgave himself, and it took too many.

I watched my father and my brother die.

I could not think, I could not feel.

When the Breakers were satisfied, my old 376 turned them to go.

I could not save him, nor do any more damage.

So I faced the dying man

with the self-brand of the Martyr

whose letter had burned so near my heart.

The revolution would have soon begun,

but first I would slip in the blood of the Artist.

Where was Darwin? Why hadn’t he come?

Blue was leaning against the wall, cradling his body with both hands

as if to keep in his heart.

The old woman who cleaned the cells stood at the door,

and when he called, she came to him.

I had never seen her face,

but I knew she must be beautiful.

He reached up.

His hand tugged as if to keep himself from falling,

and the hood fell away.

From where I was standing, I could not see her face.

I only saw the expression on his,

before he fell away.

The information passed, and footsteps down the hall.

She looked down at the dead man, turned, and said

“Remember,”

in a voice like a violin gathering up all the sadness in the world.

And in the instant before I left, upon her I could see

the tracing of a tree’s branches burnt.

So many, many fires ago.

I watched you from the door

as the Breakers came in

with their gleaming uniforms.

And my old friend, 376, hounder and savior,

leading them, head held high,

like an old horse proud to once more be set in the traces.

The only thing left for 376 now, was myself and the Duty.

He hated the State, but could not bring himself to betray

once more.

And you knew of your death, Blue, you were ready.

Your letter was in the Camps.

We are a matched set, are we not, by your making?

I watched you as you struggled.

You died hard Blue,

not with a sigh, but with a struggle,

choking and retching,

scrabbling for the light.

You are nothing that I remember.

The boy who loved me had been beautiful.

Insolently beautiful.

But your face and body were ravaged from the sickness,

rendered hardly human by the scarring of your makeshift brand.

A mockery of my own suffering.

The mark of Eden to skin is the seal of a traitor.

And that you were, as surely as I was, enemy to the State.

But you and I—

You and I.

Can we be called the same?

Memories of you in the dark,

your compact body against mine.

Your idiot whispering of love and devotion.

Your beaming of pride, your rages, and your jealousies.

Your betrayal.

I give you my last gift after execution.

Me.

My face revealed, your hand lingered upon my cheek

covering the ruined side of my face.

You made me my mask,

revealing me to be a creature once again of innocence.

I wish I could have loved you.

But for your last seconds, I will be who you wished me to be.

In your dying eyes, my age would fall away.

I would be beautiful once more.

Your eyes met mine, Blue,

and for an instant, I saw the worshipful boy,

the foolish boy that loved me.

And I saw that he was sorry.

For I am like you.

And then something in your good eye dimmed

and I watched you fall away.

What could I do?

The riot.

I waited

as insidiously, relentlessly

the snow began to fall

upon the living and the dead,

in the prison blocks, the parade ground,

and behind the sheds,

where men were once shot like horses

and a tangle of figures lay frozen on the ground.

The warden and the prisoner.

So quickly.

He must have seen the insurgent,

chased him,

brought him down in the snow—

The prisoner, emaciated, his face hidden by his hair

lay dead, his fist still clenched loosely to the rifle

whose barrel was resting against the chest of his enemy.

His enemy who was still alive.

Who was still alert as I approached,

but did not call out, did not say a thing,

only rested his cheek against the snow,

and waited to die.

As I waited.

It was too late for him.

376.

The great dark eyes were clouding.

But even there, in his dying,

there was still a glory to him,

a simplistic grandeur

that altered the plain black uniform.

Gone was his strength and his standing.

The hair that was once sable was now streaked with silver.

But the eyes —

the eyes were always the same.

And it was, it is, just a job, those steady eyes revealed

as Eden’s best Breaker tore his gaze from mine

to look to the prisoner that he had apprehended,

before he fell away.

Now he lies forever linked in chase.

The prisoner and the warden.

The errant knight and knave.

As it should and rightfully be

under that shared canopy

of dead and dying stars.

No pleasure in the chase.

No pain in the fall.

The words that died in the cold and the snow.

But did they die?

Did they ever live?

That is the real question.

To what end is all striving?

To what purpose?

What then, is the right?

“Write.”

Now Descartes is finally dead.

They put a bullet through his head.

Quickly, now.

What is the unalterable truth, the unquestionable morality?

I thought that I knew.

And it was in a single moment, a second of realizing that I would do anything it took

to further the cause, to further our goal,

that I understood that we were not so different.

The Martyr.

The Scientist.