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Saturday, March 10, 2007
I was at a trial in the House of Lords, the victimized party, represented by my lawyer and friend of many years against the Pillar Corporation. The crime was some inconsequential quibble which I really should have forgotten about before I had even considered taking to court, but nevertheless it had been taken to court. Ironically I now have forgotten it- but who really remembers a crime? Only the people are worth remembering. The man who still stands out in my memory is the judge. I forget his name, really- so you will not ever know him the same way I do. He passed the verdict for some amount of money to be paid to me in reparations, which seemed satisfactory to the Corporation, so I agreed with it and my friend must have sensed it, as he told the judge so and no further appeal was made on either side.
After the proceedings, the judge came up to me and pressed a five-cent coin in my hand; he said "you deserve five cents more than what I judged officially, but I was hesitant to include that in the verdict. It would reflect badly on my sensibilities; don't take this as an insult, I ask of you, but you will need it one day."
He was more than a judge of man- he was fit to judge all the earth and he judged correctly. Sometimes I felt that it was a waste for him to judge as a judge; he should have judged as a man or a saint, or a- just not a judge. His fairness could have been used someplace else, where it would do actual good, such as on the chair beside whichever deity might govern our lordless planet.
In the middle of my story, he was right. I was on a bus on the way home, dreaming some poetry, when a girl from my past stepped onto the front and put a few coins into the hopper, but the bus driver refused to give her a ticket because she was five cents short. I knew then what was the purpose of that coin pressed into my flesh so many years ago back when commiting minor crimes could get a major company sued, and she merely looked at me with a thankful expression and walked into the back of the bus where she faded again into the memory from which she had came. I looked at the five cents in my hand and threw the coin, now spent, into that same foggy mist whence the bus came; all of a sudden the bus disappeared and I was back in the courtroom, now twenty years past that day when I had first seen the girl on the bus and forgotten about her since. The judge Abraham Smith had just passed his verdict of two hundred thousand in reparations to the defendant, a solemn man named Derrick Ng who had been killed due to negligence on the part of the company which produced the emotional supplements he had been fed. Since Derrick was owned by the state, the compensation (since he was dead) also went to the state, although the judge judged fairly anyway.
I was present as one of the jury. The verdict, having been decided by the judge, nevertheless did not fail to astonish me. My compatriots sitting (as I was) in the spectator's box had already reached their own verdicts and were busy spewing nonsense at the judge's face, which he deigned to ignore because he could not see that they were more than puffs of air hovering over contraptions of steel and cloth over which men laid their posteriors- they were the chorus of his past, and sequestered safely away in his unconscious memory (our Freud who art in Heaven) they could only trouble the conscience of one who sat amongst them. In that way I revenged myself upon that nameless judge for justice, and the proceedings went on below me in utter silence, the gentlemen miming their sentences and signalling their arguments, nearly threatening to break out into a fight. Then again it was the fight of a man named Derrick Ng against death, and he was weeping as they brought in his autopsy results to show that he died of a heart attack, then a rebuke (he was still crying) by the prosecution stating that the attack had been brought on by a dosage of contaminated dopamine-precursor-surrogate which the Corporation produced.
It would all amount to nothing anyway, but I looked on as they seemed to drift further. Below me, the man in his coffin looked at me through the veil of his eyelids, and I waved back at a man I recognized from visions and dreams, while beside him the girl who needed five cents on the bus and missed it because she had not that precious coin (which he would only have in his memory) wept at his grave, and he knew it, and was the sadder for it because he could not make her happy in life or death. Even though she was his assigned mourner from the state, he was sad for her- and he could see that Derrick, too, was happy.
From some point of view he suddenly realized that he had been referring to himself, and he looked at his own body, seeing through eyes that were older than Time but younger than Sin. He was naked, but the crowds walked on past him in the halls of the court, moving into the room where the Wise Magos on his throne meted out judgement on the willing and unwilling, and there he understood the dilemma which Abraham faced; he was trying to consecrate a bowl of shifting sands, trying to baptize a screaming and thrashing child, bringing a population under law under strain. There he saw the weary lines in the judge's jaw, marked the face of a tiredness whipped by moderation into something which bore more semblance to an occassional weakness in his heart than a precipitious despair in his voice.
Then the whole weight of his life broke in all about him, and he was swamped in the heat of recollection, as though his life had been written on a piece of paper, crumpled, then dropped onto and endless beach and burned while the smell of ash and silica consumed his senses. The girl whom he loved, then promised a friend to get over- that was a September some year back- then the abjection that was an absence of more than a month- then his youth, where a line told him that he was wrong, that his ruler was wrong and the teachers were wrong, when he measured the side of a rectangle and the God of Education proclaimed it a square- he was wrong, though he was perfect, but those above interceded and separated him from the one hundred marks he knew he so rightly deserved- then older and older memories, built into the mottled peat that was his mind, sunk in as foundations so deep that now their unearthing shook the very castle of his thoughts- back when before he was even born, he remembered the life of the universe, its death, and his Godhood and rebirth at the end of time.
It was all so strange, yet exhilarating, as though ex homine a greater truth lay bare before him, waiting for him to take it, embrace it, and return it to the cot in his heart where he knew it rightly belong. Finally the memory that he had been waiting for came back to him- he saw Derrick standing in the hallway, Abraham pressing a coin into his hand, and the words that were spake did render him unto untold despair that he would never rise out of, even though he had finally gained the understanding he had desired so strongly ever since he had been born; that understanding of the primal world which lay behind the veil of senses and thought, and even behind the tapestry that depicted the Veniversum in all its glory; he had conquered it with logos.
-~-
an experiment in modernist prose writing. i quite like it myself. i thought of it in the shower, then wrote the whole thing out in around fifteen minutes in a flash of inspiration.