Man Is Red Dust
Fear depleted my power|rightness, and I catapulted through the forest awning high into a night of celestial fire. I was vaporizing quickly. Loneliness swarmed through me.
I knew this feeling. In deep meditation, we encounter the Watcher, Whom the sacred Vedantic texts call the Purusha, a Sanskrit term that became our English word ‘person.’ This is the original Self, the holy One at the deepest center of each of us.
If we meditate long enough, we identify the special loneliness of this One. I guess we could say this is God’s solitary dreamlessness. It’s probably why we exist, to serve as companions to this One and relieve the loneliness.
That appealing idea mollified my anxiety. If I went with this divine dreamlessness, I would bleed into it, the fabled raindrop returning to the ocean.
Not yet!
I focused ferociously on breath|force. The constellations like giant luminous dreams full of nothing descended around me. I was going fast, going out like a guttering flame. I was returning to the void, sunyata, the empty truth in which all existence floats.
Not yet! Not yet! Breath|force – pranayama – is not about inhaling energy but exhaling the misery and illusions that get in the way of energy. I released my fear, my desperate resistance, and flung ‘not yet’ to the silence and stateliness of night.
Briefly and forever, the special loneliness of the One recognized me. Well, I suppose not me so much as the not-me at the still-point of lotus serenity. Anyhow, breath|force magnified once more to power|rightness.
I sifted down to earth. Above the skyline of conifer spires, I looked up at the heavens, glyphs of stars unscrolling westward in esoteric script. I witnessed the sky with clarity|insight that exalted me.
Rim-lit clouds of moon-smoke disclosed the advent of revelations primal and profound. I wasn’t afraid anymore to confront my undead lover or my own flesh etched and cryptic with starfrost arabesques.
Genuine curiosity flourished, and I wanted to know more about this strange fate that had separated me and the love of my life from life itself.
Passing through bristly tree boughs, I set down before our damned bodies. They had moved. Bernie’s corpse was standing, leaning back against the spruce, head tilted chin up, gazing blankly at nothing. Squid-smoke swirled in those unblinking eyes.
My body had rolled over on all fours, head pulled back, more squid-smoke purling in a gaping stare.
Wind drubbed through the trees like the night’s heartbeat. A cold hand of fear reached into the middle of me – but I knew better this time and immediately fixed breath|force in the moment. Sure, this was weird – a disembodied soul meditating – but, really, what isn’t weird about life and death when you think about it?
Our bodies were becoming vampires. This was not good. What to do?
I was apprehensive about getting too close, anxious about what I’d feel if I touched our possessed flesh.
Possessed by what? I mustered courage and glided forward to my former body. A vibrato of demon-drum mania nearly shook me apart, and I veered toward pure sunyata-void. I backed off. Like a scintillating migraine, pain thrummed.
Breathe!
I stared at moondust sieving through spruce needles until the infliction abated. I would not let mere suffering defeat me. This is my body! And, besides, I was already dead.
I watched my animated corpse sit back on its haunches, skin fluorescent with radioactive keloids, eyes leaking midnight. Then, I strode forward and sat down on it.
Pain shouted!
I let it quarrel with my power|rightness. They squabbled while I labored to find the rapport I once enjoyed with these muscles and sinews.
After much struggle, like when your brain wakes up but your body won’t budge, I fit myself to my familiar shape. Only, it wasn’t familiar anymore. I reared upright, chest thrown forward, pelvis awkwardly arched, knees locked, vainglorious zombie. My mouth was a persimmon, cheeks sucked tight.
When I tried to find the power centers in myself, my vibrant chakras, all I located were beggars’ bowls. Nothing there, and whatever breath|force I put in vaporized.
I trudged several stiff-legged paces. This is ridiculous. I sat down heavily on the thick carpet of the forest floor.
Overhead, visible between creaking boughs, the moon dangled like a chunk of poured concrete. I shivered in the cold, a dandelion ready to fall apart. This was death. Not necrotic death but life’s absence.
I didn’t belong here. The spirit path across the night sky awaited me. I wanted to be with Bernie again. The pulsing cold and the quarrelsome pain urged me, Go!
Yet, I didn’t budge. What owned my body now? I had to know. So, I sat snugly in meditation. Pain, cold, and estrangement sluiced through me, not-me. And then, I detected it.
I had gone transparent, and it thought I was gone. Up from the gutter of coma it rose, out of the fossil rock we carry in our bones. It had been hiding there, waiting for me to leave.
I didn’t stir. The special loneliness of God had magnetized me to nothing, and what crawled forth in oily rainbows from its spinal hiding place sighted me not at all.
This was the vampire virus. Dripping whispers of thunder, it spilled through me, oblivious, intent on one thing – blood perfume, frothy and warm in the trough of the wind.
Far away, human bodies shed spectral heat. The muzzle of our face lifted and tracked the scent through a million signals of pine resin, pond ethers, loam smoke, and bird auras. Human bloodheat unspooling across leagues of forest brought us to our feet lithe as a panther…
Prey!
Alarm broke my meditation and kicked me free of my possessed body. Sparkling with havoc – fear, outrage, tremulous horror – I simultaneously grew bigger and smaller.
The shock of what had happened to Bernie and me was beginning to hit home. Nothing was right. I was as vast as the evacuation of stars abandoning the cosmos to the darkness that had always owned it. And I was tiny as the pointillist atoms that stitch us to the void.
I kept absurdly reminding myself to breathe. Big – small – where was I? For a thick moment, I wasn’t. I have no idea how I pulled myself together, an incorporeal entity, a ghost at the very threshold of formlessness. But I did. And when I did, the undead were gone.
Nature is lawless. I knew this before I became a phantom. Uncertainty is the radical freedom of the universe. Without it, there’d be no luck, good or bad. Reality would be a fine jewel and you and I the light trapped inside among repeating mirrors. Uncertainty is not just a principle in physics and the house odds at the casino. Uncertainty guards a secret.
We call that secret the future. I didn’t have a future anymore. And so, what do you know? Turns out ghosts can see ahead, to what’s going to happen!
I saw the vampires that were once Bernie and me rushing through the night’s stark woods, following the scent of bloodheat. They would find their way to the far side of the haunted bluff, where moonlight was pouring like milk down the rockface, illuminating ammonites and conical shellfish from an ancient sea.
The forest ended there, and pastureland floated in a soft mauve haze to an abandoned farmstead lapped in fog and muffled under honeysuckle. A gang of teenagers had built a bonfire from timber torn off those ramshackle buildings.
Drunk, dancing and amorously preoccupied, the kids would never notice when the swift vampires snatched two outliers. They were diffident adolescents sucking beer and morosely watching their more adventurous peers. No cry would escape the victims at the dim perimeter of the festive fire circle. No sound at all as the predators’ towed their prey into the dark for first feeding.
Revulsion at seeing Bernie’s body and mine slaying innocents bounced me into the forest. Cumbersome thoughts of predetermination didn’t slow me down. This murderous event was not going to happen.
For specters, thought is action. Like the thistly stars above, I was not an object anymore, not a place but distance traveled. I slammed into the back of my own head simply by willing it.
The vampires were just then loping out of the evergreens into cold moonlight. My body received me again with shrieking pain. Prophetic vision of what these demons intended hurt worse, and I packed my entire will into those running legs.
The air rang. Wind blustered from out of my marrows, frigid with icy fever as I undid the future. I ran – or rather lurched, abruptly stiff-legged now that I had displaced the vampire’s graceful, homicidal intent. Arms windmilling to keep my balance, I reeled drunkenly toward the raging bonfire.
Bernie’s vampire body fell back, sensing odd doings. Frolicking teens scattered, hooting at the staggering maniac whose strenuous face appeared heat-hazed in the firelight. Startled lovers unclasped from their pelvic dances as I shoved past.
Laughing hooligans tossed beer bottles past my head. The vampire realizing where I was going yowled. This grievous jugular cry from deep in the red river where it had only begun to flourish curved weirdly through its own echoes and scattered the romping teenagers.
I lunged into the flames. Screams and horrified shouts from onlookers reached through the roaring inferno. My hair evaporated instantly. Agony broke like glory through every inch of me.
Then, vampire strength overwhelmed my rabid will, and we rushed out the other side ablaze. Terrified revelers fled yelling.
Through the twisting pain, I felt the horrific thing wanting to drop and roll. I ran an awkward goose-step, a hurky-jerk circle back into the flames. We collapsed in the crimson rush, lungs incinerating, skin bubbling to tar.
A bellow heaved from the conflagration, flung into the darkness of time. It curdled souls, cleaved minds. Some witnesses dropped to their knees before this blort of inhuman anguish. Others stood fettered to their trembling shadows or marched slowly backward faces bleared.
I let go. Sparks flew in fiery spindrift from my pyre, crazed flagella flurrying on the black wind. And among that wild spray, clarity|insight revealed a charred elemental cast out to eternal night.
Pain clung to me in grim ooze. A skyward rush lofted me past bride-veils of clouds toward the bride herself, the honed body of the moon.
Man is red dust. Through doors of the wind, we depart this world, our flesh forsaken and all its dreams.
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on the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
FICTION
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