When those with tears for others, choose not to shade them, but shout silently; those claiming control are drenched with fear and dare to stop them. But a wit of a riddle shadows both sides. Who is there to solve the puzzle?
“The devil doesn't
come
dressed in a red cape
and pointy horns.
He comes as everything
you've ever wished for
”
Tucker Max, Assholes Finish First
1
“There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but
there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no
prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his
biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him
but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book
from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables
about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All
we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own
intuition.”
Zachariah read a passage from a queerly
thick novel Casino Royale. He paused
and looked at me with the most pitiful eyes I have ever seen. Since the capture
of our dear comrade Jethro three months past, Zachariah had developed a high
sense of insidious appetite for intricately written material. His latest
addiction to Ian Fleming’s fictitious thoughts was becoming so worrisome to me.
I couldn’t figure it out; how a man, once as cool and humble as a cucumber had
all of a sudden become such a bookworm in a split of a second. Were the seeds
of one Jethro the jerker, germinating in a man who was once aloof with life? A
man who once thought thinking deeply about matters of society was unhealthy and
brain damaging? For three months now, Casino
Royale was his sixtieth book to read. Whether he understood everything he
got from those thick and thin paperbacks, only his memory could tell.
We sat in our new home located in the
middle of a smelly scented site, ruminating over nothing but ourselves and the
future of our land. With the crisis that exposed our land, we had no doubt the
arrows of the devil were upon us.
“Do you think they managed to break
him?” Zachariah remarked as he put the book on his chest, his eyes gazing to
the roof above lying on a three sitter sofa.
“Improbable Zach; very improbable”, I
responded with the deepest conviction I had ever harboured in my entire life,
since setting foot on this globe they called earth. I looked at our bookshelf
and I noticed the improperly arranged stacks of books on so many schools of
thoughts. Two days ago he just read me a paragraph from a book Deeply Odd by Dean Kootz, saying, “Listen, child—if you’re at a party with a
hundred people and one of them is the devil, he’ll be the last one you’d
suspect.”
“Where do you get these books?” I
interrupted his thoughts. Zachariah turned his head from the roof to where I
sat enjoying my roasted sweet potato slices. His eyes were so bloody shot like
those of a parrot drunk with dobo. The selection of his latest reads had much to
be questioned, but what concern of mine was it to plod my nose in someone’s
choice of acquiring knowledge? Was I the barometer to use in measuring the
intensity of the humidity of his humanity? I felt like a traitor. In the first
instance I had always wanted him to be like our brother Jethro – vocal,
independent minded and sometimes foolhardy, and when he now became like one, I
wondered why he went that way. Was I the one with a disease of indecision in my
life; that I failed to see exactly what I needed to be, such that all I saw
were holes in others?
“Leave your life Boy and live your
real life” Zachariah spoke, his voice mellow and relaxed. That was even more
worrying. I knew that when a person who once lived with so much fear, and
eventually became fearless, the enlightenment was easily felt, more than seen.
His transformation was strong and warrior-some. I knew he didn’t just pick
books from somewhere anyhow. By the look of the stacks in the bookshelf, there
seemed to have been a smartly devised consistency in the kind of books he read.
The man was seeking some understanding of something.
“It’s not where I get the books that
matters, but what the books contain. Only a demon would prevent a person from
saving lives or fulfilling their life mission, because there is no reasoning
with the devil. Stand with pride because your heart is filled with the goodness
of helping others, while theirs is filled with helping themselves; you can
check that with Shannon Alder”, Zachariah uttered, slowly and surely as if
trying to make me absorb every word he spoke. I realised the battle of Mlatuse
was just beginning. Indeed there was no fight won by immoral ruses, because
every good soul that got eliminated in the process, still reincarnated into
something stronger and fiercely unbreakable.
“Are you upto something I needed to
know Zach? You have kept me at bay all these months, imbued yourself with a
strange love for reading. Since when did you get fond of reading by the way?” I
asked, lifting myself from the sofa, my hands akimbo looking at him expecting a
pitiful reply for me. But at least for three minutes, Zachariah went on reading
silently from Casino Royale as if I
never existed. I paced around the living room, gathering all my past memories
in an effort to figure out one that may have told me my iniquities against him;
but the more I drifted back in time, the brighter and happier the times I came
to remember being together with the lost one.
“If my memory serves me right Zach,
there has never been a time we stayed together like this. We are daily becoming
strangers in a strange land. Is this, what holiness is all about?” I saw him
lift his eyes off the page and looked at me. I stopped walking and engaged his
eyes too. They were flickering like some ripples on a still pond of fresh
water. Zachariah had tremendously changed; for the better? I didn’t know for I
could not define what goodness meant. Everything in the land had gone in a
reset mode. Definitions had acquired new meanings, and meanings of things we
knew of as unlawful had become legal; and there I was exchanging piercing
glances with my old friend, yet I could not know the status of his change.
“Bring me that book over there”, he
instructed me to a lone book at the television stand, whose TV set had been
almost off for three months, for none of us was so much interested in watching
anything on it. I walked to the stand, picked the book and handed it to him.
“Open it where there is a bookmark”,
he advised. Loyally I did as asked and without asking what he wanted me to see,
my eyes got attracted to the underlined sentence, ‘the Devil can quote scripture, after all. And monsters can say
"please" and "thank you" same as any mother's son.’ I
closed the page to look at the front cover; Karen
Memory written by Elizabeth Bear. The word memory struck me with fear. I
looked at him, asking myself whether or not I was staying with the devil
himself. How did he know I had gone back in memory of our past times, for him
to refer me to a book titled Karen Memory?
Was he able to read my mind?
“I am lost”, I managed to speak out.
“Ask
Gandhi and he will tell you things Boy”, Zachariah responded.
“Gandhi is
dead, Zach”, I strongly reminded him.
“Well I
don’t know that; what I know is that sometimes even the dead can talk”. I knew
what he meant.
“What did
he say Zach?” I calmly asked.
“Satan’s successes are the greatest when he
appears with the name of God on his lips”
“Are you
judging me? I have never hypocritically spoken the name of God in vain and you
know that”.
“You tell
me Boy. Peruse The Stand my friend,
and Steven King will tell you that, ‘show
me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall
in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”.
Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid.
Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent
prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may
have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of
His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.’ Grow your own
seeds of the mind and you will yield fruits that have never been tasted before”,
Zachariah seriously and madly spoke; looking at me like anytime soonest he
would strike a blow on me and instantly die. He went back to his silent reading
and I stood there swallowing sweet streams of saliva trying to cogitate the
seemingly pernicious moments of our lives.
Then there
was a slight tap on the door. Zachariah swung his chest up the resting arm side
of the sofa. He looked at me with a contortedly questioning face. I had no
explanation to make. At least from our full knowledge of existence, no one knew
that, the place we stayed in ever existed. It seemed we were deeply wrong. We
kept our stare at each other for a long while, waiting for another tap to
sound. Our normal birth taught us that a knock should have sounded three times
before you could answer it. That, it was normally said; was a clear proof that
the one outside knocking was a human being like us; breathing the same air that
gave life. Our upbringing emphasised that a knock that sounded once, was to be
ignored, because normally such knocks were the actions of the devil himself,
who took advantage of the unsuspectingly naïve victims to pounce on. So we
waited to hear two more taps, but the more we waited the longer the time it
took, and the more furiously our impatience built up.
I folded
my arms across my chest like a child waiting for a slap from her mother after
being caught fingers-deep in a pot of cooked beef. Zachariah aversely dropped
his legs from the sofa to the floor and stood on his feet; his left arm akimbo,
the other one stretched downwards holding the book he was reading. The living
room was so silent that I could hear my breath. The wind outside too seemed to
have obeyed the strange environment. It suddenly went deadly quiet, so much
that we could hear even the sound of the tiniest insect like a termite chewing
grass in the lawn outside.
We stood
there staring at each other like first time lovers trying to peal the beans of
their sexual innocence. As was our upbringing; such times of indecisions and dilemmas,
it was so imperative that we never made any slight noise that may have suggested
human habitation inside for any intruder outside. So we stood there silently,
using both our ears and our minds to detect any intrusion that may have been
there. But for forty minutes nothing rang a bell to our minds to be able to
make sensible guesses. Then doubts started streaming in our minds. Maybe it was
our minds playing tricks on us. But could it have been the fooling from the
mind when we both heard the tap on the door. Could it have been a grasshopper
that jumped on it before flying away? Or a Woodpecker that perched on it and realised
it wasn’t a mere tree but a door? Then Zachariah made a movement towards me as
cautiously possible as he could master his steps. He stopped right at my nose,
trying by all his naughty efforts to control his breathless sighs. Without
saying a word he stalked past me heading to the door, but I immediately
clutched his left hand with my right arm. He stopped and looked at me over his
shoulder without turning his body. We sized each other up with the battle of
fighting stares, and slowly he slid his hand off my grip.
“Ignorance
and fear can transform a live electric wire into an engine of destruction and
death”, Zachariah whispered as I let go of his hand. Like a beast energised by
the confidence of green pastures in a territory of weaker preys, he all of a
sudden casually walked to the door, opened it and slightly jerked back gazing
at his feet. I felt a tremor of internal surge rush round the inside of my
bowels. I looked at him in an effort to try to calculate the mathematics of
guess work as to what might have been his shock. He beckoned me without looking
back. The fact that he didn’t want to say anything, clearly told me that he
still revered silence at that moment despite his foolhardy decision of
carelessly walking to the door against my disapproval; I tip-toed to where he
stood and stopped just behind his buttocks struggling to get a glimpse of what
he was looking at. He slightly shifted his body to the door side to give me a
small space to see what was there. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva that made
so much noise as it slowly pranced down my gullet, before I gave out a deep
sigh of insecurity. We couldn’t do some more staring at each other there at the
entrance, lest someone was watching from an impregnable position. I swiftly
picked up the envelope lying on the floor addressed to both of us, and quickly
but cautiously closed and locked the door behind us.
“What’s
the meaning of this?” Zachariah asked as we sat on the sofa.
“There is
only one way of knowing”, I remarked holding the envelope in my hands
unsurely.
“Do it
then”, Zachariah, sounding so impatient commanded, looking at the white
envelope with dire suspicion.
“What if
it contains poison powder?” I reasonably asked.
“There is
only one way of knowing”, he mockingly stated. I looked at him and saw that he
was damn serious.
“You can’t
be serious Zach!” I chided.
“Why can’t
I …?” he calmly asked, bending over to me, with crystallite eyes.
“I don’t
want to die Zach. So are you” I told him.
“Who told
you?”
“Who told
me, what?”
“That I
don’t want to die?” he asked. I looked at him with a puzzled mind. I couldn’t
understand him any longer. The brother man from his own mother wherever she
was, no longer sang my song. Whatever demon had possessed him had all its
family tree in him. I could not understand how a man just three months ago was
as timid as a rat, could turn 360 degrees into being of a wild beast that never
saw danger lurking over any other situation.
“When you
drive the belief in disease from your subconscious mind, you will drive away
the pain and all the other symptoms with it”, he calmly with a suppressed smile
on his face said. There was no doubt, his books had messed him up. If books
could change a man as weak as him into a courageous and composed soul, then
there was magical mystery in books, I told myself.
“Well, you
better open it yourself then”, I challenged him handing him the envelope, which
he gladly accepted.
“Robert
Collier once said that, ‘the only reason that people succumb to sickness or
disease or injury is because you tell them to”, Zachariah commented looking
into my eyes.
“How is
that so Zach?”
“We don’t
have time. Let’s put that for another day; but Collier tells us that men have
taken the most deadly poison without harm. Others have fallen from great
heights without injury. Others have gone through fire and flood and pestilence
without a scratch to show. And what these men have done once, anyone can do
them again” he said and looked at the envelope with a beautiful smile I have
ever seen on his face in a long time. He behaved like weather; very
unpredictable. He opened the envelope and fished out a white plain paper; and
written on it, was a neat and carefree handwriting.
“It looks
like a letter” he announced.
“What is
it saying?” I impatiently asked.
Surprise comes only to
those who live their lives expecting nothing more than their rigidity and stagnation.
For the revolver, life is never a hiding place for forces outside our aura. We
all choose to die, whether we are prayer warriors or we are prayer worriers. We
choose to die. Listen:
“...They will assist
and strengthen as the light
Lifts up the acorn to
the oak-tree's height..."
Chao…
“Is that so?” I asked, my heart
racing profusely.
“That’s
it my friend”, Zachariah responded, his face appearing brooding. We kept quiet
for a while, wondering what could have been behind the letter.
“The
Devil dances”, Zachariah remarked rather absent minded.
“I
hope you are not accusing the devil of being behind this Zach?” I chipped in.
“Who
knows we are here? In this house planted in the middle of nowhere? And if this
letter means well as it sounds, why would the deliverer not want to be seen?”
Zachariah questioned.
“It
could have been Jethro. This letter sounds just like him. I think he is sending
us a coded message” with a convinced mind, I assertively put it across. But
Zachariah was nonchalant about it.
“There
is no way Jethro could have written this letter Boy. In the first place, how
will he even know we are here? And if he knew we are here and he is out of the
gallows, why not come; knock, wait for our response and then get in. Why would
he tap, drop the letter and leave?”
“Don’t
speak as if you don’t know Jethro, Zach. Do you remember how we met him? Don’t you?”
“What’s
your point Boy?”
“What
if his arrest was all staged?”
“That’s
silly”
“Think
about it Zachariah. This is a guy who appears from nowhere, he is so
intelligent, knows almost everything, he owns safe havens everywhere, is always
ahead of the security wing and all of a sudden he gets caught; and for no
reasons? If there was a case against him, why didn’t they come after us too?
They knew we were always together: the three of us. Why would they target him
alone? He has never even appeared in court”
“You
may be right, but if he was just using us, what could have been his mission? He
never was at any point on their side. You know that”.
“Remember
deception is master to physical strength? He often told us so”
“Suppose
you are right, why would he write us then, in such a queer manner, after three
months of his capture?” Zachariah asked.
“To
warn us I guess. Or to tell us to do something that is not being done”, I
suggested.
“Warning
us against what? Or doing what Boy? This is the work of the devil”, Zachariah
adamantly spoke as he threw his back to the sofa.
“There
is only one way to know Zach” I suggested. He looked at me with petrified eyes.
“Don’t
tell me you want us to start inquiring which gallows he may be?”
“No.
What if he is not even in the gallows?”
“What
then do you want to do?”
“What
I want US, Zach. Not ME, to do?” I pointed at the letter he was holding.
“Damn!
Boy. Don’t tell me you want us to……”
“There
is no better way to spend time in this house than doing justice to time itself
Zach”, I enthusiastically interrupted him as I stood up and walked to the
kitchen to come back with two bottles of lagers that I placed on the small table
in front of us and asked him to place the letter on the table as well.
“Surprise comes only to those who live their
lives expecting nothing more than their rigidity and stagnation”, Zachariah
loudly read out the first sentence of the letter, his face so brightly beaming
with callous momentum.
“Is it
making some sense to your thoughts?” I asked trying to figure out why he was
smiling so broadly.
“The key
word in this sentence is ‘surprise’” he stated looking at the piece of paper
with a titter of scorn at the corner of his lips.
“What of
‘rigidity and stagnation’?” I suggested.
“If it’s a
warning as you think it is, then ‘surprise’ is the key word. Is there someone trying
to ambush us? Or is it that the letter is just a mere hoax surprise to see how
foolish we are?” Zachariah fretted. I took the letter and silently went through
its contents again. The deep set of its reasoning appeared more illuminating
than before. There was no way the piece of paper could have been a hoax just to
cower us into jitters of mute boiling rascals. Inside me, grew a mixture of
confusion and confessions of sins yet to be done. Why would one want to scare us,
as Zachariah thought the note was a scare-crow?
“If
‘surprise’ is the key word Zach, then someone is asking us to stop being rigid
and stagnant”, I contemplated. Zachariah peered at me with a characterless
face. Whatever there was in his mind was something not encouraging listening
to; at least in connection with the mystical letter.
“I always
tell you that in books lie the mysteries of life ever unknown to the most
intelligent man who likes watching movies”, Zachariah reprimanded me.
“I don’t
understand Zach”
“Eskify
said, ‘unless you’re an elderly person or citizen of a third world nation,
letter writing is dead. Instant messaging is just easier. But the electronic
footprint compensates for a lot too. Without it, many of history’s strangest
and mysterious events involve letters’”.
“I know
who Eskify is”
“Of course
you must know. Every seeker knows Eskify unless his searching is based on
snobbishness and self-aggrandisement”.
“Now, tell
me more about Eskify?”
“Have you ever
heard of The Zinoviev Letter?” Zachariah asked. I swallowed a bit saliva to be
sure I said the right thing. Zachariah was becoming unbecomingly weird with the
level of his knowledge in almost everything. What I didn’t know to that point
was that he had this nag about letters. That mystified me.
“In 1924
there was an important British election” he begun talking without waiting for
my reply to his earlier question. I knew he realised how ignorant I was to the
matter at hand.
“The
socialist labour party were in power for the first time ever. But in this
election the right wing conservative party won by a landslide. Four days before
the election the Daily Mail published
a mysterious letter. The letter was supposedly written by Soviet officials and
implicated the labour party in a plot to overthrow Britain’s political system,
and introduce full blown communism. The letter seemed so authentic that voters
swung towards the conservatives”. My mind begun to reel; I could picture myself
seated before the man I knew almost all my life, yet with so much little
knowledge about what he knew about letters and alien history. He looked at me with
so much serious a face as if telling me that, ‘you unlearned fool, just shut up
and listen’. And like an obedient dog salivating for a piece of the master’s
bone, I slightly nodded and he continued talking with the most valour and
confidence I had ever seen in him.
“The
letter was leaked to the press after MI5 and the government decided to keep it secret.
But some believe the letter was deliberately leaked by the establishment as
they knew it would guarantee defeat for labour in the election. The origin of
the letter is also unknown. It was said to have been written by Zinoviev, a
leading Soviet official. At the time Anglo-Soviet relations weren’t great, with
the Bolshevik’s being seen as demons”. There he went again talking about the
devil and his angels. Was he becoming a recruit?
“But
Zinoviev denied writing it and the authenticity of the described plot. He said
it was a fake. And then, shortly after the election, it became clear MI5
believed the letter was a fake. Most historians today believe the letter was
forged to guarantee a conservative election. In those days no one knew how far
communist revolutions would spread. MI5 would have been scared of violent
revolt. So that would explain the forgery. But some historians still believe
the letter to be genuine and say if it were not for its interception;
capitalism may have been overthrown in Britain”.
We both
kept silent thereafter. Something sensible beamed into my memory. Such a story
was in fact not aptly new to students of medieval history. I recalled having
read, years back in high school a story about the ‘Society Hill Treasure Map’.
The only difference was that the map in question that still existed in the custody
of Pennsylvania’s historical society was a mysterious letter, written in
Jamaica 300 years ago.
I
remembered reading that the letter told of a fortune of Spanish gold and
currency. It gave directions to where a large chest containing the wealth was
located. The letter ended with the request that the reader burnt it immediately
as to make sure no one else learned of the treasure.
“This
reminds me of the Society Hill Treasure Map”, I commented, and Zachariah
giggled.
“Unfortunately
that letter was never destroyed”, I remarked, feeling there was something new
to talk about.
“It simply
means something went wrong” Zachariah replied. “But that gave hope to a local
treasure hunter who thought it meant the treasure was never discovered. He also
thought he knew where the treasure was located. He claimed the letter lead to
Philadelphia’s Society hill neighbourhood, where the treasure may have been
buried” Zachariah explained.
“But it’s
unclear how genuine the letter was, it’s origin, or how it ended up in
Pennsylvania” I added wondering.
“Just like
our letter here; cony and evil maybe” he remarked sounding rather doubtful.
Something seemed to have been swirling his thoughts. I didn’t know what to say.
The two examples of mysterious notes put me off guard, yet of that letter
before us never felt ominous. There was something so good about it, only if I
could discover what it was and convince him that we needed to focus on the
goodness and forget about what may have been the other side of things.
“For the revolver, life is never a hiding
place for forces outside our aura”, I read out from the letter. I could feel my lungs arching as air
fought for space to settle down. It seemed my chest was as tiny as my brain;
probably too tiny to combat the size of combustion that was rustling inside.
“Revolver and aura are the key words there Boy”, Zachariah remarked sounding so unhappy
about it. I didn’t like the tone of his voice. One thing that came to my mind
was a gun and a feeling. How the two could have been connected as to mean revolver
and aura, so that they made as much sense in that sentence as it could have been
understood easily, was getting so painfully frustrating than I saw it at face
value before. It was deeper than hell.
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