Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg

Author:Jason Erik Lundberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: infinity plus
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Big Chief

The back of your head: bumpy, uneven, overly large for your frame, dark hair oiled to a high shine and pulled backward in inverse rilles, dragging grey over brown to end just above the collar of your starched white shirt, your ears nearly perfect semicircles that stick out as if vestigial wings, sweat beading along your creased neck at the periphery of your hairline. I cannot escape this view, trapped and weakened inside this wooden form, captured in this box of leaded glass on the shelved display space behind your large teak desk in this tower of manmade corporate greed so far from my homeland.

You hunch over your desk, engaged in paperwork that reeks of import, yet which, in the grand scheme, is but a blip of nonsense within the deep time of the numinous. So enamored are you of this pointless capitalist exercise that were you even able to hear me, I am certain my words, which once held sacred power as the messenger of the gods, would be ignored. Laughed off. The endless creation and retention of wealth being as strong today as when this ligneous aspect of mine was first carved in Borneo’s forbidden rainforest of Tana Olen, by that talented artisan of the Dayaks. So intensely he performed the continuous seven-day ritual dance and mantras in order to gain my blessing so as to cut down the venerable ebony tree for his medium. I do not remember his face or his name, but still do recall the confident feel of his hands and fingers as he manipulated ebony into a stylized representation of my immortal form, a glorious apotheotic rhinoceros hornbill, my feathers left unpainted black, my bill colored the deep red of Alocasia berries, my fan-shaped tail the rich gold of sunset bisected by a stripe of night, my majestic horn curled back into a tight kinetic spiral.

But you have no interest in my provenance, or for the artifact of power that you so casually display in your office, handed down over seventeen decades, going all the way back to a Dutch trader named de Vroome, whose surname you share. He was also ignorant of the knowledge that to capture so precisely the image of a deity is to imbue that image with an aspect of the deity itself. The Dayak artisan who fashioned my form knew this, the villagers who presented offerings and hoisted me above their heads in celebration during the Gawai Kenyalang festivals knew this, yet Westerners have generally neglected due respect to the cultures of those tied more closely to the land, couching their aversion in superiority to “heathen superstition” as a form of justification for the expansion of empire.

At least I was able to demonstrate my abilities with your ancestor, calling down all manner of my extended family from the skies to plague de Vroome’s expedition party, dozens of hornbills summoned from every island of the archipelago and as far north as the peninsular island where I now reside.

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