A A Attanasio by Radix (epub)

Author:Radix (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Alone in the desert, far out of earshot, Sumner howled with happiness and let his feelings tumble into words: “Idiot distorts! I’m alive in your hell! I’m never going to die!” He screamed the last word, and the mania in his voice echoed back at him. He had become strange living with the distorts, sharing his body with the weird women—He moved at a loping gait over the broken stones of the desert, grateful to be moving and not thinking. Life wasn’t shit. Life was a stream of love, of feeling and thought, lascivious in its brevity. He laughed, and his joy was so intense it burned in his throat.

Nightfall brought him to a place of scum-froth and cracked soda. He sat on a mudbank encrusted with alkali and watched the skyfires bristle.

A yellow spark flashed beneath the arch of a dolmen, and a flame spurted and crackled in dry wood. Bonescrolls appeared, hunched over a flame-twitching stack of twigs. His long idol face grinned benevolently. He motioned Sumner to join him and produced a blackened skillet and four green-white snake eggs. “Hungry?”

Sumner went over to the archrock, cleared a space with his walking stick, and sat. His mind squirmed with questions—how had the magnar found him—why—but he ignored them and urged himself into selfscan.

“That’s right,” Bonescrolls said. “Keep your thoughts quiet. That’s a good beginning.” He held the skillet over the fire and handed two of the eggs to Sumner. From a thigh-pouch he produced a handful of small scallions and yellow peppers. The two men cooked and ate in silence.

After they were done, Bonescrolls belched loudly and leaned forward. “Listen, young brother, this selfscan you’ve mastered, it’s a very good way to sit quietly for a short time, but after a while it gets damn noisy.”

A coyote barked, its vagrantly sorrowing cry wavering across the desert.

Sumner frowned querulously. “What do you mean?”

Bonescrolls hushed him with a wave of his hand. “Listen.”

The coyote cried again, barking at its own echo. The call was thin and strung-out, and the sound of it touched Sumner with sadness.

After a moment the magnar smiled and scratched his ear. “That coyote’s just like you,” he said. “It hasn’t found its place, either.” He bent closer so that Sumner could see his eyes, dark and fixed. “We look from inside our bodies. Like the coyote, we think we’re inside our bodies. What is that animal crying to?” With his eyes he pointed up to where a wilted moon was sliding through the clouds. “We think we’re inside our bodies, but part of us is up there too. How lonely that part of us is!”

Sumner gazed sullenly at the old man, feeling dark and indifferent, a part of the night.

“You and the coyote, you both think you have somewhere to go.” Bonescrolls’ face hung in the darkness, smiling a mysterious, melancholy smile. “But the world is feeling, Kagan. There’s nothing else. Really—there’s nothing else. But nothing can be anything, and so we think we have places to go.

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