CHAPTER ONE
2,016 AD - Bye
The immediate feeling of losing a limb is somehow
different than I imagined. There really isn’t any pain, just a
numbness that starts to feel like a most urgent sense of loss.
You have to reassure yourself that this is in fact happening.
Remove an arm or a leg all at once and I might have been
dismayed. But there’s something oddly satisfying about watching
yourself disintegrate.
It starts with pins and needles on the surface of the
fingertips, but not the sort that bother me at all. It tickles,
just for a moment before steadily disappearing along with each
erased nerve ending. I wiggled my fingers before my eyes to
marvel at their gradual absence until the last edges of my palm
fizzled away.
A shock ran right along the funny bone. Elsewhere I
noticed how it rose up my shins as if I were wading into water.
noticed how it rose up my shins as if I were wading into water.
My knees were taking longer to fade. In the complexity of those
old joints I was quite privileged to realize that the incident
was consuming my tissue at a remarkably consistent pace; the
cartilage, the ligaments, the muscles, and the bone all right
where they should be.
Without extremities I must have looked ridiculous.
There was time enough still to pity my vanity. I was only human
after all, and what now remained of me was genuinely pristine
despite my quadriplegic break down. Things were simpler back
then too, I was undeterred in my dispersal.
Then it hit me in the glands and I was soaked with a
dreadful despair which was far too organic to escape from. I was
discontinued! What wretched hopelessness coiled and writhed up
into my bowels had rendered me completely invalid; as it traced
every bend and curve like a fuse. Was nothing too vital to keep?
How could I possibly lament? It had climbed down my shoulders
and stolen my breath!
My heart beat in frantic protest, flinching too and
froe, desperately punching for any direction out of that ruinous
chest of mine. But it was attached, pounding, imprisoned between
dissolving ribs which were soon to buckle and collapse. With
blood roaring in my ears, I fought against the compulsion to
sigh. That would have been the end of me. Any sign of resistance
would have unequivocally failed. So I set my eyes free with wild
abandon.
With nowhere else to go, they chose to surrender,
rolling back into my head. And the last of me vanished without a
quiver; the very same way that the edges of a paper can burn
without a flame.
The first revelation was that I was somehow still
conscious yet disconnected from my brain. Nothing to fix about
that, it was positively liberating. As human beings, we confine
ourselves to our pathologies and are strung along by our
appetites. Yet, I had finally managed to break these old
shackles of my existence.
That was until I fell; tumbling backwards and up. As
if a tsunami came rushing from unfathomable depths below,
sweeping along with it the debris that was my soul.
I was reoriented by a face. Not the one I’d worn
these previous ninety-three years. It was my father’s visage
which now loomed increasingly before me.
Perhaps it was the notion of familiarity, but I knew
that an entire lifetime of remembrance lay dormant within,
cloudy with such great and dignified purpose. If I had only one
index finger to reach it, I would have inherited his wisdom
through a cosmic blast of perpetual magnitude.
Instead, I found myself to drift farther away; the
entity rotating into a corner and out of sight. That bastion of
secrets lost to time.
Then, to my bewilderment, it was my grandfather who
came into view. Yet more blasphemous is the nature in which he
waned. Growing younger. Reducing to an age I had never seen.
This was no memory.
Grandfather arced beyond my view as father rotated
into place, now much more youthful than before. He was boyish,
and although an air of innocence followed in his wake I felt my
own tremendous sense of regret, as if I were never to return; as
if I had scarcely ever been born at all.
An epiphany struck me upon the occurrence of a third
presence. -A stranger; yet kin. The forehead, the ears were not
unlike my own. And as he sunk away, another took his place -my
father’s withering, infantile essence. It saddened me to know
that he, like myself, no longer had the chance to be.
My gaze returned to see not one but now three -
diagonally aligned by consecutive age, and cascading out as
another three replaced them. I soared within that spiral column,
each wave multiplying until there were dozens all at once.
Interwoven from father to son like ephemeral bricks, fleeting,
by both age and generation; forming an hourglass through which I
spun, and all sands passed through me alone- now that these were
the spirits of my patrilineal ancestors and among them there
were kings.
Bearing most gravely upon me was the age at which
they emerged. Their life expectancies shortening with doomful
velocity. This journey must end now! -Before its tapered
annihilation. Yet I plunge through this silo with no aid to
break my fall.
Had I tried?
From within the eye of that storm, I extended myself,
reaching to touch the edge. Upon contact, I was yanked, slapped
against a wall of surface tension. So potent was the centrifugal
force that it crushed me flat; arms overhead, face turned,
eyelid compressed against my iris. This vortex had been nothing
more than an illusion as it spun away dizzily without me. Like a
storm retreats into heaven.
Light seeped into that iris through a pin hole,
bleeding parts of a world into blurry existence. My knees were
damp. I was caught by the Earth, detritus clutched between my
fingers as I succumbed to vertigo. I felt strong hands grip my
arms around the largest muscles, lugging the weight of my body
upright as I slumped with inability.
Where am I?
“Enti, Enti, get up, come on, you have to run,” a
voice offered me encouragement in a tone and language I had
never heard before. The words were guttural but hushed, almost a
whisper but too hoarse; as if there was a secret that should be
obvious without a hint.
“It’s getting away,” another voice urged in the same
“Leave him. His name can be Sleeping Stone,” two of
the hands released and I felt myself sag, becoming a sole burden
as the sound of feet pattered away.
“Your name is Falling Leaf,” a voice cursed and I was
cast to the ground, crumpling to my hands and knees.
I can’t move. I want to go so badly!
Something childlike inside me yearned. Part of me
seemed broken; the mind, not the muscles. I could sense those
kicking madly. I had wanted to call out, but my tongue flopped
stupidly in my mouth -a feeble, undulating groan. They were
already gone. Then another came upon me and put a large hand on
my back.
“Enti, get up, there is no excuse. You must keep
moving,” this voice was softer than the others, as if it had
been tempered with wisdom ages ago.
The noise of a final, rushing pair of feet stopped
beside me and a much stronger and deeper voice spoke directly
into my heart.
“It is his name sake and he has fallen? If he does
not stand, he has chosen to die.”
And he too was gone.
“Enti, I will stay with you. Where are you injured?”
the tempered voice consoled me.