DP Tool Club 19/CD_ASCQ_19_010295.iso/vrac/rubyv39.zip/RUBY39-4

Text File | 1994-11-24 | 17KB | 286 lines

Copyright 1994(c)
                 THE RAVEN AND THE KILLER WHALE
                        By Gordon Chapman

     There is a single set of footprints in the snow under a
moonless night sky. His footprints. A dry crunch announces each
step, one after another after another, as he moves forward leaving
a long shallow solitary track. He walks alone by choice, or at
least he'd like to think so.
     He's not really certain of that, though. He keeps it as a myth
of convenience, as he really doesn't know, or just hasn't been able
to comprehend what happened. Maybe he's still shell-shocked from
it all.
     Perhaps he doesn't want to admit what happened. We all have
our own myths, but this is not a pleasant one, because it tells him
that he made a terrible mistake. He keeps the myth anyway. It's
the only logic he can find, and, he'll take bad logic over none
at all. It's something to hold onto, if nothing else.
     He carries on walking, unsure of himself in the darkness,
wishing for moonlight to guide his steps. As he walks, he recalls
his Grandmother telling him an Indian story about the moon. His
Grandmother had tucked her Indian ways out of sight, but it took
little coaxing to get her to tell her stories. She was possessed
of odd habits, and she had appeared eccentric to him. The story
had seemed like a silly relic at the time.
     The story was about a killer whale who had become old. The
killer whale's eyesight was fading, but the whale possessed the
moon, and the light guided him in his travels. But, one cloudy
night, the whale's eyesight could not guide him through the murky
water and his moon was trapped behind the clouds. The whale came
to the surface. A young raven flew high above the water. The raven
saw the struggling whale, and offered to guide him. In exchange for
his kindness, the whale gave the raven his moon. For some time,
the raven guided the whale, but, one day the raven became
distracted when he heard his flock nearby, and flew away to
rejoin them. The raven did not return, and he did not bring back
the whale's moon. The whale swam forever in circles in the dark
water, lost and fearful, with only the music of the water to
guide him.
     There is a song in his mind, and he thinks that it may guide
him. The song does not actually begin. A lone saxophone wanders
languidly up a practice scale. The percussionist makes ringing
tones by striking the upper, curved parts of the cymbals. The
bass arrives with an inappropriate jazz rhythm. A pianist plays
discordant minor chords. Then, another saxophone cuts in,
descending the scale as the first one climbs, as in a round.
After clashing for several bars, the saxophones synchronize,
perfectly countering each other in their ascent and fall on the
scale. The other instruments wander, then, the bass adjusts and
follows the scale, and adds a bumpy rhythm. The pianist loops
around the gathering tempo, then joins the flow with a two-note
staccato hammer, and drives the momentum of the beat further. The
percussionist produces a thundering rumble on his bass drum and
large toms, then rolls on the snare. The drums, bass and piano
lock into a solid rhythm in perfect step with the saxophones, a
rhythm guitar cuts in, and the band is as one. The song
progresses onwards with a torrid, driving pace.
     Like the song, his myth doesn't actually have a beginning.
There's not much of a story to it. All that there is for a plot
is some terrible formula of massive power, an algebra of
enchantment and attraction, magnetism and love. Somewhere,
sometime, someone must have analyzed this mystery, and solving
it, put it all together, a tremendous sequence of variables with
Greek names, Thetas and Omegas and Sigmas thrashing away in a
mathematical frenzy. If it was ever done at all, it would have
had to have been done in Medieval times, in a castle in a dark
valley, by a philosopher with a long white beard and a pointed
hat who documented things in books of parchment with amazingly
flourished writing, with the beginning letter of every page
decorated with florid designs and gargoyles. As the philosopher
wrote, strange flasks of coloured fluids would have steamed and
huge bolts of static electricity would have leapt from gleaming
metal electrodes reddened with heat.
     Even though the dusty parchment is ancient, it takes virtually
nothing for the timeless mathematics to begin a new iteration.
The formula never changes. Two people who do not know each other
do not plot circumstances to meet one another. Yet, they meet.
Their lives are more or less defined and neither seeks anything
from the other. But, somewhere behind the scenes, Fate and the
Furies secretly plug values into the formula, and something
happens. Once having met, they leave knowing that something has
happened. Something.
     Neither believes that it is happening or can understand why.
It must be a dream, fuzzily played to an unfocussed lens by
anonymous actors.
     Is it magnetism, pheromones, some unexplainable cosmic force,
or an ancient formula that causes the curiosity in each of them to
seek each other out again? Is it a cackling Fate, cavorting naked
with fat, greasy Furies, rolling the bones and shrieking with
laughter?
     No one knows, and no one will ever know, yet they seek each
other out, trying to plug their own values into the formula for
reasons that neither understand, not sure of the product of the
equation or why they seek it. They already have interests in their
lives, and neither was looking for anything.
     But seek it they do.
     They circle each other in a delicate social dance. It is a
language that no one speaks, and much margin is left for error.
They do not understand why they do this, and neither will admit
to participating in the dance. But the variables in the formula
and their interaction and interdependencies are becoming more
clear.
     Just as the combination of two elements, charged with energy,
can somehow make a third, the two people slowly fill the Betas,
Gammas, and Sigmas of the formula and, with The Spark that passes
between them, the formula creates a new player in the dance, an
energy with its own direction and mind that can delight, enslave
with passion, cause madness and possess souls. The formula is
huge, it fills volumes upon volumes, walls full of mouldy
parchment scrolls in endless caverns. Laid out end to end, there
are uncounted miles of meaningful squiggles, letters, summations,
and ratios. The likelihood of any of the possible billions of
parameters to ever come out acceptably is minuscule, and yet,
somehow, it happens.
     She feels it. He feels it. But neither is sure what the other
feels, and it is not allowable to ask during the dance. Neither
is sure that the other can free themselves of their various
entanglements and bask together in the light that comes from the
formula when its critical values are somehow achieved, and allows
love to flourish.
     He feels it must be an illusion, he doesn't trust his
feelings. He can't believe that some unknown power has taken over
his being, has thrust his spirits on rolling froth-spitting waves,
and couldn't imagine that the same power has also taken over her.
He looks for a sign.
     But she is possessed by the power of the formula as well. She
cannot reveal herself. He will not give an indication of what he
is feeling, and so, she is pinned to the wall like a butterfly in
a collection, waiting to be set free by his approval.
     The dance is more complex and risky when there is more to be
won or lost. Each somehow feels the intensity, and guesses that the
fire will be uncontrollable if released. But neither show his hand.
And so, the dance continues.
     Somewhere there is a Timekeeper for the Cosmos. He sees Fate
and the Furies playing, and wants to play too. He takes his reign
over part of the formula, and shrinks the time for all of the
essential elements to come to fruition. He laughs at that he
considers child's play for one as mighty as himself.
     Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, and hours become
days. The chance for the factors in the formula to achieve a
state of fusion diminishes with the passage of each micron, and
the Timekeeper laughs heartily. The dance continues, and to the
sneering displeasure of Fate and the Furies, she surrenders.
     She does not consciously decide to do so. Such would violate
the rules of the dance. She has not made the slightest advance,
given the tiniest bit of ground, nor has he. They both thought
there was too much to untangle, too much to lose, too much horror
in the possibility of rejection, too much chance of losing what was
already there. But she stands on the brink, and tells him the one
way she can without stopping the dance.
     She looks deeply into his eyes, and a power wells up from a
innermost within which somehow allows her to communicate her
feelings to him. With that one gesture, and with the power the
formula has given her, she finds she can look into the depths of
his soul. No more effort than that is required from her to see
all of him, and with that, she takes his moon.
     He cannot prevent her from seeing the secrets buried inside
his soul, and yet he finds he cannot respond. He has within his
grasp, for a single moment in time, her moon for the taking. The
moment seems to last forever. It doesn't. He somehow pretends
that he has not received the message she has sent, and he
believes his own pretence.  He is too weak to leap from the
precipice, too absorbed in the dance to give in to his impulses.
There is not enough power within him to allow him to make the
move that he wants so badly to make. He wants to leap, to fly
from the cliff with no fetters, but he hesitates. And he is lost.
He does not even try to keep his moon, he had wanted to give it
to her in any case.
     All love is fleeting without nurture, and hers has already
begun to dissipate. Fate and the Furies cackle with pleasure and
clap the back of the Cosmic Timekeeper who draws the power of what
could have been and locks it away in an furnace deep in the
bowels of his domain. He has carried the day.
                               ***
     The song that would guide him begins to die. The driving music
seems to miss a beat somewhere. There is a discordant cymbal
clash, and the drums take off in their own direction. The piano
strays, and the bass eddies into a circular rhythm away from the
other instruments.
     The saxophones hang briefly together, walking up and down the
scale, then fall into a series of high pitched squawks. As fast
as it arrived, the song departs into a disharmonious, noisy
clamour.
     The dance continues, but as the ripples in the water from a
stone thrown into a pond, it slowly creeps away from the source of
its power, ripples becoming smaller and smaller until there is no
discernable lines on the water, no trace of what might have been.
     Soon, she is gone, as distracted as a young raven hearing the
calls of its family. And she has taken his moon.
     He calls to his Gods. Will they tell him what is inside her,
what drives her, what lives deep in her soul? Can he somehow relive
the moment when he held her moon in his hands? The Gods mock him.
Why should he ask Gods, when she had already told him. He is
foolish and weak, and far too late.
     He already knows the answer, and he truly should not trouble
the Gods. Perhaps if he could go back in time, he could change the
answer, but he is too late. Her love disappears as a great wave,
rolling back into the sea in a silent foam.
                               ***
     She is gone, and he realises that Shakespeare was right.
Sorrows do not come as single spies, but as entire battalions. This
is an army of black-shirted jack-booted sadists, every one, who
delight in the torment they produce as they march across his guts,
cleats flaying his flesh and stripping him to the bone. They leer
as they march, an endless string of rib-cracking reminders to his
foolishness.
     It is a horrible realization. He would sell a thousand souls
for another chance, but there is none, and there will never be one.
Time marches and accelerates, turning days into months and months
into years, but his chance does not reappear. He will come to
rationalize it as a decision, it is the only way he can build a
myth he can live with. Somehow, too late, he comes to know that
he had had her love, if only for a moment. He would prefer to
think that he, for some reason, decided not to take it instead of
the reality that when he had come face to face with an emotion of
frightening intensity, he had frozen like a faun in the headlight
of a fast approaching train.
     Had he never really felt love before? He thought he had. But
he had never had love drag his spirits down through the floor day
after day after day in a never-ending persecution. There are no
words, no synonyms, not even parallel thoughts for such misery.
Whoever it was that spoke of it being better to lose at love than
not to love at all, clearly had not lost the moon. He lives,
eats, breathes every second with nagging thoughts of iron
weighting him down knowing he will never have what he wants, and
that he once held it in his hands.
     Time will cure this, he assures himself, as time marches
unassuringly on and on, each day bringing another dose of agony.
A diversion could be the cure, he thinks, but he is in no state
to begin the dance again.
     But such sadness has its own attraction. It is not long until
another seeks him out. Despite his reluctance, the dance begins
again, but it is not the same. Not the same at all.
     Fate and the Furies do not waste a moment's effort on this
dance, it generates no warmth and has no feel of power. The dance
is somehow facile, a substitution, a second-string representation
with understudy players. She sees the sadness in him as some sort
of deep mystery, something to be puzzled over and solved, perhaps
tended and cared for. She has a sadness of her own, and he sees
it as something that requires protection.
     They form a friendship on some basis of mutual consolation.
The formula produces no steam, there is no need to resurrect
thousand year old medieval philosophers or trouble the Cosmic
Timekeeper. The social dance is abbreviated, as there is little
intensity, little to lose, little to gain, and little risk of souls
being revealed like white whalebones on the beach. Where a touch,
a gesture, or a look would have imparted some critical information,
a piece of himself to the one who took his moon, to this woman it
bears little meaning and shows little. Yet, their friendship
grows.
     In a short time, they intertwine physically. It is ironic that
he had never slept with the one who took his moon, and yet, it is
a step that is easily climbed and somehow natural with this woman.
Climbed again and again as if to compensate for what should have
been, or perhaps to search for a meaning which simply does not
exist. It is difficult to maintain that they are simply friends
when each meeting focuses on lovemaking. There is no meshing of
the mind, no merging of souls, but in the physical, they find
each other. She comes to believe that she loves him. He knows he
does not love her, but, he had sought love, consciously or not,
and now he has it.
     And he cannot take it.
     There is a special silence in a room where your lover sleeps.
The moonlight pours through an ancient casement window which is
covered with years of grime. An errant rope, long severed from
its counterweight, hangs useless in the window well and casts a
shadow on the wall. The light streams onto the bed where she lies
naked, and it pours over her as honey, seeking out gentle curves
and ignoring others. She is beautiful, and, basking in the moon,
she glows and radiates warmth. The slight heave of her breasts is
the only sign of her soundless breath.
     They have just made love, and she leaves her moon out in the
open for him, inviting him to take it. He is tempted, but it is no
replacement for the one he has lost.  The light glistens as it
strikes her body, and in the reflected glimmer, he thinks of his
moon. He realizes that he has never made love to this woman. Each
and every time they made love, he had held her body, but he was
not with her.
     He dresses quietly, and lets himself out of her apartment
without disturbing her. He walks into the cold.
     There is no moonlight in the forest, no sign of any other
life. He walks in the dark for hours, his only guide being the
music of his footsteps and the whistle of the wind in the barren
trees. He comes across a set of footsteps in the snow. They are
his. He is walking in a circle.
                               END