Joseph Grammer, Author

What is concrete made of? You probably don’t fucking know. If you do, then shh, or you’ll ruin my tirade. Concrete comes from the word concretus, meaning compact. It was invented by Arabs, or at least its precursor was. Near Syria and Jordan. The people were called Nabateans, and they used their version of concrete to build wells. They made sure the wells were secret, since it gave them an advantage, living in the desert.

Do you know who the Nabateans are? No? (If you do already, then I bet you know far more about them than me.)

Go look them up. They were quite fine traders. They built tombs in the Hejaz that are marvelous to look at. They built a temple in Petra called al-Khazneh, “The Treasury,” carved it right into a giant sandstone rock. The façade has twelve pillars, and the whole front rises up like the entrance to a place of gods. The original structure still exists, but there is a second al-Khazneh now, in the country of Rahma. The first version was really a tomb, but apparently people thought there was treasure there (spoiler: there wasn’t). The second al-Khazneh, however, has quite a lot of treasure, including an item so rare it couldn’t be said to have a price at all. It is left over from the old times, during the Alien Wars you’ve all heard so much about by now. It is a weapon. Not a working weapon, but a weapon all the same. One that could destroy the entire Earth—gasp! And not just in the nuclear way, eradicating all life on the surface, but in an actual annihilate-the-core-of-the-planet way. And that’s just a little bit scary, right?

Scarier still: ten exist.

Less scary: nine of those ten are in the possession of one Niles Tully, perhaps the wisest of all the Caomhnoiri and certainly the least predisposed to violence. He’d built them, after all, so it makes sense he’d taken them back once the whole carnivorous alien threat was gone. In the immediate days following the conflict, various corporations and nations had hurled magnificent sums of money at him for one of these weapons, but he had turned down all comers. He’d even caught a few dozen spies trying to break into his laboratory, although he was so kind he didn’t even tan their hides before putting them on the first ship back to where they hailed from. But somehow, the Rahmans had found one. Well, the somehow was a how, because it had simply fallen from space, out of its geosynchronous orbit, right into their lap. And just like Mr. Tully had refused all offers for his functional nine, the Rahmans turned away all questions and quotes for their dysfunctional one—including Tully himself, who appealed to them first out of planetary integrity, and then out of his own admittedly girthy wallet.

And why was this Rahman weapon inoperative? Because it was missing a key part. And where does one obtain a very rare and technical key part in this day and age? Why, from a mysterious broker online. And how does one find a mysterious online broker?

Just put your lips together and blow.

Tear out someone’s fingernails until they talk.

Wish upon a fucking star.

Or ask your director of intelligence to locate one, which isn’t hard because your director is already plugged in to the undersea world of illicit trade. The caveat being that the necessary piece is exceedingly rare and expensive, which meant it takes a little bit longer than usual to locate it, which is frustrating when you’re used to everything happening at the snap of your fingers. Fortunately, the Emira of Rahma Badir Osman al-Filistini had learned patience, and she had learned patience from her dreams. Specifically, these were the dreams brought on by her medicine because of her aching legs, which had plagued her ever since she was a child, filling her with shocks of pain and making her eyes bulge, which of course led to many cruel taunts and jokes from her classmates, everything from Praying Mantis to Stumbler to Icewalker, so named because her halting steps looked like the timid movements of a little girl on a frozen lake. Emira Badir’s dreams were filled with mirrors breaking for hours under a hot blue sky, shattering pieces winking in the sun, a music that crashed through her head and made her flinch inside the dream, an endless crunching that she somehow grew to love even as it distressed her, so she looked forward to it every night as she took her medicine, and she would even feel restless the next day if she didn’t have the dream, something her psychologist said was evidence that humans could adapt to anything, even repeatedly exploding mirrors. Badir, however, already knew she was adaptive. What she didn’t know was who the mirrors were reflecting, because it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her mother either, or her dead sister, or her father, or grandmother, or Aunt Fatimah, or her hairdresser, or her fighting coach, or her chief aide, or her minister of forests, or her childhood friend Mohammad Tariq, who was the first person she’d thought of marrying, and who’d turned out to be a drug addict who screamed in his backyard pool every night, a bald man with sunglasses, screaming. No thanks.

Badir thought about the potential oneiric-mirror reflection culprits as someone from the Energy Committee briefed her on nuclear reactor output in terawatts as a function of employment, which made no sense to her, but she kept listening, or at least hearing his words, although she fixated on his dry mustache and his brittle skin, the pockmarked craggy cheek, the softball-sized tieknot, the flaky hands, the overpolished black leather shoes, and the way his knee bumped up and down whenever he pointed to the graph he’d expanded before her. They were in the wide gold emira’s chamber, a vaulted dome brimming with festive light.

The emira was seated above the minister, on a raised plinth. She liked the plinth because it felt like an ice floe breaking off from the world, leaving her alone and drifting over the Arctic Ocean, where she could catch up on whistling and naming the fog and thinking of blue rabbits who pulled their own heads off and stored books inside their bellies.

“And that’s why we should eat all the sea urchins raw,” Badir heard him say, or wanted him to say, she was hungry for sushi and ready to end this drawling tete-a-tete, ready for life and stringing lights and coffee.

“I want you to tell me why you should keep your job in three words,” said the emira, looking at his puffy eyes behind glasses.

“What? I—”

“That’s two words,” said Badir.

The nuclear engineer sat up very straight, his blue-and-gold cloak snapping against him. He blinked hard, gulped, then placed a hand on each knee, sitting below his emira, twenty-five meters away.

“Lights,” he said, pointing upward at the illumination of the ceiling.

Badir laughed and clapped her hands, which perhaps was unseemly for some leaders, but not for her. She was adorned in fine silk regalia, with gold necklaces overlapping on her neck, with gold hoops in her ears and great diamond studs above them, her hair uncovered, her body exposed to the degree she wished it, looming grandly in her chair (she was careful not to call it a throne), even though she was small in the huge circular room, she was small within this place that she had not built, but which she had enriched beyond all others’ expectation.

“That is a wonderful answer. See? Not so hard. You know your value. It is important to know your value, your contribution to others, because there are people who will deny your value.”

“Yes, Emira,” said the man.

“There are people who will say that you are nothing, that you do nothing, that in every way they are better than you. I imagine you have encountered one or two people like this in your years.”

“Yes, Emira.”

“I imagine you have countered those barbs to some degree, because you’ve managed to get to the position where you can stand before me. But I also imagine you still have some little whispers at night, gnawing at you.”

The engineer stared carefully at her, then turned his eyes away lest he should seem too familiar.

“We all have these whispers, it’s nothing to hide, nothing to burn with shame over. You think I don’t worry someone is out there, seeking to usurp me? That someone is spreading rumors, lies, even weapons to counter my influence? You don’t think that weighs upon me?”

“Yes, Emira,” said the man.

“Yes, Emira. People say many versions of this to me, all day, in person and over link, again and again like a chant they’ve forgotten the basis of. Yes, Emira. Do those words have any meaning for you?”

“They do, Emira. And you are correct in your earlier imagination, that I have risen to this place by countering my … barbs. And other barbs, as well.”

“Stop saying barbs,” said Badir.

“Yes, Emira. I only mean to say that those words you hear, the ones I repeat, have meaning to me. I appreciate that I am in a position where I’m able to speak them, directly to you. I do not take that opportunity lightly.”

Badir smirked, then signaled for a cup of wine. “You’re a very eloquent engineer, aren’t you? Have you been taking classes with my orator? He smells like dog piss, but he’s quite talented.”

The engineer smiled, very quickly and with his eyes at the floor. “No, Emira. These are only my honest words.”

“What a gentleman. Well, Committee Representative, I suppose I’ve used up enough of your time with my conceptual digressions. Go enjoy your nuclear reactor.”

“Yes, Emira.”

“Don’t let it explode.”

The engineer stopped as he raised himself from his seat, poised in the middle. He nodded to her, then continued rising. “Yes, Emira. I’ll keep it safe. I’ve devoted my life to it.”

Badir smiled at him, sipping from her cup. “So have I.”

When he was gone, the emira summoned her director of finance, the gold-eyed Nazrah al-Jabbar. She was a diminutive woman in a black hijab, her sleeves long and her nails unpainted. She was younger than Badir.

“Have the financial board propose to raise our Committee Representative’s salary by 10 percent,” she said. “Someone wants to poach him from us. I’d like to keep him unpoachable. Add a clause to contribute another bodyguard to his retinue, too, make him feel more important.”

“Who wants to poach him?” Nazrah asked.

“That’s a question for Abdul-Raman,” she said. The director of intelligence.

Nazrah shot her eyes to either side of the room, as if he was lurking there. “Does he ever give a clear answer about anything? It’s always perhaps this, perhaps not. What person would abuse this word so carelessly?”

“A person who wants you to know he doesn’t say maybe,” said Badir.

They both smiled at that. Abdul-Raman was a fastidious man, pious, with a mark on his forehead from praying so often. Those around him joked he only did it so he could gather dirt on God, but they only said this when they weren’t eating lunch with the imams. Sacrilege was well-tolerated in Rahma, but it was nice to be respectful, as long as the imams respected you back. There were still a few old men who resented being led by a woman, but happily they were a minority, shriveled dates with weighty words, twisting the Quran to suit their needs just as the priests and monks of Nazrath tortured Bible lines to justify drone attacks and the murder of queer people. Badir had resolved quite strongly never to let her country fall into the theocratic monstrosity that the Federation of Patriots had become. Proper application of shariah required it—it was against Islam itself to rule by religious dictum, especially when here in the capital itself were thousands of Jews, Buddhists, Cubists, Ba’hai, Hindus, and even Christians, Assyrian and otherwise. None of them paid a jizya, none of them saw any less in the law, a triumph that had been won by wise-hearted emirs over centuries. Rahma was a center of learning, and if Badir wanted to repair the strange aged weapon from the old days, it was not because she wished to wrest more land from Indignenous families, or even crush the wild Christians and their looming stone cross. It was because she had made contact with Cleanskin Chris, and she was terrified of him. Well, Abdul-Raman’s agent had, in the halls of Doxian, posing as a chemical supplier of aspidaritin, a biological shielding solution that conferred a resistance to picoforms. It was generally only used by militaries and rich people, and while an individual seeking to purchase it on the black market was not immediately concerning or surprising, the quantities desired were more unusual: one hundred thousand liters. A person would purchase that much if they were building a private army. Several families and corporations across the continent had private armies, but even they would never need one hundred thousand liters. This was new. New was concerning, which was how Abdul-Raman came to investigate this interested buyer, and to discover that said buyer was Cleanskin Chris, a mildly popular self-help talker and the same person their Guardian Halima had been searching for over the past five months. He was apparently a serial killer, ranging through all cities and countries while using proxies to accomplish his crimes. He represented no nation that they could detect, and he had no ties to any company or clan. His only network, according to Halima, seemed to be other lone men, dispersed by geography, who followed and even collaborated on his killings, an audience ostensibly separate from his self-help crowd, a more private club, as it were. Badir knew what the connection between those groups was. Chris funneled his casual supporters into increasing degrees of fanacticism, until they were ready to pay exorbitant sums of money for “access” and “intimacy,” or whatever word suited his needs at the time. All his media functioned as a pipeline to dead women. The man who thought he was complex was just a caveman who fed himself bullshit to feel powerful. Not that living in a cave made you unintelligent (come on, they harnessed language, wheels, and fire, and actually these days I live in a cave myself, very cozy, cool in the summer, warm in winter), but what else do you call a man who’s answer to emancipated women is a club or a knife?

You’re right. Caveman is the wrong word, rooted in the same irritating, dangerous, Eurocentric brain that pulses in Cleanskin Chris. The proper word is abuser. Language can obscure, or it can wipe away the outer layers and show you the core of things. For many men across many eons, from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump to Attila the Hun, the only word of choice is abuser.

And why do people abuse others? Out of suffering, impulsivity, hatred, ignorance, power, lust? Yes, but there is a word beneath those things, humming quietly like the nuclear core within its graphite shield. That word is entitlement. Believing you have the right to impinge upon someone else’s privacy, body, resources, rights. Manifest Destiny, Monroe Doctrine, whatever you’d like to call it (be careful what you call it—that matters). Abuse stems from entitlement. End of story. All those who abuse exercise their privilege to do so, a privilege they don’t deserve and can’t possibly earn, ever. All those who abuse decree their supremacy by fiat, by fist or finance or dismissal. Abusers are like God: they say “let it be,” and in their own deluded minds, it is. And here is the first entitlement of all abusers; they try to create their own universe. And to steal a word from our diligent Abdul-Raman, “perhaps” more important than this improper assertion is the destruction of other universes. But I don’t believe this is true. Because entitlement doesn’t mean you seek out the destruction of others; it means you don’t care about it, you don’t mind the bodies in your wake, the lingering insults, the kids evicted or dirty handshakes made, to be entitled is to have the luxury of not thinking, of acting with the fresh authority of a king who firmly believes himself to be just, so firmly that he no longer needs to ask himself if he is just, because his rightness is a fait accompli, and he is the light of civilization and progress, he is the enlightenment embodied, a savior amid wretches who need his service, when really he is just a parasite, trying to define his own space by consuming the space of others, and without this act of consumption he will die, shrivel up like a prune and pass into silence, the thing all narcissists hate the most.

“Well, back to business,” said the Emira, sighing. “Make an offer to the Copyleft: we will destroy the entire Federation if they fix our weapon. Understood?”

“Inshallah, the Federation will fall,” said Nazrah.

“Yes, and those robots will have something useful to do besides praying to their tiny stump. I imagine they give each other tune-ups for hundreds of years while playing chess games none of them can beat each other in.”

“Do you really believe that’s how it is there?” said Nazrah.

“No,” said Badir. “Don’t ask such foolish questions, it’s insulting to someone as smart as you. I know they’re working on something special. It just doesn’t involve humans at all.”

Gray pillars slabs smashed all around shadowed rubble shafts of light gray walls late afternoon halls the dust spinning gold in swirls and the silence like vines that cuddle this world until it dies, the plinth of stone high and rough, unsanded, askew in a slope, 45-degree angle, with a patch of white lying on it, and it’s my mum, isn’t it, with her hair across her face and her arm bent in a V? I stagger backwards, first away, but then that old core inside bids me limp forward, my hand on my belly, my right arm hanging down, my face charring: wrecked. The high quiet unmakes me, the last scraps of my bravery ebb away and I am a child, beholding mother.

To either side galleries of stone hold the cool darkness. I am between them, beneath the sky, the glare confusing me but never quite letting me lose the still figure on the pedestal before me. I am too hurt to cry out, my feet shuffle. It is the best I can do, here, in this empty capital grounds where the name of patriots once raged. Flags like mad butterflies drift across my sight and collapse. There is no blood, strangely, but for mine. It leaks out of me like tea from a chip in the kettle.

My armor encumbers me, it has never been loud but now it seems to clank and rattle like a medieval knight, announcing my arrival. All the meds are embedded in my blood, but it is not enough to stop the gradual process, the failing. Even a god will cease.

“Was it always so to be, mater mia?” I say. “In some scroll, on some gilded card, was this day inscribed by a withered hand?”

I speak only to myself. Is my mother a dream, a faerie of the Tuatha de Danann, or else some fell Fomorian giantess, primordial ogre? It matters not what Gallic fancies I conjure within this brilliant jury; don’t trouble yourselves with the reference. At this late stage, I am spent of metaphor, of wit, like Oscar Wilde in gaol—although didn’t he persist, convert, manage a quip at the last drips of his incendiary heart?

Too long have I played the Dorian Gray, consuming my soul for a shadowed immortality. Is this, then, what I am here to witness? The fate of hubris, the hand of God admonishing me for my crass playacting on the stage of His infinite grace?

Every step leaves pinpricks of blood and cooler. This man who is wrought of plate metal, this Icarus above the sea, I escaped the labyrinth, but is it such a hackneyed sun that must arrest my dream? A smiling fool with jewels and bare feet? A dancing cretin, my rival?

“And where hast thou gone, fell jester of the forest? What spells do you cast even now for my distress?”

He is vanished, they have vanished, we are all gone—or no, no, only me. Here in this city where cenotaphs are written in blood. They have all fled, winged away to celebrate their passions. Have all those close to me been slain, buried alive, detained in cages meant for a dog? Is my mother real? Is she here, asleep?

I reach out my hand, but it brings me no farther. Oh, that unclaimable reach! How arrogant a blackguard was I when I crossed a room with no second thought. What I would profane to gain those lighter steps now—what I might divest in order to hold the one who gave me life, all those eons ago! Please let her be real—but wait! Does she stir upon that damnable slab? Does she wake?

A gritty wind blows about me, stirring my skin, leaving me chill as the blood deigns to abandon my cup. In my mind I hear high bells, a cathedral’s pealing. Is it the carillon of Ballaghaderreen, or just my mechanized medic warning of low vitals, impending collapse? My world moves into a haze as I take another venomous step; internal hurt, torn muscles above my stomach.

To lift my leg once more would be to fail unsparingly. I stand transfixed in the passage, the carven heads of gods surmounting the arches on my left and right, many avian, others grotesque reptiles showing tongues that jut forth like eager knives. The air above is blue, and there are clouds plying their way across that rarified steppe, industrious, caravans laden with breathing. Alas, my industry is complete; I am as the nail when it is made crooked, I arrest my face in shame because I am the bowl shattered before the guest, the untrue arrow, the faulty Skydisc coughing dark when the child takes her flight, alone.

But could I really die without meeting mother’s gray gaze? I push on, pincushion, flotsam of this grand vacated metropolis, the omniscan reeling, imploring with all its servile force that I please remain stable, motionless, until medical benefactors arrive. “From where?” I might snort to my optimistic implant, but even I, moribund and broken, have not been reduced to communicating with a nonsentient software protocol.

Closer, now. The plinth is wreathed in fire, a gold chorus of seraphim swell beyond it, their song is dire yet purified by angelic breath. So Eochaid Ollathair is greeted.

Yet in the next moment I see through the veil; I have opiates in my blood, it is the drug that defiles me, tantalizes my spirit, seeks to deceive and occupy me until I die. I begin to laugh, my head thrown back, arm limp, blood spotting my twilight shadow. Is the sun that close to gone already? How long have I been out here? Ah, well, is not time, that most immaterial of subjects, ultimately a gulf that covers no distance? What I mean to say is, time is a veil, too, a partition, which is the real definition of hijab, it is simply a wall or screen that might apply outside the context of a Muslim woman covered.

And had I not lived my life with the hijab between the world and me? A bulkhead made of ice, a proud stage-curtain while I peered at my audience, kept them entertained with an endless procession of nattering hacks, dazzled their eyes while I pried the labor from their bodies. Oh, those gentle skeletons too couth to rise in revolution! I owe them my life and my welfare, as they owe me (owed, now, I believe: for the night is seeping through me like ink in a glass of vodka).

I turn up the dial on my opiates and see the angels waver and shake. My laughter continues, and had it ever stopped? I wonder. Still, though I know my mother died three hundred and ninety years ago, I may as well see what my febrile circuits dreamed up for me on that rough platform. Another step, it is easier. What wonders a moderate shot of sephanyl sulfate can enable! Bold now, I venture my other leg from its nest and remain vertical, well-deserved success.

Once I loved a woman! Ya Fatimah of the golden kingdom, that great juggernaut of the West, her pyrogenic smile. Her heart and mine found no boundary, a space without guard or hijab, even though she remained veiled, she was not pious per se but she lived her life right as she saw it, I did not want to stop her, she prayed facing Mecca. Before we split, it was I who entered the first serrated shard between our embrace. I shut myself off from her, that magnificent queen wreathed in ruby promise, kohl round her eyes and silver rings on her fingers, amethysts, pearls. With a loveless stroke I tore two states asunder, and you can blame me for all that has since transpired. Cleanskin Chris? This digital ghost is but a whisper in the dark, proletarian scare tactic. It is I who made nations move and cannons stand outside gilded halls, by accident. The blunders of the gods, after all, shape the destinies of many. You can write that down if you wish. Soon all that will stay of me are these statements.

One more step. Two more. The sun wheels down and the wind coos and the galleries become more circumspect, gathering more shadow, the temperature drops.

A twinge of pain animates me, and I think of my organs, such as they are, struggling to work, temporarily protected from grave agony by that noble yet capricious gendarme, dopamine, who buzzes fiendishly inside my unruly synapse. Too much? Very well, I become ornate, I let my language falter yet entwine like ropes, I carve a prayer out of wrought iron, I design my spirit and it peers around with eyes sharper than the clarity of Sri Lanka sapphires.

The cathedral kyrie swells and I see the stained glass, blue and amber and green, strike down and burst upon the hard oaken pew, the crude hymnals, the woman kneeling with her arthritic rosary beads, proud and cowled, her words through pursed lips untouched by a gentleman for forty years, hair and mole, eye twitching nystagmus, feelings breathed only to a withered priest at the end of each month, and to this rough necklace that resonates with the gumshoe and illusionist, a network of mysteries to pierce with ancient prayer. She is alone but voices people and branch like a virus, holy disease singing, aiming to generate their own cure and destruction with an updraft of melodic will, ever chastening, ever sere, ever invested with the razor grief of saints.

For it is my mother whom I wish to see, that champion of nightly knockings by father, survivor of fist and of stone, that calm practical magistrate of distress, a cliché, a woman vilified by woman because her new mantle is only to be strong and positive, all the weakness has been drained away from man’s abscess, but what about my life, what about what I saw, was it not real as the rain down on Cobh as I watched her steam away, Greenland bound? Must she suffer under an oath of “not now, we have moved beyond”? Do her bruises not make the cut into the final script, atman? Would you dab over them with foundation and hold her eye steady by the mirror, not too heavy because they’ll suspect, just enough?

As I move, slower and slower, my fists (fist) clenches, my other arm is limp, my armor is draining, I am a gray shambling mass, iron coffin, a face congealing with blood and my eyes smashed into bleary cameras that record but with haphazard skill. Monster.

I am a beast more than any wolf that prowls the trees, and I have eaten demons to attain the broad, emerald dais from where I reigned for a hundred years. (I’m getting the hang of this past tense now; it won’t be long, just when I master the latest grammatical challenge I will be gone.) I have taken life, never given, and worst of all I have slipped babies from their homes and skewered them. Nothing was removed from me, no ill failed to make its way to my heart, and I gave it leave within my court, a castle of banshees and peat ogres, only gussied up in diamante or silk or tightest cotton. With my pernicious blessing I let blood be a currency, I traded information for wealth, I made sisters gnash their teeth at their brothers and clamor to place them in the stockade, or more accurately in a pit filled with venomous snakes, for you see I had to slap St. Patrick for his greed and import a few devils back onto our fair isle.

“Mother,” I cry, or think, what is the difference, “what is a sinner to do when he is transgressed, but there are no priests to hear his confession? What then, dearest?”

I approach the throne—the kyrie attains its shuddering height, the voices mass and break away, the stained glass offers rainbows where I only offered bones, and in the colored dark of the cathedral, I see my mother, still praying, her fingers sieving the beads and her knees purple from the work an old woman must provide a thankless pew. All around goshawks cry and a rollicking crack like thunder moves through the church, and rain penetrates the once-solid slate, it is a downpour worthy of an ark, but my mother deepens the mystery undisturbed, her blue cowl like some alien rose in a land conjured up by a wise reprobate, its own hymn to pity; or not pity, but a stoic grace like a knight’s helm, a proud vertebrate patience before the gale, that almost idiotic trust in the power of impermanence, the martyr’s sword is his abrogation of safety, it is a glittering weapon, terrible and sick, but awesome in the way of the book of Genesis, that gross story pebbled with lies.

Aha! A house of god that welcomes a torrential downpour through its doors? What false pocket of reality is this? I wave my hand to make the vision dissipate like mist, but it only warps and recovers. Perhaps I am meant to die in a stormy nave, it is not my destiny to dispel the image, I must embrace that which my creator fashioned for my demise and make do.

“Mother, alas,” I tell her, hand outstretched to reach for her cowl, my feet anchors, my breath pulverized shells from Curracloe’s coast, my mind mercury. The engine I have made myself become is failing, sputtering smoke, exeunt machina. Sweep me from the stage and toss me with all the broken props at strike! Oh, but like Beckett, I cannot go on, I’ll go on. There is more for me here, in this guardless cloister in the loins of the city.

The plinth, the platform, it towers above me, still angled, my mother’s arm locked in its lovely V, her face hazy, and the light all the time becoming diluted, the tea of night steeps and brings my world from clear water to heady brew. I reach up, I can almost touch the edge, dare I bridge the gap between this plane and its neighbor, what if the waterfall and the church return, what then, Eochaid?

Fah. There can be no qualms and queries: these are my seconds for chance. My palm grazes the stone, all is stable, nothing booms or sunders or gives way. This reified skin of mine transduces such roughness, a denticled shark hide of weathered stone which has been stucco’d in some likely homage to the homespun strength of ancient architects. Did the halls of Babylon keep achievements such as this? Would Assyrian temples in Ashur be smooth to the touch, or harsh? To press my argent thumb against the ruins of Sumer—what would I feel? Would I weep with joy, remain blank, grow angry with the waste of long years, longer even than I can know? Who can say, we are cards thrown to the wind, and an old man chases us down the walk with his curse and his cane, we slip away, edge into culvert and briar patch—all except one, perhaps, who lands in the fresh-swept path of a child, is picked up, treasured, kept in a box to wait for generations, the ace of hearts, a kind of happenstance sigil that transmits a family’s strength and transmutes it, binding the bloodline together across houses and dates.

I feel a well in my heart overflow its limits. “Mother,” I say, smiling, infantile. I reach my hand up, straining, but it’s a meter too far from her feet. Yellow flakes of ash touch my cheek, crumble on my brow, as if to mop the sweat that’s been oozing. In the distance I hear a scream, and I turn my head (my neck tendons aching), but there is nothing. The nerves along my spine electrify, my whole body shakes. In my chest is that thrilling cold that accompanies the basement steps descending into darkness. Or is that too pedestrian for you, too conveniently bourgeoisie? Perhaps you’ll wag your heads more if I say it was the fear of walking down the street at eleven p.m., your purse against your ribs, head high and your steps loud on purpose, making yourself large, but the echoes themselves seem to scare you, and the presence of streetlights only heightens the oily tension of the dark.

All at once my mother is gone. Like a fur cap plucked from your head by the winter wind, I am left surprised, the chill changes, the blues and whites sharpen, I start running, except in my case I just press harder into the stone slab, grasping at the departed flesh of my dearly beloved parent.

It is a statue. Mother Mary. Lying prostrate on this stage, one arm missing, the other steered into a V, technically detached at the elbow, with the ulna and hand nevertheless lying next to it, angled with the open palm towards her face, when in its proper arrangement it should have been extended out and down towards passersby. She is unpainted stone, but she needs me.

“Oh, is it I, a sinner, come to thee in my latest hour?” I say. Like a child at the limits of his limbs, fingers flailing for the sugared scone on the high counter, I groan and stretch myself towards our lady’s feet, which show burnished toes and sturdy sandals. Heaven requires a lot of walking, after all, I’m sure.

My omniscan is cheeping, pulling up blood levels, pressure, oxygen count. Damnable parrot, squawking from its profane station. I have no need for you here, no need for medicine or metal (and yet, the seraphyl’s in my veins, and the armor upon my frame).

Purple night clashes into the evening sun, I stand before a striped banner of royal paintstrokes that drip and meld, all from photons wobbling at the frequency that unlocks gold or orange in our eye and cortex. It is as if we and the light require each other to have purpose, the thesis is old that nothing exists without a witness, but what if I were not here to ratify this gentle fusillade right now? What then, earth and sun? What if I am a storybook for this realtime tapestry? I contain the light and tell it, and through me the light passes to you. Is this not more marvelous than the glowing string that crosses the universe for ten million years and brings you a timorous wink of white? This light I give you crosses all borders, it waits in a letter, not revelatory but foolishly familiar, it is a torch I imprison within language. You can use it up by merely thinking, but it is inexhaustible, its fuel is you yet you can bring it to your child, and she will grow up holding this light that I saw in 2779 in New Ismene, and you will die.

Maybe I’m making too much of this whole light thing, but I am dying fast, and I will not restrain my neurons from their deepest will and testament, this imprint of my life that lingers.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.”

I say the prayer, it leaps from my tongue like an ambassador’s fluid words of praise. But am I sincere or meretricious? Is this the callow gasp of Mr. Wilde in the cell, the hurried plucking of the crucifix from the dirt, am I tousling my hair and lashing my back to make it look as though I’ve suffered with the flock, and is my real prayer that Jesus won’t catch me by the collar of my shirt as I trundle through the savior’s gates? Mr. Wilde seemed to mean it at the end, he repented of his ardor, if not his wit, but perhaps he only mourned for his false cloak of invincibility, that cheap love of the people, that drug, which I turned from love to fear so easily. Fear is always the more potent opiate, it soothes them into hunched aspects of adoration, it gives them the gift of an iron love they can use as a sjambok against their own flabby thighs.

Oh, to inject more fear into the bloodstream, and not this artificial River Lethe! My throat is closed from terror, I grunt like a man on the cobblestones, picking his face and declaiming with authority on his visions of Christ, only his great homily exists within a tongue all his own, a code of wolf howls and hungry rat peeps.

To glut on discomfort is my goal, I crane my corpus upward, go to my toes, hand managing almost to touch the big toe of the Lamb’s virgin mother. I suffer for you, sweet one! See how my teeth grind, my eyes ready to fall from their head with the cruelty that suffuses my bones? I manufacture my pain and I send it up for your grace, I anoint your sandals with my agony, if I can … just … touch …

“Blessed are thou among sinners, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners.”

The blackening night encloses itself around me like a cloak, I am wrapped in fading twilight and fresh stars, will the crickets sing? Do they sing in the citadel or are they banished like all other life? Am I this one sacrifice at the altar?

I feel the cold as abstraction more than rattling legs. The wind enters my canals, I accept, this body is mine but it is not mine, you can tread its rooms, test the timber, I have a good foundation, only I was led astray! With time, you can heal this and deal with it as you see fit, lord. Do I pass the exam? Must I perish to see the score, and will my mother chide me with unfashionable glasses and gauche lipstick like some sitcom dominator meant to punish my ambition, make me into a joke for the ugly crowd, the dread banana peel that eases the unchanging woes of the millions for that brief second, man tripping back, arms in a windmill, jaw open like a steelback salmon, falling, silly popped eyes, vein going in the red temple, point and laugh, right on time, hit the mark, on the X and yes! He’s on his back, savagery, have I only meted out the vulgar words of the sword?

“Now at the hour of our death, amen.” Begin again. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is with thee.”

I push my chest into the textured slab, my arm will dislocate if I go much more, but I must touch her, at least once! If this is all for naught, my death will be less justified than a man I once put to the guillotine for serving me fish on a Friday during Lent.

“Blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.”

But I don’t need to feel the womb, only her sanded toes! Hers are different from mine, of course, I have the Celtic mishmash spread of digits in all directions, as if Hephaestus had taken a hammer to them at birth. But mother’s are smooth and even, proportionate members, immaculate (to give you gaucheness yet again).

“The lord is with thee.”

I put my hand out, my severed ribs tremble, I have blood pouring down my leg and spreading around me like some dark spotlight. There is silence in this zone but it is like music. I keep praying, again, more.

“Hail Mary, full of grace.”

And what is grace, that ecstatic plasma of the faithful? It moves beyond forgiveness, far past luck or good fortune. It is the smile on the saint’s face before they burn her alive, it is the porcelain mastery of the stillborn child in your arms. Not all suffering becomes grace, so what is that sweet ingredient to raise our pains into a world without gravity, without paralyzed choice, with ardor?

And then it frees me, this light I have encoded, the origin of which even now passes out of my eyesight, yet remains within my private space, that soul’s library.

I surrender. I fall back.

Not to touch her toes is simply how it goes. I am on the floor, dust clouding, my good arm (good, yes, it barely works but it is still good) straight out to my side like a steel, heated arrow.

“I deserved that, sure,” I say, laughing, blood in my gums, squishing through my teeth. Above me is cooling blue, I lie between the galleries of other gods with my mother on overwatch, my diamond net. I cough and relax, my senses blur, fade, rekindle. How long, now, atman? Minutes?

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” I say, but I give up. Once I desecrated a statue of our lady by rubbing my bare rectum on her nose, and I remember saying, “Behold, the Pharisees have something to tell you!” and then I farted with all my might, spraying feces across her brow and benevolent cheek, and I left her in the church where I grew up, a scandal for the town that somehow went unsolved.

I keep laughing, perhaps I always had been, it was fine now, I had given in, towel on the floor, Eochaid on the floor, prostrate. I am 387 and I have seen this pearlescent world, I have held its emerald isle in my palm, I have drained the glass of life and filled it again more times than any man has a need to, I watched my friends die and then I crippled the ability to seek more friends, I became image and sun, I topped the banners and spread from screen to screen while millions fawned or simpered.

One leg of mine is bent, one arm pointing out. Sunset. I feel my light uncouple and become frail, I know the gods are watching, priceless.

“And what does a sinner do when he comes to the end of his path?” I ask, a chummy whisper, my lips slick with ichor, my teeth exposed to the waning day. I feel like this mask I wore has become real, I don’t inhibit it, I finally inhabit, I am the false god who crushes man and lands on his back for it. I am the storybook villain, the negligent excuse, the skypack fiend who leaves a wash of typhoon leaves in his wake. In my heart has been malice; I have killed for no point other than to satisfy me, I have insulted time, I have made love wither that once was close, I have choked the fruit from the vine and trampled crosses into the garden.

“And what becomes of he who has fame of evil?” I smile, I cry, there are tears and they carry memories along my cheeks, the diamantine days of playing on the hills near Birdhall, an axis to my mother at all times, I revolved and she guarded, my hair was quite good, too, a gift from my father, that British nonce.

The dust motes drifted upon me, they cradled my chest, they were my mother now, proper and light, I was joining them.

“Thank you, great Mayan battler,” I say, “you are my father now, you have made me in his image. In whose? Perhaps you have finally made me in my own, hah.” This joker’s life wedged inside mechanized suit. My own flag upon my chest, a striking adder, yet another jab at the vainglorious past of our sweet Eire. Finally now, am I not joking? What would be more right? To do as the apocryphal Oscar Wilde, and throw a line at the wallpaper? Or to face my name, collapse and crater, sinking slow?

But I think of nothing. Instead I see a smear trundle towards me, miniscule vision. In the wheatfield haze of that final sun, my magnified eyes resolve properly, and I can make out the wondrous red dome, those bucolic dark spots. My heart spirals, blooms.

In my youth, I never cared about ladybirds. They were like dollops of sugar to me, another extravagance I never had and never needed. My mother would let one stay in the house if she found it; she claimed they were good luck; but good luck apparently cannot save you from cancer.

But I forgive all this, now, and I welcome my tiny peer, lovely and fire engine red, mobile. She moves like a strong old woman pulling a cart, determined and healthy, moving slow but what of it? Most people were slow in their minds, and she’d be damned before her own wasted and cracked on the drivel they pumped in from every outlet. I welcome the ladybird and she moves towards me, and the blood runs from my ribs and spreads beneath me like a floral carpet, I lie on a bed of roses, I am the princess in the wood waiting for a tender mate to brave the magic that always scares the profoundly musclebound, I wait for this clever man to wake me. But instead of a raven-haired groom on a horse I have this living shell, this painted button with legs, this god’s cow.

That’s what the Russians call ladybirds, you know: bozhaya korovka. God’s little cow. I have no sacred idea why, and I couldn’t give a fig’s wrinkled bottom.

The plucky insect crosses the stone space between us, moving to my finger, that living digit, as if it holds something for her. Do they drink blood? I wonder, and then laugh. A vampiric creature would be just my luck, but I trust this little beast, I know she has secrets for me, she answers the question of the sinner’s choice.

As the sun blends away, I keep my eyes open, I see the bug blurry on the tip of my finger, I watch her lift her front legs and place them on my steel pad. And then I wink out of the drama, just like that. The machine becomes spirit.