THE GREAT WALL, pt 6 - The Return of…
I’ve been in town for awhile now, doing municipal work. Once a week I go and see the teacher, and we talk about various things, mostly about the town and how to make daily life better in simple ways. Like emptying the moon-trap on Sundays rather than later in the week, and how if you leave the seed in the uneaten half of an avocado, it keeps better. I try to ask her about the Wall, but she is always vague on this subject. Sometimes she gives me some herbs, and I pay her. It’s not so bad. The wall has been absent from my mind for weeks.
But one morning I awake – I have been rising early, often before the town alarm – and it’s pitch black in my room. I look to the small, cracked window, and it seems something is covering it. It’s the Wall. It has come to me.
Now a shock of dread runs up my spine and explodes in my cranium. Little fireballs of electricity shoot through my extremities and my body erupts in a violent convulsion. I gasp for air as my pelvis leaps up off the floor like a Mexican jumping bean and my limbs flail about like branches in a storm. I think about William Carlos Williams’ trees, wholly abandoned, and their clacka-tacka-tacka.
I want to give up, give into the frantic eruption and be ended, cloaked and covered finally in blackness.
I sink into the darkness. But there sparkling faintly, a semblance of mind. It summons me enter it and ZAP, the seizure subsides.
I lay quietly for a minute, completely still, resuming normal breath, and listen to the constant bass HUM of the Wall, before threatening and malevolent, now constant and simple. Almost soothing.
The words come to me: AMEN THE THUNDERBOLT IN THE DARK VOID and I know something for the first time in my life.
