In The Manner of a Moment

In the manner of a moment, Shlomo Kowalski slunk into the beaten blue house at the end of the street. In the style of a second, he scurried passed the motes of dust and sunlight that filled the empty rooms and ascended the stairs. With the delight of a day he went through great pains to set the trap. When he was done, he sat on a white sheeted-bed in the upper bedroom and panted.

He took off his brown fedora and wiped the sweat from his brow. The face of his watch said that there were twelve hours left to depart. Twelve hours before the great-grandchildren would arrive. For nine of those hours he slept. He was very tired and his body was happy for the sleep. He awoke at the start of the ninth hour.

With the nuance of a nanosecond, the chutzpah of an hour, and the yearning of many years… he replaced the fedora on his bald head and let his shoulders sag in relief. He turned his feet in the direction of the distant sky-houses, giant memory banks, and the ubiquitous matter organizers….

He thought of the great-grandchildren. He thought of what he had left in the house.

And in the manner of a moment, Shlomo Kowalski was gone again.

*****

I am sitting down and trying very hard not to think about the library or the fire when he walks in and sits down at the table across from me. I feel like I could have ignored him standing there… that I could have stayed long dead while still breathing… until he slid the chair back to sit down and it dragged across the floor. So loud, the metal on the linoleum. It makes me wince. When I hear the horrible mechanics of his knees cracking as he bends, the time for ignorance is over.

I clear my throat to speak, and there is half a word in my throat. Half a word that could have become a sentence of condemnation. A sentence that could have become a speech of rebuke… but it breaks off into something that could be a cry, and I break that off too.

When I peer up from my grime-covered hands, he stands there smug as can be. He has a big grin and two brown eyes far recessed into his face. I wonder what happened to him. He’s wearing one of their uniforms. All brown and green, from head to toe.

“You know I couldn’t allow it, didn’t you?” he asks.

I cannot reply.

“The world is changing.”

I snort.

“Borders are fading. People need something to keep them together. Something to give them an identity.”

And before I know it I have a butter knife in my hand. A dull little thing with a serrated tip… and somehow I have managed to put it through his neck. No one ever told me it was like this to stab someone. That stabbing is not quick and clean. That the substances through which the blade passed are several and various. That through the knife I can feel the pieces of the body through which it has sliced.

He’s so confused as he dies. Not angry. Not even afraid. Just full of wide-eyed dumb that I would do such a thing. “I didn’t kill anyone yet!” he says with his eyes. “All I did was get rid of a few books! They just told me to make you afraid!”

I hold him while he dies. It hurts oh so fierce, because the ashes of the books taught me that all life began from a single-cell and that the man I have killed is in a academic sense, my brother. I cry for him even as I get up and run for the back door.

And in the manner of a moment, one friend has slain another.

*****

The world had been very exciting before it became dull. Oh, how exciting it had been! Shlomo Kowalski missed all that excitement, and decided that he missed war the most. War had been an absolute thrill. Plagues, droughts, genocides! Never knowing whether you were alive or dead. Exercising every faculty for the sheer pleasure of exercising them all over again. From a distance of ten thousand years he remembered horrors as if they were lost friends.

The fedora hung on a peg by the door. The shack smelled like cigars, syrup, and cat piss. It also smelled like old men, but since Shlomo Kowalski was the only old man alive he knew the scent only for his own. Shlomo plopped down into a crumbling leather recliner that released a puff of air that smelled like ass. He turned on a television. It was an ancient device he’d had to design himself from one of the matter organizers and it made a little “hum” as the screen lit.

For some reason the hum made him remember one of his wives falling out of a helicopter and being torn limb from limb by an angry mob. She’d been his fifth wife, and probably his favorite. He paused in his rumination to check on his trap. The television attested that the rooms of the old beaten blue house were still empty. He saw all of them in the quadrants in the television. Thoughts of his dead wife returned. He wished he could remember that woman’s name. He had never loved her so much as when she’d been a few dozen bloody pieces in the hands of a thousand starving Rus, and he wished he could have held onto the name.

He let his shoulders fall. The Peace had come not long after she died. It had come with the matter organizers, which had dropped rice and grain from literally whatever shit people put into them. Built them up atom by atom. After that the internet became immersive. Then it became more convenient for people to live in dream worlds than a world where people fell dead sometimes for no reason at all. Then after that well… it was hard for politicians to get a rise out of people anymore.

He lit a cigar and suckled on it like a mother’s breast.  You couldn’t make people kill when there were no boundaries to kill over. You couldn’t get them scared by race when the only people who were different colors were people from a world so far distant children laughed at it like he had once laughed at cavemen. There’d been a couple of little wars before the homogeneity had settled in. He’d been dumb enough to think they were atrocious at the time.

The cat came up and pissed on Shlomo’s leg. He kicked her away and laughed. She yowled at him. In general, Bitch was a lousy cat. He’d had to make her out of a matter organizer, cell by cell. Every ten or so years he had to compile her again when the last version of her kicked the bucket. As she was the only cat left on the planet, and did not have the behavior of other ancestral cats to model she was an eccentric animal that was almost unforgivably awkward. She’d never learned to piss or shit properly, for one.

When Bitch came back to him as if she would like to piss on his other leg,  Shlomo threw his cigar at her and screamed a hundred different words in Hebrew, whose translation he could not really recall. Too long since he had spoken it to someone else. He was pretty sure they were all curses though.

He meant them to be curses, and he was sure that was all that mattered anyway. He’d only remembered being Jewish a couple hundred years ago, and felt like he’d made great strides in that time.

From the primitive speakers of his television he heard the sound of footsteps.

He found another cigar and sat back down to watch.

*****

The part that depresses me the most is how very stupid they’re being about the whole operation. How they make me haul stones back and forth all day. How they do this even when there is no reason. How they do this even when it would easier to do it with equipment. This above all makes me realize that it isn’t about anything reasonable. It isn’t about anything that can be argued about. It’s about black, ugly hate.

When you’re stupid, you’re not worried about a world you have to be prepared for. When you don’t care enough to be smart, you don’t have a future. When you’re under the rule of stupidity, you don’t have hope.

I carry a piece of limestone from a destroyed building. I carry it from one pile of rubble to another pile. If I and the thousand others they have rounded up continue to do this, we may have the city cleared in ten thousand years. Stupid.

I meet my second wife, or rather the woman who will become my second wife when we both reach for the same bit of rock. Somehow through all we have suffered the social stigmas remain, and our hands pull back. I smile at her, nod my head, and bend down to pick up the rock. Raw fingers scrape on rough stone. I grunt.

She smiles back, so small you can’t really tell. This is not a time for smiles.

We’re not quite skeletons yet. The woman who will become my second wife still has a bosom. Not much, but some. Her hair is shaved, but I decide that she has pretty eyes.

I think about the shape of her eyes as I pick up rocks.

I see her again on the next haul and a shift in the wind carries the smell of her to me. There is the smell of dust, and decay, and limestone… and the smell of roses. The smell of roses is in her hair, and I breathe deep on this because it is the smell of something clean. I have not been or felt clean in forever.

The elders marry us a month later because we need something to keep moving. I don’t even really know for sure that my first wife is dead. We need to believe in a future even if the stupidity around us tells us that there is no future. Even if we are dead while still alive.

I never find out how my second wife dies. Just that she never comes back.

I take my third wife three months later. My fourth, six months after that when the third one dies.

We do not dare for one moment think of the loss that lays in the past. We think only of the love that may be in the future.

And in the manner of a moment, as I pick up another stone, I find a reason to keep moving.

*****

People used to write horror stories about monsters putting them in cages. Monsters that made them dance in worlds almost like the real world, except that they were awful and there was no escape. When they fled, they ran in place as if the distance to the exit was a constant which could never be crossed.  They clawed at walls that once torn away showed only another identical room.

Shlomo missed those stories. He missed the simple correctness of the terror. Of the values it expressed. That being alive in the real world was better than living in a world with no consequences. Even then, even as those movies were put on the shelves, philosophers had begun to wonder if flesh itself was evil. If the world might not be better off if there was only mind, and never body.

Philosophers had also wondered why the stars were empty.

Shlomo Kowalski had taken ten thousand years to figure that one out.

Some part of him had never stopped screaming.

The great-grandchildren were on the television now. Naked as the day they were born. All the grand-children compiled naked when they took their minds out of storage. They didn’t care about the bodies long enough to protect them. The great-grandchildren were convulsing on the ground, some ten in all, screaming as they pulled out their hair.

*****

For twenty years I have run from the smell of roses. And the smell of lilacs. And the smell of whiskey, which my fourth wife somehow managed to smell of even in our death camp where such luxuries as alcohol were never to be found. For twenty years I have run from the smell of roses, until today. With all the advances made by men, elevators still break down. I am stuck in the middle of a building, in a cube not big enough to lay down in, more terrified than I was even at the camps. I am afraid because I am alone with a woman and her hair smells of roses.

The scent lingers in my nose, and it makes the memories linger too. Memories of the women I have never mourned.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

I nod, gray-faced, and pat my forehead with a handkerchief. It is such a polite thing to do. To pat one’s head with a handkerchief. I am astounded at the dignity of it.

Her features are Rus, but with the smell of her in my nostrils she looks like every dead woman I have ever loved.

“They never break down for more than half an hour or so.”

She takes my hand. It is so human, so wonderfully polite, that my whole body jolts.

“You’ll be okay.”

I have always been fascinated by time. By the passage of one instant to the next, how every decision however small impacts the next. Through a very unlikely series of these events I have managed to survive. I have lived long enough to see peace.

I ask her if she would like to have dinner. I want to throw up as I say the words.

She laughs, care-free.

And in the manner of a moment, I am no longer afraid of roses.

*****

Shlomo shooed Bitch off the top of the television when she stretched out there to sleep. She fell on her side, and ran away after regaining her feet. The grand-children on the tv were huddled up in balls now, crying. Shlomo turned the tv off for a moment and rubbed his head.

The world had been most real in the Death Camps. Those memories were the most vivid. Of running his fingers over his ribs like chain links and counting. Of counting the bones in his hands and feet, and the throbbing that came to him whenever he had to walk, or move, or breathe… or be present enough to think. Of holding a pillow over some boy’s face, who might have been his brother. Holding it there even while he struggled, because what was coming for him would only ever get worse. Of eating his food later that night, and wanting to have the luxury of throwing it up in shame.

He remembered the very old telling him that in the first Death Camps there had been lessons learned, but he told them to shove it because what had happened to them was hundreds of years ago and the world was a different place. People were more honest, and more selfish now and they could cram it. This was horrible, and there was nothing to be learned from what was horrible.

They had been so sad when they looked at him. Telling him that he was going to die one day, and did he really want to carry all that he was doing to survive on his conscience? Didn’t he want forgiveness?

And he had.

Then.

Not that he would have admitted it.

The weight of his conscience wanted to burst like a sore, and he would have given anything for relief. Hot spit had flown from his mouth as he told them he was never going to die.

Shlomo Kowalski started to laugh when he remembered that! Oh what a smart one he had been! How brave!

His jawbone dropped and he laughed with all the power of flesh that had been engineered for every contingency but the desire to rot.

Bitch yawned and licked her asshole.

*****

I know war is coming again because nobody cares enough to stop it. There will be many deaths at the hands of very few.

It is the people that are so different now that are causing all of this. They pass through the world like air, leaving almost no mark. They pass me on the streets, barely human anymore. I have not noticed this, because it has come bit by bit. I think of the mind like concrete. All the hardships, all the experience, writing symbols into that unformed substance creating a pattern until the pattern hardens and becomes an adult.

But now?

There was no hardship. There was no experience. Nothing to create a pattern.

All that cement is left horrifyingly blank.

Every day one of the old-timers dies, and a new child is born. A child who will never know hardship, or pain, or fear, or guilt. How long until all of us old-timers are gone? How long until there are no more sentient human beings?

I see my wife smile as she stands on our balcony and wave from up the street. We have been together for a very long time. We cling to each other in this empty world, and by looking at each other ignore the vacuum around us.

And in the manner of a moment, I forget to wonder at the inhumanity of others because I am filled full with my own.

*****

Shlomo wondered if it was vice or virtue that had made him compile. He had never been a good man, but he had always been a man. A human man, and proud of the fact that he claimed kinship with the apes. He could remember why he’d gone into the big memory towers, leaving his body behind as a husk. But he could not remember what event had struck him in the ether that had made him use a matter organizer to create a new body. He could not remember why he had made a body that would be eternally old. Or why he had scrapped his memory but left his technical senses so finally tuned.

He turned the tv back on to check on his grandchildren, and favored Bitch with a pat on the head. He grabbed his fedora from off the peg and walked back to the blue house. Bitch followed at a lazy saunter.

*****

We’re running through the streets her and I. The feel of her fingertips on my forearm is electric. I am safe only where her flesh meets mine, for it is the only place I am real. Our flesh hungers for the feel of the other, so as we run we make sure to keep our hands wherever they may find contact. Palm to palm is best, but if I must I will touch the small of her back as we run should she get too far ahead of me.

“Don’t let go!” I say, but I know she can’t hear me. Too many voices. Too many snarling mad Rus running through the streets. All the Rus in the world left over from the old time.

The crowd is not all mad of course. Some of them are just walking around placid. The new timers. The people doing all the murdering are in the minority. Survivors of the old time. People driven mad by the sameness of it all. They make a poor obstacle for the Rus.

The helicopter is up ahead. Such an old piece of equipment. So antiquated. It is filled with people like me. Other survivors of the camps, who have prepared against a day like this. People who have reason to want to protect me. People who think of me as a member of their tribe.

I push her through the crowd up to helicopter. She is grabbed and pulled upward. The Rus howl, seeing the helicopter. They are angry now. So angry. Angry that the people they are killing don’t even care enough to fight back. Angry that they are impotent to cause terror. So they see us, living sentient beings, and they run to kill us and show themselves the reality of their anger. It’s not enough to terminate a series of chemical reactions. They need to find a living human mind and stop it from working.

There are a few thousand of them in all the millions. My wife’s hair fills my nostrils as I give her one final shove up into the helicopter. She smells of roses. She makes it aboard, and my hands are empty. The Rus are closing in.

They are lifting as I drag my last leg into the helicopter.

Coming down from the adrenaline, I am in a daze. I don’t notice the way the man with the gun is looking at my wife. I don’t see the way he’s looking at her Rus features, and scowling. I don’t see the memories flickering in his eyes. By the time I do notice, he has put his hand in her chest and she is falling back through space. She is floating through the air, and lands, horribly alive in the arms of the Rus below.

And in the manner of a moment, I stop wanting to be alive.

*****

With the eerie pace of eternity, Shlomo Kowalski snuck into the blue house at the end of the street. The house he had used to draw the great-grandchildren. The house he had compiled and made real so that the grand-children would take physical form to investigate. How could they not, for he had placed it right in the way of their power grid? With the festering stare of forever, Shlomo Kowalski examined the great-grandchildren where they lay on the ground. With the unforgiving motions of always he cocked the gun.

He couldn’t really remember what he was doing, or what it was the great-grandchildren were supposed to remember. He knew only that he had put all that they needed to remember in the small nanoscopic machines littered through the air of the house. The machines he had designed before compiling. It had taken a long while to figure out how to write over memory. How to give them a lifetime of human-forming experience in the span of a few hours.

“Are you human?” Shlomo asked, shaking the gun at one of the great-grandchildren.

Humanity was old enough now and diverse enough that he considered all humans to be his grandchildren. Bitch pranced over to one of the great-grandchildren and snuggled at their feet. She purred. It was the first time Shlomo had heard her make such a cat-like sound. It sounded like a rattle.

The great-grandchildren were all staring at him, not knowing what they should say. Shlomo walked over to one and pressed the gun into his mouth. He looked to be about sixteen years old, although the new-timers had the look of six year olds in terms of innocence.

“Do you care?” Shlomo asked calmly “if I end your life?”

After a moment, the great-grandchild nodded. The others nodded in tune. Shlomo held the gun in place, not knowing what to do. He was unaccustomed to conversation.

The great-grandchildren closed in a circle around him, and gently pushed his arm back down to his side. One took the gun and let the bullets fall to the floor. They scattered there like metal raindrops.  Then the gun itself was thrown on the bed.

“You had many children in a house like this,” said one of the great-grandchildren. She was perhaps eighteen.

Shlomo nodded.

“And they all grew up and went away-” he was thirty.

-and became new timers.” She was ten.

“What you needed to tell them, could not be told in words.” He was seven.

“So you had to find a new way. To carry forth all that needed saving.” She was old as well, and bent forward to kiss his head.

She smelled of roses.