I haven’t written another revision of my Pazuzu Trilogy, but I have tweaked Chapter One of Manifestation. I did because I can. I don’t have a professional publisher so I’m not locked into an unsatisfying revision – no matter how petty the changes may be. In my perspective, I have a degree of freedom of which I take advantage – though not-so-silent detractors claim I abuse (I hear of their discontent via rumors conveyed word-of-mouth). I listen, but until I achieve 5000 copies sold of each of the second and third books in the story, I’m prone to tweak my books.
Owning my un-professionalism, Chapter One is where my Pazuzu story originally began. I added the Preface after more vocal readers complained of immediately getting lost. In the beginning, I wanted readers as lost and unknowing as Benedict and myself. The Preface isn’t necessary, but it does provide context.
Without the introduction, readers do gradually learn more of the story’s bleak setting, but therein the Preface is a crash course in the resurrected and fictionalized Shur desert. Mr. Binger has made the changes in his Waste but his revision is merely a copy with different flavoring. The essence of the tale is my Pazuzu Trilogy. Below is Chapter One with the latest, minor changes. They’ve been incorporated into the Ninth Revision currently available online.
1
The Wilderness
This morning, the colors of the sky possess weight. At the faraway horizon, where a wide, blue bruise is caught between dark and light, the hues are luminous gases – layers of yellow, orange and pink pressed together by the nothingness of the previous night. The rising sun pushes warm colors upward, burning them away, and bleeds sore purple from the sky. A shirtless, stumbling man then falls into the morning.
He knows where he is, but the bare wraith cannot remember who he might be. Beneath caked dust, he appears overall red and covered with angry pustules. His torso resembles an antique table dusted by careless strokes. With each of his heavy steps, the dirt encrusted upon his chest and back drops off in flakes.
His own shoulders bear upon him with a foreign weight he wants to throw off. The extra fleshy padding around his waist only adds to his burden. The gain had crept upon the smoldering man with stealth, over years of denial and through moments of complacent acceptance. Growing fat once seemed a natural process of age. The extra weight had introduced itself as a hobo trespassing the rails, a sneaky hanger-on who refused to be shaken off.
The tired posture and swollen, blistered gut of the man makes him a forlorn caricature. His arms swing with the weight of pendulums knocked from their paths. And this broiled devil lumbers across a desolate, alien world – the only living thing exiled and cast into Hell. Desperate thirst comes without warning.
He feels his insides bake and he imagines his already bulging belly will bloat until the skin bursts and all his juices bubble out. The very last of his fluids will evaporate even before dripping to the ground. Such was not the death the empty man desired. He would not die sizzling in his own fluids. Instead, he preferred drying-up. He wants to disintegrate, to become part of the dust – red dust.
A clear, familiar voice speaks into his left ear. The voice sounds like his own. “You have certainly wandered enough.”
The disconnected specter speaks with finer clarity than the stumbler – absent of the muffled hesitation he struggles to overcome in ordinary conversation. This voice sounds rehearsed and confident, far from his own verbal fumbling. His voice, like a nasally monologue recorded on an answering machine, seems an amputation, separate from any concept he believes about himself; whatever that could be now.
The better voice resonates as if echoing inside an empty room. Just as abrupt, it vanishes and a second of stillness fills the void. Leaded footfalls on packed dirt and a muffled ring in the man’s head dispels the silence; much like listening to a radio station when an announcer misses his or her timing – until a burst of sound jolts the dead air. Yet the voice was not scratched with static heard on radios. Nothing disturbs its dismembered words. The voice and the man’s plod across the dry waste remain exclusive and opposite each other.
The wandering man does not bother looking around, because the sporadic company of the invisible voice is his only companion. It had joined him earlier that day, or maybe the day before. Time had passed as fleetingly as the voice. The sun had traveled only a quarter of its path through the sky when the day became unbearably hot and bright. The previous night had been sweltering, and the man had stumbled through the darkness, unsure when one day ended and another began. The endless expanse of dirt and suspended days disorient him. Yet he must walk and find his way or die.
From the road, the desert had never appeared so large. He would have easily spotted scant landmarks if he rode in a car or truck. Regardless, the man thinks he can recover his bearings. His sense of direction had always been amazing, or so he believed.
Though he could not recall why he found himself in the middle of nowhere, he suspects he had a destination when the dangerous trek began. The “when” was now long ago, hidden beneath hours and unending dunes of sand. If he had brought any water, it was now gone. He did not know what supplies he had packed for this journey, and he now lacks a pack and even a shirt. All he apparently owns are a pair of scuffed laced boots and crusted khaki pants with empty pockets.
“Hey, wouldn’t a tall glass of cool water be great?”
The voice, barely noticeable beneath hot winds, teases like some subtle siren – hidden within whirlpools transformed into sand dunes. The thought of a gulp of water lights in the mind of the stumbling man, but he deliberately quashes it; none was to be found here and he would not torture himself. Entertaining pleasant fantasies seems more conducive to his survival.
The wanderer dreams he finds that siren and she takes this poor, baked fiend to her dune. They lay down and her bare skin is cool, like the ocean in which she was born. Her eyes, green as kelp, compete for admiration against lips that flirt and glisten with the sheen of pearls. Rescued and transformed, he tires of the colorless desert and travels back to her sea. He will never be thirsty again, and never care and recall how or why he discovered himself alone in the desert. Finding the bliss of love and the sea were the answers, and she was the reason for his journey.
Dehydration had set in a long time ago and stumbling on his feet was currently just a pretense; he was already lost and dead. Heat exhaustion was near, but still, the voice calls.
“Benedict,” it names him. This time the voice shuts out every thought. “Ben.”
Ben jerks leftward with such violence, he twists completely around, a marionette thrown into a clumsy pirouette by an amateur puppeteer. The momentum pulls him off his feet and he falls forward as if his strings are cut. His shoulders remain hunched while he lay face down in the sand.
With a huff and small cloud of dust, Ben flips himself over and sees the orange cauldron of the sun over his toes. He had stopped sweating, which wasn’t a good sign, but he lacks any will to worry. His name will be forgotten, if ever really known. He recalls it now, because the voice had reminded him. His name is Ben.
Ben closes his eyes and pictures rippling waves drift upward from his body. He feels stuck to the ground, a part of it. This land might also be called Ben and he is merely a piece of desert, like the dust stirred by his steps. The particles will eventually settle back down and rejoin the suffering man; misplaced specks relocated from one part of the desert to another, but still part of the whole.
His breath becomes the hot breeze and he exhales a gust that singes the inside of his gaping mouth. When Ben opens his eyes, the sun hangs directly overhead as a white whirlpool in a smooth blue ocean. A mighty hand had polished away the waves and ripples; not God’s hand. The Mortal God was gone. The voice tells him, although the man had already suspected.
“Ben, you’re wasting the day, dreaming.”
****
Ben knows he’s disoriented and he’s hallucinating. The voice is clearly not his own, but it disguises itself and imitates an internal conversation; so that it might creep upon him unawares. Still, Ben responds to the reproach in the voice and rolls onto his right. He grunts with the exertion and feels choked.
He lies still and listens to the ringing in the back of his head. The high-pitched sound was constant, but does not demand attention. In addition to his internal ambiance, he hears his own thoughts and shallow breaths. Yet only the ringing reminds him he is awake and painfully alive. With his ear pressed against the ground, Ben also hears far off rumbling, not unlike an ocean wave slowly rolling over the shore then retreating. The rumble seems to come from a road. Ben continues listening, but the familiar sound of civilization again evades him. The ringing in his head recedes after a few minutes. By then, he avoids focusing on the noise entirely, unlike the voice when it decides to speak and demands its audience.
Ben spends a feeble hour pulling his knees to his chest. He lays in a fetal position a few more minutes, while flashes of the sea above taunts him. Fear of the voice scolding him for such fanciful ideas brings him back to the reality that he lay in the desert beneath an afternoon sun.
“You should put a little more effort into survival,” the voice tells him. Ben pants slowly, with hard breaths rising in crescendo. His respirations climax when he pushes himself onto his knees. Hoping the difficult part has passed, he is disappointed. All his exertion becomes even harder. Standing almost takes the last of his strength.
Ben drops back to his hands and knees, needing leverage so he might lift his leg from the ground. He plants a palm flat in the dirt and props himself into a runner’s three-point stance, as if waiting for a starting gun to fire. After a few minutes of posing motionless, he considers standing. Apparently, the starter and the other runners had gone home – the race called due to extreme weather; the temperature was much too hot to compete. Ben agrees there will be no running today.
He raises his other shaking leg and pushes himself backwards. When he attempts to stand, Ben digs shallow furrows in the sand with the toes of his boots. He grunts and pulls himself upright, with his feet spread wide. His head swims and he feels nauseous. If he had any gorge, it would have bubbled up his throat. Ben wobbles uncontrolled, but he stands on his feet. Where this reserve of energy came from seems unfathomable. A fluke of gravity holds him upright, much like setting an egg on its end during the vernal equinox.
The fossil of this creature would not be found here in the Shur desert, unless he falls back onto the ground and dries up alone. Ben determines he will be the last living thing ever to cross this particular piece of desolation. Although, he would rather have his bones found in a cool lake or inside an air-conditioned car. The stumbling man leans forward and lets momentum carry him. Each step catches him from falling on his face again. He asks himself “Where is that road?”
Behind him lies a temporary path carved by his shuffle that the wind already sandblasts away. A compass point seemed impossible to find because the sun shone directly overhead. Chances were that he had confused his direction long ago, even after noting the sun always rose in the east. Ben did not recall where or even when he became lost. The belief he possessed an acute internal sense of direction could have been merely delusional thinking. His misconception seemed a perfectly rational diagnosis, given he now heard voices, saw seas in the sky and possessed generally grandiose ideas about himself.
“Rationalization and losing one’s mind never fit together,” Ben thinks, then laughs aloud. The chuckle begins with a cough then cracks his harsh voice with a noise he had not made since the age of thirteen. The sound makes him laugh harder, deliriously. Ben stumbles and nearly falls, but his feet swing forward and faster, now. Wherever he was going, he would get there quickly.
He veers toward his left, because that side-ward leg became heavier than the right and dropped and dragged. His right foot crosses his left, as if he steps over the carcass of an animal that had stewed in the sun beyond recognition. The sidestep-dance continues another twenty or thirty meters, until Ben grows dimly aware a black line stretches in front of him. The line reaches from horizon to horizon and an invisible glass wall rises from the delineation. No matter how Ben tries stepping unto the line, he leans leftward. He walks parallel to a road, a road! The voice becomes more than a hallucination and hails from the direction he follows.
“You have certainly wandered around long enough.”
Ben does not raise his face from his discovery. The thin black line then stretches into a thick ribbon of cracked asphalt. Sand drifts over the surface in sheets. When he realizes the road lay flat instead vertical, Ben steers himself onto the asphalt. He deliberately continues walking toward his left.
“Now, here we are and all the worse for wear,” the voice says. Ben swears the quip was a thought hidden in his head. He snorts, then chokes with amusement.
“Who are you?” demands a nervous new voice. Ben stops walking. This voice could not be more real than the first.
The sound of the wind had not deadened when the new voice asked his identity. Other noises also fill the air – labored calls bark from a hoarse throat. Another voice comes from the direction of the distressed shouts.
“Oh, man, he’s gonna die too?” This voice sounds shrill and scared.
The only reply comes from the hoarse throat. “Help me, no, stay way from me, All of you. Away, heathens! Do you know who I am? Stay away, damn you!”
Ben raises his eyes. Crust had nearly glued the lids shut, and now painfully tears away. Only his right eye opens enough for him to see more than white light and blocky, shadowy shapes. Two men cautiously shuffle toward him, their hands raised before the pair. One man comes from the rear of an old truck – really just a moving assemblage of scrapped parts, haphazardly painted pastel yellow. Scratches scar the crude brushwork already pitted by blown sand. The mirrors and back window are missing and the bed of the truck is crumpled toward the cab. The yellow coat of paint appears to have been added after the apparent accident – the folds in the metal retains the color thickest and brightest, as if freshly coated. The truck stands parked in the middle of the road with its bald tires molded onto the pavement. The engine ticks while it cools, if that was possible in the daytime heat.
Another man sits in a white Bourdon sedan, a popular car in Church fleets. A couple years had passed since that particular model had appeared on the market. It looks dirty, but in good condition. Further behind the truck, the car sits on the shoulder of the road. The hoarse voice comes from inside. The approach of the two men obscures whomever had actually issued the warning.
The two men look alike, thin but not wiry, maybe brothers. They wear coarse denim work shirts and pants. The mismatched boots and cuffed pant legs on one man dispels the impression they wore military uniforms. The one with cuffed pant legs polishes a small, discolored bump in the middle of his forehead. Their deeply tanned and unshaven faces testify work and life outside had carved undeserved age into them. The men were accustomed to the heat and glare of the Shur and took no precaution, such as hats. They bare their necks with open collars. The smell of their musky sweat reaches Ben before these two unrecognized men.
The shrill voice sounds again. The man whom comes from the sedan, the one with the bump on his head, says something no one can understand. His lips curl back over short white nubs of teeth. Wrinkles curve over his nose and below his eyes when he looks closer at Ben.
“There can’t even be any blood left in him. You’re not doing all right,” says the smaller man on the road.
“Get him into the car,” the other man orders. Up close, Ben sees the other man has narrower eyes. His mouth is larger than that of the man with the bump, but his lips are thinner.
Ben staggers toward them as they approach. He ventures saying something and three words crackle out of his mouth like smoldering leaves, “Tall…glass…water.”
“Sure, man” the thin-lipped man replies. “Sure, yeah.”
Ben falls forward into the pair and their hands wrap around his arms. His skin feels scalded where the men touch him. He hisses in pain because his horrible burns from the sun. Still, Ben feels lighter born by these strangers. His head becomes a weight he can no longer bear and it lolls, tethered by a heavy invisible chain jerked from side to side by the sadistic puppeteer.
The shrill noise disappears from the voice of the man with the bump; and he was a better man for the absence. “He’s heavy for being all dried up, huh, Dil?”
The man he calls Dil does not reply. The trip to the sedan is short. When they near the driver’s side, Ben peers through the partially open door. He sees a lap clad in black slacks on the reclined seat. A pink elbow rests on a rotund gut so large that Ben feels less concerned about his own, but only by a small degree. Panting comes from within the sedan and the hoarse yelling starts again when the three men approach.
“Get away, heathens. I will command the Mortal God down upon you all.”
A pale man, not much older than Ben, lies sprawled in the sedan. The man has a herald of gray hair. He buries his right hand into his left armpit. His other hand grips the stunted collar of his white shirt, pulling it from his neck. The outburst causes him to gasp and wince with pain. The man with the bump squeezes Ben’s arm emphatically.
“He’s having a heart attack. He won’t let us help him – won’t even let us touch him.”
“I’d rather die out here, by myself, than let you spiteful heathens cut-out my living guts,” the man spits. The meager spittle falls across his chin in long clear threads. More pain grips him.
Speaking about Ben, Dil directs his smaller twin. “Take him around to the other side.”
Dil and the one with the bump carry Ben around the front of the Bourdon and toward the door on the passenger side. The windshield is covered in sand, except where wiper fluid has changed the dirt into bluish mud, which the rubber wiper blades had pushed aside and left caking. Through the glass and semi-circles of grime, Ben watches the panting man grow calm. The man closes his eyes and rests his head against the window at his side – the immediate threat has dissipated, temporarily.
The sick man is a priest, and consequently one of the Mortal God’s Chosen. He was born of the elite caste – which accounts for his threats and recalcitrance. Only heathens wander the wastes of this desert – crazy, cannibal, suicidal heathens. That is what people believe in Capital and other oases where the Chosen live.
The priest obviously did not have a rank because no insignia appears pinned on the short upright collar of his white shirt. At his age, people expected he would have gained some achievement in the Church. The lack of rank and his presence in the desert were connected.
“You’re him, huh?” the man with the rolled pant cuffs asks Ben while they walk around the vehicle to the passenger side of the Bourdon. His voice stayed low and conspiratorial.
“Shut up, Hen,” Dil warns with toothed sharpness.
Both the question and command float past Ben like a conversation drifting on the wind from far away. He does not respond to either before Dil reaches for the door handle. At the sound of the latch, the priest stirs from his brief respite. The incapacitated man makes a desperate lunge for the lock; but cannot lift himself from his seat. Anyway, the attempt comes too late – Dil swings the door wide open before the priest rolls up and fortifies his defense.
The clergyman scowls. “Damn each of you, I mean it.”
He then falls against the driver’s side door and hangs from the open vehicle. Only the seat belt saves the priest from spilling out entirely.
“Give me back my keys,” the priest demands, pawing his neck. He sucks short, shallow draws of air through his mouth. An unseen weight immediately presses each breath back out. The hands of the priest return to his chest.
“Hey, we found him like this. We were going to help, you know.” Hen’s voice warbled.
The two strangers ease Ben onto the passenger seat, within the blessed shade of the sedan. The brown leather upholstery burns like a griddle on Ben’s bare and injured back, but he endures. Shelter from the direct glare of the sun is worth the pain and, mercifully, night falls early. Dil lets Hen lift Ben’s feet into the car. The thin-lipped man then passes in front of the vehicle, back the way they had come.
“You’re going to peel the skin from my living skull, terrorist.” The priest emphasized the last word with another dry spat. “After you pull my insides out.”
Hen reaches over Ben and toward the middle console on the dashboard. His shirt feels like sandpaper dragged over Ben’s bare torso, but the burned wanderer is too weak for protest. The air conditioning burst forth with a roar. “You know,” Hen said. “We’re UnChosen. We believe in the Mortal God.”
“Liar,” the priest denies. “Don’t touch me when I’m dead.”
Hen steps from of the car and straightens himself. He grimaces and looks at the truck and he puts idle hands on his hips. The glare makes him squint. He sees Dil rummage through the crooks of the folded bed and Hen shuts his mouth with another clack of teeth. Dil soon returns and hands him a clear plastic bottle of warm water.
“Give it to him,” Dil says before disappearing around the back of the sedan. Hen holds the bottle at the bottom and carelessly dumps the contents into Ben’s open mouth. The water streams down the broiled man’s dirt-crusted chin and heat-radiating chest.
The air from the vents had instantly cooled the interior of the car, as well as the space just outside the open doors. The stream reaches toward Ben like a caress; the siren finally arrives. Her golden hair floats about her face as if she is underwater. Gleaming with the light of the sun above, her smile is the only thing Ben clearly sees beneath her hovering yellow tresses. The siren’s hands raise goose flesh when she strokes his face and shoulders; her touch is the only sensation that did not burn. She straddles his lap and presses her cool, bare breasts against him. The touch of her skin makes him forget pain. He slowly surrenders to exhaustion and will soon follow his salvation into secret fathoms. When she leans forward, smiling through parted, shining lips, her hair drifts into his face. Once she kisses his open mouth, cold air flows into Ben. The cool caress fills his lungs with unbearable frost.
Ben chokes and the water Hen gave him sprays against the dash. It runs down the interior of the slanted windshield in short rivulets and evaporates before any pools. Hen fumbles.
“Just a little. You can have more, just not so fast.”
The coughing and sputtering continue a few seconds more, but Ben does not move. Exhaustion plants him in his seat, as firmly as the priest had sunk into his own. Hen gives him another sip of water, now carefully. Ben drinks his siren a little at a time, lest she drown him. When the scorched stranger looks as if he can properly swallow the water, Hen gives him several more gulps.
The priest looks away and speaks softly. “I condemn you…” he exhales and grows rigid. His mouth falls open. The sound of the air conditioner covers whatever the priest says next, if any intelligible comment follows. He adds a long and low “…oooooooo…” trailed by a longer, rattling exhalation.
“I think he’s dead,” Hen guessed. His voice shakes again. “We didn’t kill him. Right?”
Ben does not hear. His siren drifts away and he still thirsts – the weathered man’s cravings only slightly quenched. His need becomes worse. Hen’s rationing of the water taunts Ben, but he has no strength or presence to do more than suck the tiny portions as they’re offered. Ben remains unaware of the dead man laying next to him.
Suddenly, the voice returns and all other sounds vanished. “You’re filling up again,” it says. “You were empty, just the right place for something, later. You will remember, Benedict, but not now – soon.”
Ben disregards the cryptic statements. The water is gone – the only important news he cares about.
“You’ve learned some truth today. You will remember that later. We need your revelation kept in mind.”
The sound of the air conditioner wavers then abruptly quits, before roaring back solid. Within the pause, the voice adds another word.
“Transformed.”
“What happened to your clothes?” Hen wonders aloud, knowing Ben cannot answer.
“Hey!” Hen exclaims. “You look about the same size as that priest. He has a suitcase back here.” Hen stretches his neck and peers into the back seat. Just as the priest had passed, so did Hen’s fear. He sounds eager and already scavenges the vehicle.
Ben remains conscious long enough and watches Dil return. Dil carries a small gas canister in his right hand. The red plastic had faded to pink, especially at the seams. Light passes through the canister, making it appear glowing from within. The black spout looks gnawed.
Dil passes something to Hen. The object appears to be a small key ring adorned with a charm shaped like an elongated “X.” The shape is actually a cross, a shared emblem of the Chosen and UnChosen faiths, or rather castes. One silver key clearly belongs with the sedan. Ben closes his eyes and wants nothing. A dreamless sleep claims him completely.
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