field.
A week later, requesting anonymity, Glenville’s cousin had the body exhumed for reburial at the family crypt in Darien. When the coffin was unsealed, Glenville was found lying face down, his knuckles caked with blood, his fingernails torn off. His eyes were wide open, his mouth agape in silent horror. A crimson crust coated his nostrils and lips.
Cryogenics Unlimited, the outfit that keeps utopians on ice until the elusive Lazarus Factor is synthesized, was called in to inspect Glenville’s remains. Hard at work on the development of an enzyme that offers the dead another lease on life, technicians at Cryogenics Unlimited theorized that Glenville had somehow thawed and slowly stirred back to consciousness like a hibernating toad.
“Realizing he’d been entombed alive, [Glencille] must have suffered a massive heart attack,” read the coroner’s report. Glenville was cremated and not even the Lazarus Factor can help him now.
Floyd Horton, his misery reduced to phosphate-rich sublimates, endows long-stem pink roses with a very special blush.
PAST IMPERFECT
Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
and then gone back quickly whence we came.
Sophocles
If the latest theoretical physics fad has any merit, a moment recorded in time, it purports, is a moment exhausted. What this axiom suggests is that impermanence is reality’s only constant. Only what remains uncreated escapes the shift from potentiality to actuality, from imminence to nothingness. To be, for all intents and purposes, is prelude to the unavoidable end of being.
For “Otto,” betrayed by the laws of probability, mocked by fate and spurned by his maker, being was unavoidably the essence of his finality. Unloved, deprived of a memory and short on dreams, Otto, poor Otto, is no sooner conjured from the dregs of an ancient genesis than undone, nullified and jettisoned into the abyss of oblivion. Were it not for some insightful and long-since forgotten astropaleobiologist, his living nightmare -- set at the beginning of time -- might never have been chronicled.
Unschooled and tentative, tolerated but never tamed, nature turned its back on itself and sanctioned -- some say, “with a vengeance” -- the spontaneous advent of a bizarre and unique life form. Ponder, if you can, an organism so vile, so grotesque, so pathetic in countenance, so tortured and twisted, and so utterly purposeless that it lived less than one Earth spin around its axis. Otto’s sudden emergence and abrupt demise defies the canons of evolution; it has no antecedent, it fits no known paradigm. The very laws of thermodynamics are being upended in the process. Serenely unconcerned, entropy spares the miserable “thing” the passage of time. It is an unlikely act of compassion in a realm of cosmic unconcern.
Discovered in meteoric debris, Otto’s fossilized remains reveal a brutish organism, apparently legless but equipped with a prehensile tail with which it flogged itself and copulated through an orifice doubling as its mouth. Paleontologists agreed that the improbable entity was covered with a scaly, mottled hide, and that its single eye, capable of polychromatic sight, was probably endowed with a gentle, almost seductive expression. Otto is also credited to have been capable of emitting piercing moans so rueful that they all but froze the hearts of those who may have heard it. The Grand Lexicon of Random Biogenic Anomalies confirms the existence of cosmic influences capable of inducing auto-asexual reproduction, though none quite as peculiar as Otto -- as the monstrosity was christened.
The ancestor and sole offspring -- the auto-progeny -- of a freak process that doomed it to genetic irrelevance, Otto is believed to have succumbed from exhaustion brought on by futile attempts to reproduce. Tritium dating has tentatively placed the appearance and virtually simultaneous disappearance of this as yet unclassified phenomenon at 500 trillion year ago.
Otto’s remains were laid to rest and a monument was erected to commemorate the momentous find and incongruity.
Signs of Man, the legendary if hypothetical vertebrate believed to have accidentally emerged at an earlier period, are never found. An acceptable theory justifying his advent and arguing his brief and noxious tenancy on a minor planet in the Milky Way Galaxy has not yet been postulated. None is forthcoming.
IN HIS OWN IMAGE
There is no absolute, no reason,
no God, no spirit at work in the world: nothing
but the brute instinctive will to live.
Arthur Schopenhauer
It had never been done. It would never be tried again. Not even in a dream. Here was an unrepeatable chance event that upended the laws of potentiality and defied the very core of reason. Bear with me. Imagine absurdity challenging the sublime. Picture the unthinkable. And yet, against all odds, preposterous as it sounds, it happened: A driving force, heretofore unimagined, the offspring of a staggering abstraction that can’t be annulled once spawned -- nor left unexplored -- burst out of a single, indissoluble vanishing point.
Reaching into nonexistence (or emerging from it?) now ponderable if not fully manifest, suspended somewhere between immanence and dizzying inscrutability (as are all things when first caused), he endowed himself with being. In a single surge of cognition, exceeding his creative potential, he was now his own fait accompli. He had just invented himself.
Free from his cerebral cocoon, fully transfigured from genderless ambiguity to virile causality, he surveyed his completeness. Heeding a time scale of his own calibration, anxious to add purpose to will, meaning to intent, momentum to stimulus, he separated cause from effect, quintessence from character, provenance from possibility, state from circumstance, identity from distinction, metaphor from divergence. In short, he elaborated all manner of paradox and contrariety which would forever set him apart from those who are not, and can never be him.
To avert any confusion between him and the teeming realm his incarnation would evoke, he relinquished form for unquantifiable symmetry; he traded transparency for impenetrability. His geometry would be indivisible and without limit, here brimming with presence, there immersed in desolation so vast that even time would stand still at points unmarked and of his own design.
He then granted himself the capacity to remain unmoved by sorrow and calamity. To justify such dispassion, he endowed himself with ostensible kindness and discernible unkindness, allowing himself to be perceived as possessing equal amounts of benevolence and evil, munificence and heartlessness, genius and imbecility, as circumstance dictated, and depending upon prevailing moods and attitudes.
Now armed with an ego, he gave himself an indecipherable name by which others would know him. Some followed him in silent awe. Others, whose cries were never heard, wept and suffered and died forgotten because pain, by some outlandish precept, is a path out of bondage. His ear inattentive and his breast unfaithful to the throngs who called on him and sought his succor, he was forgotten, in time, like a distant tragedy, like a bad dream.
Cynics suggested that he’d been a figment of his own imagination. Others, with greater forbearance, offered that, in a supreme act of mercy, having lost faith in his own inflated image, using his extraordinary powers, he nullified himself for the good of all.
A great, raging, thunderous roar shook his domain. And the legend,
