THE UHURU

Peter Billig
THE UHURU

Albeit the Uhuru tribe has been known to the ethnographic society for ages, it has not been described otherwise than in useless allusions and generalities. The reason for this is that, before me, no man (or woman) of science could bring himself to settle among them: even though the Uhuru cover their bodies tightly with their tribal garb, they leave the genitalia uncovered and whoever wants to set up house with them or even come near them has to dance to their tune.
Especially, they shield the face from the others’ gaze considering it the most intimate part – to the degree that they put the complete ethnic attire on the newborn: to start with, a hood with slits for eyes, ears, nostrils and mouth, then a jacket provided at the breasts with two pockets open downwards, and long trousers with a “décolletage” spanning the underbelly and the privy parts, and at last soft skin shoes.
They recognise each other by their genitals, and even more: they comprehend each others mood, frame of mind and even character, if it is an unknown tribesperson they meet, as other peoples do from the face.
When two Uhuru meet, they take each other by the reproductive organs and fondle them the more intensively the more sympathy they feel for each other. If they don’t like each other, they settle for a token touch. While greeting the opposite sex, they follow the example but should they wish to express cordiality, they copulate and even put their palms down the aforementioned breast-pockets and rub each other’s breasts: these caresses are the equivalent of kisses and hugs in other cultures.
The children sired as result of such greetings remain in the mother’s custody and inherit her family name, because for the matriarchal Uhuru the identity of the father is immaterial. Nevertheless, this attitude is a kind of gentleman’s agreement since the fathers identify faultlessly their progeny: and not only the sons, which could be understandable, but also the daughters. Siblings of one and the same womb must not have sexual intercourse – it is a very strong taboo, and that is why brothers and sisters confine their greetings to stroking each other’s privy parts, and only in very elated moments, e.g. after a long separation, masturbate each other.
Marriage amongst the Uhuru is based on principles different than elsewhere. To a chosen single, whose gender, age and degree of kinship is of no consequence, they make a proposition to go together to a secluded spot and there, in complete darkness, they take off their hoods and fondle each other’s faces. They do it repeatedly in stronger and stronger light and at last, on the day they distinctly have seen each other’s facial traits, they consider themselves a married couple. Then they move together into one hut – sometimes even into the same room! – and if it is two females they take their children with them, on condition that every child dwells in a room of his/her own.
It is so because the Uhuru take off their clothes, and the hood in particular, exclusively in connection with hygienic procedures, and to be seen without the hood is the most nightmarish experience that can occur to an Uhuru, so they live separately, wash the children in the dark and you never ever enter anybody’s quarters without permission. The most dreadful curse you can put on a fellow Uhuru is: May your hood fall off! Even to see one’s own countenance is not considered decorous, so before they begin their toilet they ruffle the surface of the water. Mirrors are considered the most abominable objects in the world.
Yet, to uncover your face in front of the beloved – and this person only – constitutes the erotic substance of marriage. A revaluation of values takes place and the very thing, which otherwise would be unbearable, becomes rapture much stronger than orgasm. The couple relish it even several times a day – as their libidos take them – and they are unwaveringly faithful to the partner.
Of course, all these eccentric practices, unheard-of among other peoples, are dictated by religion. But whoever should think the Uhuru heathen, would be utterly wrong; on the contrary – they are fiercely monotheistic. According to their beliefs, the Only God, Yu-hu-vu, having created Heaven and Earth, plants and beasts created also a woman and a man: U-vu and U-du-mu. But as He had made them in His image and after His likeness, He commanded them, in order to prevent them from becoming too familiar with Him because of that superficial resemblance, to cover themselves from head to toe with the exception of what made them outwardly different from Him: the genitals – because He, as the Divine Being, is sexless. The insubordinate U-du-mu and U-vu, though, did not obey Yu-hu-vu. On the contrary, just to spite Him they covered their reproductive organs; in retaliation, He took their immortality from them and sentenced them and their progeny to a short life in the sweat of their brow, in diseases, wickedness, fear and insecurity.
Years flew past, centuries were passing and peoples have filled up the Earth; the Uhuru were living as godlessly as the others. All of a sudden, one of the members of the tribe – a man called Yu-su-su – had a revelation: Yu-hu-vu manifested Himself for him and enunciated that His anger has abated and He wishes to offer humanity another chance to repent – and the Uhuru have been chosen as the tool of this recovery. Therefore, let them clothe themselves in seemingly fashion and allow nobody to befoul His face – mirrored in the face of every human being – with gaping eyes. Only the countenance of one other person they are allowed to see – the one most beloved – because in that face they will be venerating – Him! In return, He will bestow upon them more and more favours and, at last, will return to them everything they had lost because of U-vu’s and U-du-mu’s stupidity.
At first, the Uhuru scoffed at Yu-su-su’s words and attire, but as he was sticking zealously to his purpose and since his speeches had an overwhelming effect, first a few then more and more numerous tribesmen and tribeswomen believed that he is the Apostle and followed his example.
And they have never regretted. First, the internecine warfare within the tribe, a scourge of many centuries, has stopped as if by magic. Epidemic diseases disappeared, then normal diseases – first the grave ones, then the not serious – never to return, and everybody lived into a ripe old age. The Uhuru’s hunting grounds were teeming with game as never before, the rivers were full of fish and the fields were yielding crops beyond compare while the neighbours, as I witnessed in person, were tormented by constant epidemics, wars, famine, poverty and squalor.

Consumed by my hunger for knowledge I spent three years amongst the Uhuru. When I deemed my data complete I went back to the civilisation in order to set it in order and publish.
I am sitting in a hotel room behind a locked door, surrounded with provisions, and I write these words, which were meant to be a scientific paper but became a request for forgiveness.
There is just one horrible moment yet to come – a visit at the post office to send this message – and then back to the Uhuru!
Goodbye, Dear Wife! Farewell, Beloved Kids! Be well, Friends! Please, bear no grudge against me!
And, for Yu-hu-vu’s sake, cover those mugs of yours!

© Peter Billig 2007

THE WATER BEARER

Peter Billig
THE WATER BEARER

In the credits of a motion picture I saw once: MUSIC: ARTHUR XXYYZZ, and I thought: What a weird name to have, but the music was simply wonderful. These credits repeated themselves in several more films – I’m a movie-fan – and the music was getting better and better, though I would never thought it possible. Then I read on a poster about Sinfonia Mormorando opus 69 by Arthur Xxyyzz, directed by the Composer, to be performed in the Philharmonic, I broke with a longstanding tradition of not going to concerts (all these nitwits sitting in rows with eyes closed), bought a ticket at an exorbitant price and enjoyed myself tremendously sitting in a row with the twits, but with my eyes wide open, listening and watching the conductor: a handsome young man with a thoroughbred artistic face and haircut. The standing ovation that followed made my hands sore for a week, and the critics, normally so critical, were stumbling over each other in universal praise of his great achievement, comparing him to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
I have hardly had time to come to my senses when HENRIETTA XXYYZZ made me enthusiastic and horny, as I, on TV, was watching her win the title of Miss World over a dozen of only slightly less well-endowed girls. I allowed myself to participate in the jubilation in the streets that followed: only men came out and wild drinking and the shouts Henrietta! Henrietta! soon degenerated into smashing of show windows by the inebriated crowds. I, who have always hated doing anything with the masses – never go to soccer games, demonstrations, festivals and such like – felt like liberated by her and I personally smashed seven shop windows – well, six, as the last one was personal, belonging to an Arab-run local convenience store: he is an insolent git and charges you through the ceiling. I had a deep satisfaction carrying his stock up to my flat before the cops managed to arrive! No, Mr. Copper, it’s not an admission, should you try to charge me, it’s artistic imagination: licentia poetica. The oversexed Henrietta, though, having heard of the riotous male reaction at home, embarked on a model and movie career in Hollywood, so the welcome prepared for her at the airport had to be cancelled.
I was disappointed and angry with her, as so many of my heterosexual male and female lesbian compatriots, but it was only until I espied, in one of the newly replaced shop windows – that of a bookshop, not my work – a novel by CHRISTOPHER XXYYZZ and spent a sleepless night reading, from cover to cover, with flushed cheeks. I did the same with his other four novels, released with three months’ intervals, and claimed him to be the best writer ever. I was jubilant when the news arrived that the Nobel Committee… The reception at the airport was raucous as there were people present who, until CHRISTOPHER XXYYZZ began to write, never touched any literature except the funny papers. How he has managed to write books fit to unite the tastes of all the readers and critics of the country (with a few exceptions), and make every new book more exciting than the previous one, and every third month at that, is an insoluble enigma, all the more so, as he is keeping up both the rate and the quality of his output.
Some time after Christopher’s Nobel Prize, his brother MARTIN XXYYZZ also received one – in physics, and his sister DEBORAH XXYYZZ, M.D. has found a cure for a dreadful and until now incurable disease. A member of the Nobel Committee, interviewed by our journalists, said, with his thick Swedish accent: Why deliberate? It is easier to extend this honour to the remaining members of this family in advance!
Well, he was right even if he was wrong: half a year after Deborah’s prize I spent a very exciting quarter of an hour watching, on TV, ANDREAS “THE BEAST” XXYYZZ, brother of all the afore cited XXYYZZES, punch the current Champion of the World shitless all over the ring – and finish the poor sod off with a spectacular KO. There’s no Nobel Prize for that, is there?
Neither for the sister, NAOMI XXYYZZ, who in six chess games has pulverized the current Grand Master and World Champion (male) and won a purse of a million quid.
Her brother, engineer OLAF XXYYZZ, has, in his backyard shed, constructed an engine so fuel efficient – 30 per cent off the most thrifty so far! – that he had the motor companies – GM, Ford, Citroen, Renault, Toyota, MG, VW, Volvo, Fiat, you name it – all lined up on his threshold to buy his patent.
His younger brother, DAVID XXYYZZ, has soon after founded a political party and in only one year won the general election and the absolute majority in the Legislature; David himself became the youngest Prime Minister ever. I voted for him and have no complaints so far; nor do the 76% of the electorate, according to the polls, as the reforms and initiatives he has commenced once in power are exactly what this country has been panting for!

Well into David’s first period as Prime Minister, a friend took me to a garden party in a hilly countryside – and what an unusual place it was! The huge mansion and vast garden were sitting at the foot of an enormous mountain – and what a garden it was: a lush orgy of plants in bloom, birds chirping, a fishpond with water lilies and even a waterfall zigzagging in picturesque cascades down an enormous rock. The drinks were exquisite, so was the food, and the catering service was first class. I felt at home at once and helped myself liberally.
Then I spotted a bald gnome of a man standing by the falls – and every tuxedoed guest who approached to shake hands did it with a degree of reverence I simply could not understand, while the women were less formal but even more admiring. He, for his part, seemed to assess their femininity, as if he was looking for women to procreate with. This observation may seem bizarre, but believe me: I am very seldom wrong when intoxicated.
“Who’s the hairless dwarf everybody’s so obsequious to?” I asked my friend.
“Don’t you know?” he was scandalized by my ignorance. “It’s our host, ARCHIBALD XXYYZZ, the father of ARTHUR, HENRIETTA, CHRISTOPHER, MARTIN, DEBORAH, THE BEAST, NAOMI, OLAF and, last but not least, your pin-up: DAVID, the PM!”
“This is their Pa?!” I was stunned.
“There is more to him than meets the eye,” and he left me to greet an acquaintance.

“What the heck?” I said to myself having digested the information. “Even if he were the father of Napoleon or Einstein, he would still be human!” I downed more of the midget’s excellent single malt and I felt less intimidated by his breeding prowess. I approached under the pretext of praising his hospitality but actually hoping to find out how such an unremarkable fellow has been able to sire so many remarkable children.
“Thank you, sir, for your exceptional…” I began but our eyes met: there was a good-humoured twinkle in his, so I stopped open-mouthed, fully aware that he was onto me.
“No, sirree,” he said, “you have come to find out how such an uncommonly commonplace bloke has been able to spawn so many top-notch children! A person who is so bad at hiding his true motives cannot be bad, so I’ll tell you, especially as I see that you are quite familiar with astrology…”
“How can you see that?” I managed to utter in spite of my general perplexity and muddleheadedness.
“I’m a good judge of men,” he replied. “But if you want me to tell you, you’ll have to drink from this source,” he pointed at the pond behind his back, raised a glass of clear liquid to his lips and drunk.
I had a vision of germs, larvae, frog-eggs and other filth in the water, but overcame my aversion and started looking around for a glass.
“You know, the founder of Cynicism, Diogenes “The Dog”, had vowed not to own anything superfluous, yet one day he saw a boy drinking water from the hollow of his hand. He was crestfallen and threw away the bowl he had been carrying. Well, it’s a silly story, as every modern and ancient child, Diogenes included, knows this way of drinking…”
“He should have thrown his palm away, as well!” I exclaimed, leaned over the pond and drank directly from the surface trying not to imagine what malignant microorganisms I was exposing my macroorganism to.

“It’s enough!” he said, gave me a moment to swallow the last mouthful and took me to a cosy nook of his fantastic garden where behind some blossoming shrubbery there was a picnic table. We sat down facing each other and he opened with:
“Well, Mr. Astrologer, I have one of the traditional planets in each of my natal horoscope’s watery signs. What other classic planet is necessary to keep them in check and good order?”
It was a real assignment as he did not say which of the planets – Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn – were involved. I wanted a drink – it normally helps me think – but there was nothing on the table. Then something peculiar happened: a surge of inspiration seized me and I knew the answer: Moon in Cancer, Mars in Scorpio and Jupiter in Pisces and in an exact aspect – respectively quincunx, square and semi-sextile – to the planet holding them in check: Sun in Aquarius in close conjunction with Uranus. Actually, I saw the whole of his birth chart, including the positions of the inner planets and of Neptune, Pluto cum Charon, Chiron, Ceres, Juno, Pallas, Vesta, Vulcan and Transpluto, the last two being entirely hypothetical, but I saw them all – hypothetical and real, miraculously – together with their internal aspects!
“Here you see what good energized water gives people!” he exclaimed nodding his head that I was right about his horoscope. “I was born in this house and have been drinking only the water of this spring until I was eight, when I went with my parents to the capital and got sick immediately upon arrival. They took me to the best doctors but I was only getting worse and none of the stars of the medical profession knew what the matter was with me. I was told later that one day I had started hallucinating and, in this state, I was repeating: Take me to the Old Gush – it’s this source,” he pointed at the water gushing down the cliff. “They did and, as soon as I drank from it, I recovered. A miracle! It must have changed something in me because from this day I got interested in water-science: I wanted to know what was it in the Old Gush that has beaten our luminaries of the art of healing, and I did even if it took me eight more years. Well, you see…”

He paused, composing a lecture in his mind, and I got scared he was going to hold forth, but something like the astrological illumination told me not to flee, and the tiny bald Aquarius, as if having read my fears, said:
“I could talk about my research for days but suffice it to say that we, the living things of the Earth, are totally dependent on WATER – we humans are over seventy percent WATER (and most of the rest is calcium: the skeleton designed to keep the jelly, which is our soft matter, in place) – and we know dick about it! I’ll bet you anything that your illumination did not come from some minerals in the Old Gush. No, it’s the way WATER is treated that makes the difference: WATER has a memory and a mind! It hates being made to flow through miles of pumps and metal pipes – only to flush shit in a lavatory, wash a car or dissolve chemicals in a plant. The Old Gush, on the other hand, takes his origin from the rain falling on the ridge above us. Clouds and filtering through soil purify WATER: it likes it and when it comes down the rock, it meets happy human minds and a happy garden full of pleased plants, insects, birds and beasts. The garden is watered by the Old Gush and I never use fertilizers, fungus killers or pesticides. Once, when swarms of aphids descended upon nearly every plant, it was enough with a mantra – luckily, I had done plenty of research by that time – to strengthen the WATER – and the bastards just died out! When WATER from the Old Gush reaches the pond – whence there is a direct non-pipe aqueduct to the house: to the kitchen, the bathrooms and other outlets – it is extremely happy: it’s fully energized, you would say. Imbibe it, and every watery part of you gets revived and it utilizes one hundred percent of its know-how and capacity: hence your sudden astrological genius! As you normally drink adulterated WATER from the waterworks’ pipes, the Old Gush must feel like champagne (WATER hates metal and 90 degrees turns!), LSD or another conscience expanding – psychedelic – drug. Everybody is at least 70 percent water, many eat only ecologic food and abstain from meat – but still they drink from the tap or bottles claiming to be source WATER – and it well may be so, but it is tapped, for the producer’s convenience, through pipes! Up yours with such WATER: never drink it, unless you energize it before!”

“How?” I inquired.
“Even the worst treated WATER can be reenergized by a sincere mantra, a prayer or good will. Take holy WATER: in the Orthodox faith the priest blesses gallons upon gallons and the faithful take it home by the bucket, drink it celebrating Easter and give it to their sick and wobbly – often with marvellous results: Lourdes can kiss its arse! I was there by Bernadette’s fount but the WATER was delivered through pipes and faucets. I got sick there and I lived only by energizing the rest of what I had tapped with my “mumbo jumbo”. What a pity – the source WATER is excellent, even better than the Old Gush’s, but why don’t they allow people to wet their snouts in the fountain? Otherwise with Asclepius’ fountainhead outside Bergamo (Pergamon) in what is now Turkey. By the way, there is a military base close by but the well is still undefiled and going strong, as is the one in Epidaurus, the god Asclepius’ birthplace. And the WATER in the Ganges is not as bad as you would expect in view of how many millions pollute it daily, but it’s certainly overrated, especially as you go downstream from Varanasi. The Jordan’s WATER, however, is excellent from the very springs to the Dead Sea. As you hear, thanks to my watery know-how I can now travel all over the world and improve on any WATER before I down it. I am not the first one to do so: there is a story from some centuries ago about an abbot jailed by the Inquisition. For a month, he was given only a slice of bread and a cup of filthy WATER a day – it should improve on his will to confess his heresies – but when he was finally standing before the inquisitors, he had gained a stone. Asked how it was possible, he said he had been purifying the WATER with a sincere prayer before drinking it!”
“And what happened?” I enquired. “Was he released?”
“On the contrary: the Board considered it evidence of sorcery and the poor devil was burned at the stake!”

“Well,” he said and made a round movement with his arm, encompassing the paradise of the garden and the enormity of the house. “I am a very well-endowed man and I assure you that I am that also in the other sense of the word. But first things first: I was the only child and my parents left me, apart from the whole lot here, a very large portfolio, which I was able to enrich, particularly lately. The general public does not know him, but I have another child, ALOYSIUS, who is a financial wizard and very prominent within the banking society: he is my adviser. Being so dependent upon the quality of this liquid,” he pointed at the cascade, “made a scientist out of me: I have a very advanced lab in the house and employ a handful of collaborators. We go on field trips, testing the WATERS, so to speak, all over the world, both in Nature and in man-made systems; my last was to an oasis in the Sahara. But the most interesting thing is experimenting: WATER under influence. If you, for example, play nice music to it – Mozart, Telemann or Bach – and then freeze it and look at it through a microscope, you can see beautiful regular crystals, but should you choose heavy metal, the crystals are all broken up and pitifully shapeless. A tip: if you want to purify and energize WATER and know no mantra, prayer or incantation, play Bach’s passacaglia from BWV 582; and if you listen along, all the WATER in your organism will be likewise greatly improved. WATER is very partial to organ music and also responds to our human feelings: it gets crushed and shattered if we display hatred, anger, malice or even indifference in its presence. When, in his old days, the great Russian geneticist Ivan Michurin began to talk gently to his plants, his disciples thought him a senile dotard. Assholes! He was improving the quality of the WATER in his plants! I, on the other hand, made an experiment, since replicated on different plants, where three begonias were watered from the same source, but with WATER, which respectively had been abused verbally, praised or left unattended. Guess, which begonia grew and blossomed, which wilted and which barely survived!”

“I can imagine and it doesn’t surprise me that you, Mr. WATER Bearer, with that horoscope of yours, are researching WATER in all its forms: liquid, solid and gas – Uranus plus Sun in Aquarius in control of Moon in Cancer (water), Mars in Scorpio (ice) and Jupiter in Pisces (steam), even though you have not been mentioning the last one. However, I don’t see what bearing it has on your astounding fatherhood.”
“You don’t?! Well, as to steam, evaporating is the way WATER gets rid of the substances it is joined to or contaminated with: it gets purified, forgets all about its previous impurity and changes into a new state – rain. As to paternity, I would remind you that WATER is the most important building block of all life and above all – of our DNA! What can stop a person with so considerable expertise in WATER as mine from devising a way of influencing my, begging your pardon, sperms, towards one result or another? I’m going to explain all this in great detail in my forthcoming book. To give you the gist of it: every time I was impregnating a woman I knew precisely what effect I wanted to achieve – and I always pulled it off. A great achievement, isn’t it? I never could be sure in what way the partner’s genetic code would throw a monkey wrench into my works – all my children are offspring of different mothers. The only thing I never was able to achieve is the sexing of the progeny: CHRISTOPHER was to be a girl in order to write deep sensitive books – but the boy did it anyway! DEBORAH was to be a boy, but thanks to Women Lib it did not impede her career. I was afraid that the same mix-up would happen with “THE BEAST” but I was lucky – not that it would have mattered much: nowadays, there is an international Women’s Boxing League! I got it wrong with NAOMI, but again the position of women has changed from the time of her conception.”

I bowed to him and said with an ironic smile:
“Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?”
“You might say so but remember that a pioneer has to cut corners and take risks. Another drawback was that having enriched some traits I have depleted some others: to name but a few, the gorgeous HENRIETTA has absolutely no ear for music and OLAF is dyslectic. With Chiron on the Ascendant in Virgo and Mercury in conjunction with Venus in Capricorn, it’s no wonder that I strive for perfection. Having fathered DAVID, I have decided to take a break and get my act together. And I did, twenty nine an a half years later! I’m happy to announce that my command of WATER is now so complete that I can sire a child of a chosen sex and with all the talents well above average. This child will be able to choose any career he or she fancies and, whatever is chosen, still accomplish the absolute best, which is there to attain.”

“And what woman would like you to cover her?” I thought, and a pleasant female voice exclaimed:
“So here you are, daddy-o!”
I turned and saw a pretty young woman in loose attire entering our cosy corner. She nodded to me, went over to Xxyyzz, patted his naked head and planted herself firmly on his lap.
“Speaking of the devil,” he pointed at her bulging belly, “behold the Masterpiece: REGINALD XXYYZZ, the universal baby!”

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE LINK A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE LINK
A Saul Vogel Mystery

We were enjoying another sunny day on the porch of our forest home, Vogel laid-back lazily in his rocking chair, while I was fidgeting and wriggling like an impatient child.
"What is the matter with you?" he protested at last, my squirmy mood disturbing his – that of deep pacific relaxation. "Got a pain in the rear?"
"As if you didn't care about the great news: Humanity is finally landing on Mars!"

Together with the rest of the world, we were awaiting the TV transmission from the simultaneous landing of four manned interplanetary craft, their mission to build a base on the Red Planet. The transmission was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. and I could hardly contain myself. I checked the watch: 20 minutes to go. Did not bother to see commercials, look-backs (establishing bases on Moon to be used as chute for further travels) or listen to the experts, having heard all their opinions and predictions before.
"You misunderstand," he protested. "I am interested, but I don’t share your view of things to come. You and your co-religionists view the future of Mankind as that of space expansion, while I feel that we yet are too much linked to Mother Earth to be able to leave her without restoring her to her previous glory."
"You think that since we killed a few whales and reduced the jungles to national parks, Mother Earth won't let us go? On the contrary, she'll kick us all the way to Alpha Centauri – if only to get rid of us!"
"I'm afraid she won't. Her nature is to detain those who don't respect her."
"Care to explain?"
"Mother Earth is of Space, too, but she won't be just used by us, no sirree!"
"She survived the giant meteorite, which killed off the dinos. Why should she mind losing some acres of forest? She’s indomitable! When we are gone, she'll recover in no time."
"I feel we are tied to her with an invisible cord. It is long, I admit; after all, we have landed on the Moon. Perhaps, we will land on Mars as well or even on Jupiter’s moons, but as we’ll be going to the outer planets, the cord will be spent and we will be stopped in mid-space,” he said quite seriously.
“Yeah. And these invisible cords are fastened to the dicks and the clits of us humans, I presume?”
“I’m throwing my pearls for swine!”
He rose, stepped inside and switched on the TV.

The transmission lacked any dramatic merit, as the touchdown was smooth and uncannily true to the timetable. The four craft landed precisely on the spot and began the prescribed procedures without a glitch. It would have been boring if not for the feeling that I was witnessing a momentous event, but Vogel was actually yawning.
Then, the female commander of the mission stepped down the ladder onto Martian soil. She kneeled down and symbolically kissed it through the helmet of her spacesuit. She got up, took a step forward and said: Yet another giant step for Mankind – and she emitted a frightful howl, fell down and rolled on the ground. Simultaneously, the other astronauts emitted a howl and fell – and so did Vogel and I. Writhing on the floor, I almost upset the set. Then the indescribable pain in the gut ceased.
When we crawled back into the easy chairs the screen was all snow. Then, a sorry-looking speaker appeared and explained that the station's technicians have upset, in their paroxysms, some vital gear. The transmission from Mars is postponed owing to equipment having been smashed by the astronauts in their paroxysms. NASA is, however, in radio contact with them. Confronted with the inexplicable phenomenon, occurring both on Mars and Earth, the space agency commanded them to stay inside their craft while Earth was investigating.
Then he began to read the news from all over the world and the nature of the anomaly became clear: it hit all Humankind – that on Earth and that on Mars – at the very same time. Already, one intellectual has managed to formulate a theory and get on the air with it: the Solar system is an organism and the spacecraft must have hit some crucial nerve within it. "NASA's making a big mistake: the astronauts should get out and inspect what their rockets are standing on," he said. There were reports of disasters: fires, botched surgeries, an acrobat killed – the paroxysm having surprised people in precarious situations. Seven airplanes crushed, innumerable traffic accidents, people drowned, many injured in the safety of their homes. A religious pundit proclaimed the phenomenon a warning from God: "We overstepped our authorization and we have been punished by the Lord."
"Well, Mr. Vogel, what is the learned opinion of Philosophy?" I asked.
"You are my assistant, you tell me!"
"You've been right. There is a link between the Earth and us humans. With her giant step, the mission commander must have stretched it too far and it jammed the system."
And a new paroxysm hit us, followed by seven others. There was a pause from sunset to sunrise, when new paroxysms began…

Three weeks were gone. As the paroxysms during this period – up to fifty-one on the third day, thirty-three on average – occurred only within day-hours of our time-zone, people of other longitudes had to adapt to night-time torment and change their life rhythm. And adapt we all did, working and sleeping at odd hours and finding out what functions could be maintained in the periods with paroxysms. After a week, the global system of air transport has been re-established – with long stopovers. Working hours and routines in most work places have been re-devised. Contrary to some fears, suicides decreased, as if the paroxysms actually mustered us into hanging on. The fact that humans were the only species to be affected gave us hope that the answer is in our physiology: curable, when we make it out. And that the length of paroxysm periods was in accord with the shortening of daytime in our geographic latitude suggested that the problem is of earthly rather, not interplanetary nature.

After a month, NASA has at last ordered the astronauts out – for a few hours, well inside the paroxysm-free period. Their movements, some many miles from the base, provoked no paroxysms either here or there. They checked the ground under their craft and found only solid rock, in no way unusual.
"It only proves that stretching of the invisible cord is not guilty of our misery: we have plenty of rope yet," Vogel commented with that peculiar facial expression we all had during the paroxysm-periods: that of bracing oneself for a sudden explosion of pain. And the convulsions were hitting and they often came in pairs.

People were coping somehow: took painkillers, wore amulets, spent the periods in support or prayer groups or drank themselves numb, but all these took only the top off the agony. For myself, I developed a meditation-like attitude, which was taking more than the top. Vogel, on the other hand, was drawing on his hobo experiences: he concocted a herbal pill, which took off much more. He was selling plenty of those (made a wad) and was working on a stronger version during the precious paroxysm-free hours not squandered on sleep.

On the 35th day, we stayed, as usual during the periods of torment (sleep was impossible in spite of pills, booze, anything), in front of the TV set waiting for a news that would give us hope. We had seen journalists stalk men and women of science and demanding explanations – to no avail. We just heard a guy had been acquitted of killing his wife (who was divorcing and suing him for a stash): he was loading his gun when a paroxysm hit – as if Humanity did not know that toting firearms and paroxysm-periods don't mix, but there was no law yet.

Agony (for the 24th time today)… Agony (the 25th time: they do come in pairs)… We were not rolling off the chairs only because of the makeshift safety belts we had installed. After two paroxysms, there was a strong probability of a calm period, so Vogel took The Daily Rag, a paper edited by his old hobo-buddy Feigenblatt, just back in business. He skimmed a few lines, hammered his fist on his forehead and began to read aloud:

Dear Reader, we've been knocked out as much as anybody, but here we are again! In order to disperse the shadow of calamity hanging over the lot of us, a good news: our Mother is still alive! On the now infamous day of the Mars touchdown, a vivacious development has been taking place here on Earth – and within the borders of our own country! A tremor deeply under the seabed, several miles south of our fishing town of T., was registered that morning, but because of the later developments, the authorities were not up to the task of investigating. The first report came when our fishermen went back to fishing two days ago. They discovered a brand-new islet jutting from the sea [here an exact position according to GPS]. As our armed forces are rebuilding their efficacy, we remind the Government of its sacred duty to assure our national sovereignty over this possibly valuable piece of land, positioned so close to the territorial waters of our neighbor…

"Yeah, let's go!" I cried and we ran to the garage. I grabbed the flag in passing (we fly it on Vogel's birthday, National Day and other law-prescribed occasions) and we were off. Twice, we nearly got killed (driving and paroxysms don't mix) even though Vogel had swallowed a handful of his pills, and we survived other five paroxysms before the sun went down.
The roads were crowded during the nights, so we arrived at T. first shortly before sunrise and we couldn't find anyone willing to sail us over or to rent a boat (sailing and paroxysms don't mix). We were resigned to waiting till the evening when a motorboat appeared with a middle-aged guy at the helm, his military camouflage jacket and beret in national colors identifying him as a member of a certain nationalist group. I took the flag from the car and commanded him to take us to the new island. "Just think that some foreign jingoist claims it for his country!" I told him.
Who said that nationalism socks? The patriot took us over in no time, planted the flag, sang the national anthem and proceeded to drink beer and sing chauvinistic songs, leaving us free to roam the rocky island.
The day was breaking when we finally found our prize: a thick reddish rope protruding from the ground and forming a twisted sculpture. It must have issued from a fissure in the ground, much like toothpaste from a tube. As we were looking, a gull landed on one of its numerous folds, looked around, as if thinking what to do next.
"No, you bastard!" we shouted in unison, but it was too late: the bird pecked and as its beak hit the rope, we were hit by a paroxysm. It sent us writhing onto the hard stone.
There was no second one. As we got up, the bird was gone, scared by our contortions and moans. We approached the rope: it was like a thick cable braided of innumerable strands of enormously thin threads. It could have been mistaken for a piece of hi-tech wiring if not for its being alive and pulsating. It exuded a smell of flesh, which must have been prompting seabirds to peck – twice, before finding out it was too hard to penetrate.
It felt very hard when we – cautiously – laid our hands on its surface. We took off our clothes, wrapped it and with utmost care covered it with stones and camouflaged with seaweed.
When we joined the patriot he declared that he had named the island after himself and was going to claim it as his possession and to build a home here. Then he saw we were naked, called us perverts and wouldn't have us in the boat. It took some effort to persuade him that his title to the island depended on signatures of two witnesses, before he agreed do take us and to give us clothes from the boat's cupboard.
When we arrived back in T., the streets were crowded with happy people, united in an impromptu merry-making. Somehow they knew: the ordeal was over! We joined in.

"So there are invisible links binding people to the Earth,” I began, as we were speeding home in the afternoon. “But what was the thing we secured? It must have some connection with the links, obviously.”
“A fragment of the nerves of the Earth containing a part of the cords, which normally is hidden inside the Earth and has invisible extensions connecting us with Her. She’s a living organism and we are parts of Her. Volcanoes and earthquakes are Her diseases. The tremor must have forced the nerve up together with the island. In one of his stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle depicts Earth as a living organism and us humans as its parasites. Personally, I think we are Her organs – eyes, ears, noses and brains – and therefore have to be attached to Her. As no other living organisms were hit by paroxysms, it stands to reason that they don’t have that function. The purpose of the evolution must have been to generate new organs for Her, and when we humans appeared She set the apes free – as She did with other animals while developing improved organs. It seems that we also suffice as Her space-organs, at least for a time being, but who knows how long the link is? She might evolve another race whenever She feels like going into Deep Space. After all, we can only serve Her with our five senses! Imagine that a complete picture of the material world can only be achieved through not five but, say, ten senses, the extra five being unimaginable to us?”
“Master, the inconceivable thing is that our links are so material inside the Earth and totally invisible outside!”
“Must be one of Her early inventions: imagine Her organs: the fish, the dinosaurs, the monkeys, the apes and us pulling long meaty ropes from our asses? She made our part of the link of something so invisible, so pliable, so obvious and so supple as to be detectable only with one of the senses yet unknown. Should She make you grow them, you would be “seeing” the “cords”, don’t you worry!”
“You think She will give us enough “rope” to go for the stars, Master?”
“Let’s hope so! Otherwise, a new breed will appear and take over – if we don’t kill Her before. Just imagine: organs killing the host off!”

The paroxysms never came back, but Vogel’s pills have proven to be effective against migraine.
A month later there was another tremor and the island disappeared into the sea, back whence it came.
Let's hope that now, when the wiring is on the bottom, sharks won't get to it.

Copyright Peter Billig 2007

OCKHAM'S RAZOR A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
OCKHAM'S RAZOR
A Saul Vogel Mystery

“Don’t you feel sorry for your characters?” Vogel asked, as I finished reading some of my short stories to him. “You make them feel so much, think so much and suffer so much.”
The reason for the reading was that some of my stories – a hobby until now – were published and received good reviews. More stories were in my head, good ones. I was considering a fulltime author’s career and Vogel wanted to size up the competition: up to this moment, I have been happy working as his associate.
“Master, fictitious characters don’t exist ergo they don’t suffer! They are models of attitudes, that’s all,” I replied as one would reply an illiterate.
At that time he actually was illiterate, having unlearnt the art after running from school and home at the tender age of 8. He was roaming the world as a vagabond until 25 years later he decided to settle down as a philosopher and to secure my collaboration. We set up house in Domicile, a villa in the middle of great woods he bought at the same time.
“I may be an illiterate, nevertheless I sense that writing poses a philosophical problem. Are you familiar with the concept of Ockham’s Razor?”
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, I quoted the medieval thinker. “Beings oughtn’t to be multiplied beyond necessity, but literary characters can hardly be called beings!”
“While listening to your stories I had the same feeling I once had in Greece when in the mountains I encountered an agitated local who said he’d been attacked by a human-size hairy ape with an oversize nose. By putting a rapier to the Greek’s throat, the primate elicited directions to town. I asked the man to show me where. He brought me to a place at the foot of a rock where the alleged ape allegedly had jumped him from shrubbery. Behind the trampled bushes, I found an entrance to a cave. There was only one set of footprints – leading from the cave to the bushes: human prints, apes do not wear shoes. They came from the murkiest part of the cave. I did not have the guts to go there. The peasant revealed now that the ape actually was a man with long hair, a monstrous proboscis, a plumed hat, outlandish boots and clothes. We were both puzzled but had no explanation to share. It became one of the mysteries of life: never explained. I have this queer feeling that your stories and that incident are in the same category.”
He gazed at me. It is pointless to reveal treasures of literature to illiterates, I felt.
“Why not check it out?” Vogel said tentatively. “Book us on tomorrow’s flight to Athens.”

“I remember another feeling of the same sort: listening to goodnight stories in childhood,” Vogel resumed onboard the plane to Athens. “Made a great impression on me. I could see and hear the persons, and the events described were lifelike for me. Yesterday, I saw the antagonists and the plots of your stories as vividly as then. Your talent releases the reader’s or listener’s imagination.”
I was flattered: my best review to date! Being on duty, though, I just informed:
“Your Greek described a well known long-nosed literary character, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poet and a French musketeer from the 17th century.”
“A character from a book?”
“Now you come to mention it, not entirely. Rostand based his play on a real person.”
“The plot thickens: a real individual becomes a role!?” Vogel said pensively.
He closed his eyes and thought, sipping his scotch.

The Reader may consider it strange that Vogel, a vagrant, could afford to buy Domicile together with the surrounding woods. Thanks to his experience with Nature, his sagacity and powers of observation, he designed, patented and got into production two herbal medicines, Gomorrin® and Sodomin®, effective aphrodisiacs for respectively females and males, no side effects. As long as sex remains the main diversion of mankind, the ex-hobo will be able to meet the expense of employing an assistant, driving a Porsche, traveling business class and staying at the best hotels.

In Athens we rented a jeep, bought provisions and spelunkers’ equipment, drove up to Lamia and further north. Here we drove off the road and went on bumpy paths, which Vogel called donkey trails. Finally, when I was ready to swear there was no intact bone left in my entire body, he stopped the car at the foot of a steep mountain.
While I was unloading rope, helmets, flashlights, backpacks and rations, he hewed at bushes. An entrance to a cave appeared. We went in and scared some bats. There were no prints whatsoever; water, dripping from the ceiling, has obliterated everything. In a murky corner, the powerful flashlights found a corridor leading deeper into the mountain. We entered.
After an hour of uneventful stroll, light appeared at the end of the tunnel and then a cavern so immense that its farther walls were invisible. From above, a soft celadon light was issuing. You had the impression that the ceiling was open, only no sky nor sun were to be seen, as if the light originated from another world, governed by different laws of physics: a strange dimension, more dream-like than real.

As we stood agape, we heard a mumble of countless voices, like lamentations of pain, from further ahead. The threshold of Hell, I thought but Master sped forward, already having guessed the nature of the realm, which we were encountering. I followed, even though every fiber in my body told me not to.
People appeared in teams small and large, clothed in the queerest of garbs. One group wore medieval suits of armor, another – mendicants’ rags, yet another – frocks and suits from the Victorian epoch, and the fourth donned modern jeans and T-shirts. There were hundreds of teams nearby and I could see hundreds, thousands of others behind them.

In each group a different kind of action was going on: talking, fighting, getting married, working and lovemaking. No one paid any attention to us or to anyone outside the group.
“Can’t they see us, Master?”
“They can’t see outside their own book. How can you ask, Mr. Writer?”
“I don’t understand!”
“Let’s take a stroll, and you will.”
We walked slalom-like among the countless teams, me not understanding anything at all. Suddenly, I saw a group, which made sense: D’Artagnan receives his marshal’s baton. A Dutch bullet hits his breast; he sinks to the ground bleeding, the baton falls out of his hand. He pronounces his valedictions to his friends and dies, exactly as Dumas wrote in his trilogy about the four musketeers.
“Literary characters! But how come they’re alive?”

“Fictitious characters don’t exist, ergo they don’t suffer,” Vogel quoted. “It’s you bloody authors who call them to life!”
The old, immobile and dead d’Artagnan changed suddenly into the youngster he had been before setting off to Paris, and action began exactly by the book, other dead or quiescent persons becoming operational in time for their part in the plot.
“He’s been dead as a doornail. What made him alive again, Master?” I asked, mystified.
“The bloody readers, I figure. The writer creates these individuals; the readers’ imaginative energy keeps them alive. They play their parts as many times as the book is read, waiting for it to become obsolete and forgotten, and themselves to become dormant. Then some scholar reads the text, making them perform once more. And think of the pitiful fate of the characters from a classic work, read and imagined by millions of schoolchildren. Movies are made, based on literary works, every moviegoer multiplying the torments. One hell of existence, wouldn’t you agree?”

He motioned me on. I was identifying the authors, and he made the comments. We saw Balzac’s crowded fields (“a criminal!”), the gallery of suffering by Shakespeare (“a bandit!”), the gloomy meadows of Tolstoy and Hugo (“scumbags!”) and the populous steppes of Dickens (“a gangster!”).
I refrain from quoting his remarks concerning the writers, whose output has made a lasting impression on me. Instead, I deem the moment appropriate to pay tribute to Dumas, Tolkien, Dostoyevsky, Sienkiewicz, Fleming, Waltari, Vonnegut, May, Mrożek, Hrabal and Hašek.
As we saw mine, the author’s heart began to pound quicker: some of “mine” moved – I was being read! Some were dormant, though, and Vogel pointed them out.
“These are only in manuscripts,” I explained.
“Burn the scripts, and the poor beings will disappear, as if they never had existed! Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” he said.
We left in silence.

“In ancient times, this countryside was called Phthia. Here was one of the entrances to the land of the dead: Hades. A friend of my nomadic days, an ex-professor of classics, who taught me Latin and Greek, told me about Ulysses. In the Odyssey, he visits Hades and meets his deceased friends we saw alive in the Iliad. Was Homer cognizant of this land? Did he visit his characters there?” Vogel mused, as we rushed back to Athens.
“How did Cyrano leave the literary world? Why Cyrano and not, say, d’Artagnan?” I asked.
“It might have something to do with the original Cyrano having been a human being. Together with Rostand’s art, it might have made the literary Cyrano so lifelike that he grew to be alive, and he left.”
“So that’s the way out! I have to make my characters more human-like!”
Vogel shook his head:
“You are talented, yes, but can you fill Rostand’s shoes? My advice is: if you have to write, write nonfiction: a casebook of Saul Vogel’s philosophical exploits, perhaps?”
“That would necessitate a raise,” I replied.
“Let’s negotiate on the plane,” he said and stepped on it, happy to keep his assistant.




















Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE FOURTH DIMENSION A Saul Vogel Mystery

Peter Billig
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
A Saul Vogel Mystery

Vogel had a sudden fit of scientific interest, this time for ancient Roman religion. I kept fetching volumes in numerous languages. I would have protested sooner, the library being miles away, but the librarian was so attractive that I did not protest till two months were gone and I still heard only her firm “no!”.
“Master, drop it!” I appealed to him. “I beseech you in the name of the Capitoline Triad! It’s all Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad now. Nobody venerates Jupiter or Juno anymore, and the career of a Vestal or any other virgin is not that popular nowadays. Perhaps only old Priapus…”
“You have become impertinent, my young apprentice! You do whatever your employer tells you to, that’s what you do! I want to refresh in situ on my Minerva, Saturn, Pomona, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Lares, Penates, Janus and other deities. Pack up! We’re going Rome!”

We stayed in a hotel. My hopes that Vogel, confronted with the Eternal City, will soften up, enjoy campari on the rocks and tick off the obligatory sights were gone. Sure, he liked campari but he refused to visit churches or the Vatican (“it’s modern Roman religion”). He spent day after day wandering in the worst heat on the Roman Forum: a site at the foot of the Palatine Hill, all covered with stumps of ancient temples. He would stop before a ruin, read in the thick books he carried in a case, and ponder.
At first I felt obliged to accompany my boss and carry the case but as he would not share his thoughts and the heat was unbearable, I thanked off, bought a second-hand bike and made excursions into the landscapes around Rome. We dined together in the evenings and broke our fast in the mornings, but we hardly spoke, as he was completely engrossed in the studies.
“Have you ever heard of the canicula, a vacation any Roman with self-respect would take from Rome’s burning heat when the constellation of Canis Minor came up?” I asked.
“I’m an old vagabond, I can take the heat.” And he counseled me to drive up to the colder North and see Florence, Venice, Ravenna, Turin and Milan on the way.

Heat indescribable. I couldn’t pull myself together to drive anywhere and stayed naked in the room, frequent showers and camparis on the rocks. I remember lifting the glass up to my lips, and suddenly Vogel is shaking me and I am spilling the drink.
Why was he in my room? How could I have fallen asleep like this, with a glass to my lips? Am I drunk? Is it a dream?
“Wake up, man, let’s go! No time to waste!”
“A moment, Master, I’m naked!”
“Not important!”

He dragged me out into the street and I was taken aback. A green double-decker was standing at the bus stop in front of the hotel but the alighting passenger was not landing on the sidewalk – he was hanging in the air! Cars, in Italy honking and speeding, stood motionless and soundless, and so did pedestrians, normally garrulous and gesticulating, now like a sculpture exhibition.
“What is this shit, Master?”
“Time’s stopped.”
“What?”
“Time is standing still. Time doesn’t fly,” he added in Latin[1]. “Let’s move it! Every second is precious!”
“How come? If it’s still, what’s the hurry?”
“It hasn’t stopped for us, can’t you see? And I don’t know when the next attack comes.”
“What attack?”
He sent me one of those glances, so I said: “Lead on, Master!” and followed him.
We ran like hell, slaloming among the frozen pedestrians and cars, all the way to the Roman Forum. There he led us zigzagging between the petrified tourists to a particular ruin.
There a young couple stood frozen in the middle of a kiss, a priest immobilized while taking a picture, two nuns eternized in mid-conversation, a sculptured woman reading in a guidebook and a guy immortalized with a string of urine between his dick and the wall of the ruin.
Vogel paid no attention. He stopped, raised both arms and cried out in Latin: “Father Janus, Father Janus, come to me![2]”
This I echoed and we kept on in more and more lamenting voice until a tall bearded man in a white toga emerged out of thin air.
“What do you want?[3]” he asked Vogel in Latin.
“Mercy![4] Don’t make us perish![5]” and Vogel made a movement with his arm encompassing the tourists but meaning all mankind.
The newcomer looked around with satisfaction, like a craftsman proud of his work. As he turned, I saw another face on the back of his head – and this one was angry.
“Seventeen hundred years”, he thundered out of this mouth, “and no respect, no sacrifice, no nothing! And now you even piss on my temple! You’ve been worshipping foreign gods here in my city and they have kept us down. I’ve got enough! I’ve stopped Time. Let your new deities save you!”
“I’m not so sure they can,” my Master answered with a bow. “For you, Father Janus, who were the god always named first in the prayers of the Quirites, to be ignored like this must be intolerable. But I vow and pledge that if you stop scourging us with your wrath I shall enliven you once a week with a prayer and incense burnt for you and you alone on an altar!”
“So you have sworn, mortal. Be careful not to breach your oath!” one mouth said. “Gee, you must be somebody special to resist my power so easily,” said the other mouth. “Or have I wanted you to succeed?” asked the first teasingly and the old god smiled with both pair of lips. “How nice, you brought yet another worshipper. Prayer and incense, remember, prayer and incense! Jove will be furious that the mortals worship again – not him but me!”
He disappeared into thin air and the tourists came alive. The pisser finished, hid his tool and zipped his fly. The reading woman turned a page. The priest took the picture and started looking for a new opportunity. The couple finished the kiss. Nobody had noticed anything. For them, nothing has happened.

Then they spotted the stark naked man: me. The priest dropped his camera. The young couple laughed. The nuns stared with open mouths. And the pisser sent me an angry look, as if I had outperformed him, the nuns having overlooked his performance.
Still stunned by the meeting with the double-faced one, I had completely forgotten my nudity. The pisser’s rage brought me back to the fact that the old rules apply again. I had an impulse to cover my dick with my hand and run for cover but I overcame it.
“See you later, micturator!” I said to the pisser, smiled to each of the other viewers and walked tall to the exit, head high and meeting the gapes of the revived visitors with intrepid eyes and a friendly smile. Master walked behind explaining in the numerous tongues he speaks that I was a fugitive from a loony bin.

At long last, we were out and took a taxi. As we were driving through the revived streets, again full of speeding cars and lively people, Master nodded philosophically and said:
“No person in the world save the two of us know that anything’s been amiss. If you ever wrote it down they would call it fantasy. Should anybody bother to check, the only clue to follow is an out-of-thin-air materialization and following parade of a well-endowed naked man in the Roman Forum.”
“You did it to me on purpose,” it dawned on me.
“And you surpassed yourself,” he answered, and the cabby asked me in bad English whether this was the newest outfit for flashers.
“Va’fa’n’culo!” I answered in a better Italian.

In the evening we were seated in a plane bound for our country, imbibing tax-free malt and talking.
“No, Master, no lecture. I may not have studied Roman religion as heatedly as you but still know my Janus, the double-faced god of beginnings and endings, the deity of Time. January is called after him and so should December, only it isn’t. The gate of his temple, that’s our ruin, was closed or opened only when there was peace all over the Roman Empire…”
“Closed!”
“Wasn’t it the ardor of your studies, which brought him back from the oblivion inside old books?”
“The ardor of my studies made me know what was going on, where to go and what to do. Actually, it’s the Catholic Church who’s been negligent or weak. After all, the Christians dislodged the ancient gods and it’s been their job to keep them down ever since. The Greek Orthodox Church does a much better job, as no Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hades, Ares, Aphrodite or such like re-appear over there.”
“How did you resist Janus, Master?”
“I was about to go out and roam the Forum again when I suddenly felt I was dying. Didn’t want to, so I fought it and it gave up. A moment later, it tried again and I gave it a shove and felt it was loosing interest for the time being. Then I looked out of the window and the sculptures down there made me understand: Time has been halted. With ancient Roman religion on my mind, I thought of the Roman god of time and, as you have seen, the hunch paid off.”
“But how is it possible to keep Time going for two persons only? Isn’t Time one and same for all?”
“So we philosophers thought but it can’t be. I figure Time is a bundle of individual channels. Makes sense if you think how differently time flies when you are in an uplifting conversation with your Master and when you sit in a dentist’s chair. And for the dentist, it’s a different time still.”
“Why use time on reviving me while a new attack was imminent?”
“If my intuition was correct and the attacker was a Roman god then he would appreciate another worshipper. I invested only little energy to activate your time channel; you kept it alive yourself after. And Janus was glad, which brings me to the oath we have taken…”
“You have taken,” I protested. “The constitution guarantees the freedom of religion.”
“You don’t have to feel any piety, just go through the motions. It’s a part of your job from now on,” he replied and we had a longer discussion about my job description, wages and such.
We built an altar in my garden and every Sunday we burn frankincense and say the following short Latin prayer:
Father Janus, I venerate You as the first and the last of the gods[6].
Any takers?

---

[1] Tempus non fugit. A paraphrase of one of those “golden thoughts”, which always have to be in Latin.

[2] Pater Iane, Pater Iane, veni ad me.

[3] Quid vobis vultis?

[4] Miserere!

[5] Noli nos omnes perdere.

[6] Pater Iane, Te primum ultimumque deorum veneror.

Copyright © Peter Billig 2007

THE HILL

Peter Billig
THE HILL

It was a clear summer evening. He was eight, standing on the top of a hill. To the right, the last red afterglow was going out, to the left, the stars were already shining. A black silhouette of a mountain range stood out on the horizon like a paper cutout. As the stars began to spread all over the heavenly ceiling, he had a sensation, frightening at first, then awesome, that he is not standing here and imbibing this view for the first time. Once, he was someone else and this someone – he, as it is he who is remembering this – made an important decision just here, on this very hilltop. What was it now…?
"Where are you, you brat!" called a harsh voice from below.
"I'm coming now, Mom!" he called back and ran downhill, the memory gone.
"You promised to come after sunset! Supper's getting cold!"
As he was eating, he strove to recall the consciousness of having been someone else, but the thought seemed absurd under the low ceiling of the hut.

He had a strong dream that night. He was in a town in some distant century. As he was walking the narrow streets, he recognized houses on both sides and remembered their names and purpose: a city hall, a blacksmith's, a mercer's, a grocer's, a gunsmith's, a bell-founder's, an inn and so on. He came to a broad river, and crossing it on a bridge with fancy towers he remembered that a famous person had been thrown down from here. He went uphill to a huge castle: the gate was open. With sure steps he strolled past a half-finished church to an alley glued to the ramparts. It was "his" and he knew which of the tiny houses was "his". He came to the door and spelt the name on the nameplate – his own. He awoke with a start.

One summer vacation twenty-five years later he was visiting Prague, a city he has never experienced before. First, he participated in an astrology seminar, astrology being his great hobby. Then there was time to play the tourist. And here he was with a guidebook in his hand, standing before the old city hall, a peculiar structure. Suddenly, he had an uncanny feeling of having seen this unique building before. Obviously, he had read illustrated material about Prague before going, but it did not explain the eerie quality of the experience. Then he remembered: it was the city hall from that long, long forgotten dream!
Being inside an evolving dream gave him goose flesh. He decided to follow through. He trod in the footsteps of the dream throughout the Old City, walking in the general direction of the river and recognizing the blacksmith's, the mercer's, the grocer's, the gunsmith's, the bell-founder's, the inn and so on through their now modern trappings.
He reached the river. The bridge was there. In the dream it had not been adorned with the statues of the saints (added by Counterreformation from 1685 on, the guidebook said), but the fancy towers gave it away.
He crossed the bridge (whence St John of Nepomuk had been thrown down, he read) and went up to the Castle. The unfinished church has grown into a consummate cathedral. He went to the alley from the dream, glued to the ramparts. It proved to be Golden Lane where Emperor Rudolph's alchemists lived: they were supposed to find a way of producing gold from base metals. At that time, Prague was the occult capital of Europe, full of astrologers, alchemists and magicians, the guidebook said.
He found "his" house: it was an innocent souvenir shop now, but it gave him a shudder, nevertheless.

Five years later, the first morning of his summer vacation. The exams are over, his students gone. He puts his Latin off his mind, ready to go holidaymaking, as he has been planning all the year. He has packed the car but now he feels like not going to the sea after all. What an unexpected change of heart! Where to, then? At once, the name of the destination enters his mind. He checks the road atlas: only one entry of that name: a village in the Foothills District, so he drives there instead.

Halfway, he stops at a roadside diner. He orders and sees a magazine, left by another customer, opened on a picture of the information plaque from the probe "Pioneer", sent by the U.S. at the end of the 1960's to meet Extraterrestrials. He looks closer. The messenger carried images of man and woman and a diagram of the Solar System. Aliens will be joyous finding it, now knowing that there is life in Space! And where Earth is and what manner of creature we humans are, should they feel like invading, ha, ha!

But what if we had sent the messenger not for the benefit of aliens but of ourselves?
"You all right?" inquires the waitress coming with his soup.
"Fine, I just had a very crazy thought."
She nods and leaves. This short exchange and the enticing smell of the food changes his priorities. He begins to eat, but the thought would not give up. It hits him again and he freezes with the spoon in midair.
If we, who now are Earthlings, are later reborn in another part of the Universe, a plaque from Earth could be, on Sirius or Aldebaran, a welcome reminder of a former incarnation.

He puts the spoon down and lets the thought think itself out: the sojourn on Earth is for gathering experience to carry out an assignment elsewhere. The sojourn elsewhere is for an assignment here. On Earth an exchange takes place: a part of one's soul is invested in Earth and it stays within Earth after one's death. One's body improves Earth by staying behind. It's of a better stuff, having been so close to the soul. Earth reciprocates by enriching the soul via the body, by making new parts of the soul grow. The new parts are the reason why a sojourn on another planet is now feasible. It all makes sense! So it can go on all over the galaxies, with repeated sojourns on the same planets, perhaps as member of a different species whenever on Earth? This traveling between distant worlds might be the meaning of one's existence as an entity…

"You don't like the soup?" the waitress arrives with his main course. "The cook believes himself to be the reincarnation of Brillat-Savarin. Puts his soul into the soup, we hear but praise and acclaim!"
"It's excellent. It's that crazy thought, I'm afraid. Could you explain to the cook…?"

She nods and leaves with the cold soup.

What did she say? The cook puts his dick in the soup?
He visualized the scene and burst out in laughter. The other guests began to stare. He shut up shaking with stifled laughter, tears pouring down his cheeks. Eating was impossible.

"So you left the main course, too. Been crying over it? It's not that bad, some people like it. The cook won't accept apologies this time. He'll go for you with the cleaver!"
He smiled and gave her a bill.
"Keep the change."
"No." She gave him change and pressed her own coins on him. "I'm tipping you for the entertainment."

The name of his destination appeared on a signboard by the road; a moment later he recognized the hut, and the summer vacation with his mother years, years ago came vividly back. It was here – that dream, which led to the curious experience in Prague! This great sensation, top of a hill!

And the hill appeared. He stopped the car and ran up.
To the right the last afterglow was going out and to the left the stars were already shining. Before him there was a black silhouette of a mountain range, like a paper cutout on the horizon. As the stars began to spread over the heavens, he had a sensation, at first frightening then awesome, that he is not standing here for the first time. Once, he was someone else and this someone – but actually he, as it is him who is remembering this – had made an important decision just here, on this very hilltop.
What was it now…? He sat down, closed his eyes, fell down the well of his inner space – and landed in Prague, crossing the bridge. Like in the old dream, the saint-figures were gone, as were the buildings built later than the early 1600's. Now he could fully appreciate it: the monstrous Wallenstein Palace, for example, wasn't there.
He went up to the Castle, entered Golden Lane and walked to his house. The door was locked. As he was searching for the key, he suddenly felt very cold – and found himself back on the hill, shivering.
It was 3 a.m. and dark, except for the stars. He fetched his sleeping bag from the car, found some level ground on the hilltop, crawled into the bag and was fast asleep:

Now he was by the door, turning the key. The room looked like a medieval laboratory: pipes and alembics arranged on long tables, shelves with varicolored jars, flasks and phials, containing chemicals, as he could tell by the smells. The fireplace was ablaze, even though it was summer.
A desk by the window was covered with writings and drawings. A man was scribbling laboriously with a quill. Immediately he knew: he and this man are one and the same person!

The man finished scrawling and fetched a little glass bottle from a shelf. He rolled the paper, he just had written, and placed it inside. He skillfully melted the neck down over the fire. There was no doubt: an important document has been placed in a time capsule.
A man with a whip knocked on the window:
"Your coach is ready, sir."
"I'm coming," the other replied, put the bottle in his breast pocket and reached for his cape and hat…

He awakes with a shudder. It is very cold; the sleeping bag is covered with dew. The sun is rising. The dream has been so vivid that to be back on the hill feels like being in a different universe.
He stands up, urinates, fetches a screwdriver from the car and begins to jab the soil off the level part where he just has been sleeping. The metal scratches against glass, and he digs on with his hands, extracts the little bottle. He rinses it in the dew. Yes, it is intact; the paper is still inside. He breaks the glass and unrolls the paper, actually a parchment.
There is a horoscope of one Adalbertus de Praga, drawn in the antiquated square-based style, and a text in Latin:

When I, Adalbertus of Prague, alchemist and astrologer, was on 15 August 1600 AD bivouacking on this hilltop, I was shaken to the deepest of my soul by an enormous view. As with wondering eyes I was watching the stars being born on the evening sky simultaneously with the black ridge of the mountains and a bloody sunset, a feeling in my heart and a thought in my head were born spontaneously: death is not the end of a human's life, but the beginning of a future life. There is no point in fearing death: when a human dies, the soul leaves the dead body, freed of carnal constraints. At the astrologically proper time, when the mistakes of the previous life best can be straightened by virtue of the favorable configuration of the planets, the very same soul enters a new body. That is why it is called metempsychosis in Greek and reincarnatio in Latin. To me, my doctrine seems to be a pernicious one because it is not in accord with the Scriptures and the Church, but more like a religion of heretics. Whom shall I believe: the heretics or the Fathers? Other people's authority or myself? Is it a deceptive daydream or a true hope? If it is not just a specter, let this be the token and testimony for you – or should I say "me"? Because if you should recall this had been written and find this container and read this report, what more should you require than this testimony, this token and this document? I stretch both my arms out to you (to me) through the chasm of eternity. Get born (let me get born), live (let me live) and stay fit (let me stay fit)![1]

"My private Pioneer has arrived," he thought and heaved a sigh of relief.

---

[1] The horoscope is private and will not be published, and the original Latin text reads as follows:

Ego, Adalbertus de Praga, alchemista & astrologus, die XV Aug. A.D. MDC hic in summo colle cum tempus tererem, visu enormi sum percussus usque ad imam animam. Nam cum stellas in caelo vesperino nascentia simul cum nigro derso montium & cruento Solis occasu oculis admirantibus animadverterem, sponte sua sensus in corde & cogitatio huius generis in animo nati: non esse mortem finem vitae humanae, sed initium vitae futurae. Non est timenda mors: moritur homo, dissolutis carnis catenis anima corpus mortuum relinquit, & cum tempus astrologice idoneum obventurum sit, quando peccata pristinae vitae ex constellatione planetarum facillime emendabuntur, ingreditur anima ipsissima in carnem novam; quare Graece metempsychosis, Latine reincarnatio appellatur. Quae doctrina ideo mi perniciosa videtur, quod contra Scripturas & Ecclesiam ad haereticorum paganorumque spectat religionem. Cui credam? haereticisne an Patribus? auctoritati aliorum aut mihimet ipsi? Est phantasma falsum aut spes vera? Si spectrum non est, en tibi – dicamne "mihi”? – signaculum testimoniumque: quod si scriptum recordatus fueris, repositorium inveneris, hunc nuntium legeris, quid hoc testimonio, hoc signo, hoc documento amplius requires? Bracchia ambo tibi (mihi) super abyssum aeternitatis protendo. Nascere (nascar), vive (vivam), vale (valeam)!

Copyright 2007 Peter Billig