Hypostasis

This is a parable about Homo necans—the killing man.

Us humans are unique in the biosphere; we’re the only species with a self-evident raison d'être—a drive to do something besides exist and reproduce. And that’s precisely what makes us the least moral, the least ethical, the least explicable of all life forms: Almost without exception, when we commit gruesome acts, there are other available options.

It’s the cardinal distinction between ancient Rome and apeland: From the outset of our genesis we have created arbitrary divisions—friends and enemies. Easter Island fell when the warrior class took over. When reason fails as a last resort, or is ignored as a first resort, explaining war becomes easy, while explaining peace—except as a hiccup between wars—becomes impossible.

And that’s the ultimate biological paradox, because war is an anathema to evolution. Natural selection is rooted in the idea that the weak perish and the strong reproduce. In war, we send the most virile off to die and leave the weak behind to cower and snivel and reproduce. 

That is a digression, of course, removed from the parable. The parable is about me, but you’ve probably been where I was at least once:

Stuck at a red light by the throat of an alleyway or cross-street in a huge dark city at some small and unforgiving hour—five in the morning according to my analog dashboard clock. The streets are empty and on all sides, a palisade of bricks is enveloped in gauzy grey vapors that shift, fold and unfold, clearing briefly so that every tiny crystal of quartz within the mortar between the bricks comes into focus.

Like photons and gluons, concepts shoot through my mind as I sit and wait for the light to change, and being massless, they are unstoppable, flotsam on a flood.

A red light at an hour when there is no traffic seems insulting—an arbitrary display of authority without purpose. But the human race is by nature hierarchical—in that, we remain primate-like; our patience in the face of disciplinary illogical is profound. So I glance up and down the alley on either side of me to places where shadows congeal into pitch, and then I lean out of the car to scan the barricade of buildings surrounding me.

Astonishingly, I think, not a single window shows a trace of light, even from behind curtains: Evidently, this is a city where nobody rises before dawn and nobody goes off to early morning jobs. But surely, that will have to change in the minutes that follow—no city can be supported without workers and shifts. With every inhale of breath I expect to see a light flick on somewhere, a sign of normal activity. It’s already five o’clock, after all, and people must have things to do. And where are all the insomniacs? I check the dashboard clock again after scanning the periphery: Five exactly.

So, perhaps you’ve been in this identical scenario, especially if you live in the city and keep night-owl hours. A red light with no reason not to run it beyond a sense of keeping the fragile order intact, and the slim—though not impossible—chance that there might be a patrol car in the shadows waiting on prey like an eager spider. You know this feeling? Where the road, in a sense, becomes your Rubicon, and to cross it is to commit a deed from which there is no turning back, regardless of consequence?

But here is somewhere you’ve probably never been:

Sitting in that car, at that red light, in that strange hollow city, at five in the morning precisely, I suddenly realize that I have no idea who I am.

At first, it’s only a minor crisis, seemingly random and totally benign; an eyebrow twitch or brief tinnitus after swimming. It will pass, I have no doubt; I will reassemble, my self-recognition will return, the traffic light will change and I will drive on. It’s an annoying speck; it’s photons gain, now in a vacuum, and nothing more.

But then I have another thought: I have no idea where I am either; I can’t name the city nor assign the slightest reason as to why I am here, inside this car, at this red light, within this city, at five o’clock in the morning. Or for that matter, even how I know it is five in the morning rather than five in the afternoon in a place and a season where it’s dark at either hour.

But I do know it is morning, and there seems to be no rational explanation for the knowledge.

A tinny buzzing grows in my ears accompanied by a full-body dermal reaction—goosebumps.

But again, I’m sure the sensation will be short-lived, so I crank on the car radio as a distraction. A distraction from my own thoughts, of course, but not from extraneous noises—the city is soundless and apparently birdless.

Like the clock, the radio is vintage, with old-school knob and twist controls. But it works, and from the speaker sifts a strange strain of melancholy music: I imagine Titans on a mountainside blasting wild and distant harmonies from an infinite ensemble. The tune is gloomy and threatening, but also flecked with congenial trills and light-hearted tremolos. It is transport music, no doubt, intended to drive one’s memory backward through time and space, to take a listener to distant realms in other years. But in this, it fails: The doleful music affects me only in the immediate, on the surface, like an abrasion or razor burn. It’s an uncomfortable sensation and I make an effort to find another station, but up and down the dial, I find nothing but random static. It’s not likely that many radio signals find street-level reception beneath these ghastly brick cliffs.

I’m sure I can drum up memories, of course—after all, I am in the process of thinking rationally and forming cohesive sentences; that means I remember language. Conceptually, I can think of Titans. But beyond that, I don’t even remember arriving at this intersection, nor can I say with certainty how long I’ve been here, idling the engine, tapping my fingers, staring at the light. For all I know, this light is always red and perhaps it’s broken—mechanical malfunctions happen all the time in cities, particularly in those with such lazy infrastructures that no repairmen is even awake before five in the morning.

This explanation seems increasingly probable. So, since you are no doubt familiar with the same red light phenomenon, at least in part, how long do you feel is ‘long enough’? How long before you are entitled to simply run the light in good conscience, sure that in the event you are dragged to earth by some phantom cop, he will understand? Is three minutes fair? Five minutes? Ten?

I glance at the clock and it is still five on the dot, so now there seems to be two possibilities; first, that these thoughts are running through my mind at an extremely rapid pace, perhaps instantaneously. There’s something I can cling to: If I am lost in the moment, I am lost in the always, and it makes no difference who I am. On the other hand, this seems irrational since I have a distinct impression of time passing in the normal sense. So perhaps the clock, like the stop light, is malfunctioning. And that immediately makes sense: It is ludicrously old, after all; imagine having an analog clock in this day and age.

And then I have a quick epiphany: It’s none of the above. I am dreaming, embedded within the universe of my own subconscious. This new explanation has a primacy about it; it checks all the boxes. I exhale audibly—unusual for a dream, but not unheard of. I am satisfied—I am having an extremely vivid lucid dream which will shortly melt into its own form of radio static as dreams invariably do. I’ll either jerk awake and take the requisite inhale, or the scene will shift into something else.

It’s true enough, isn’t it? –despite its almighty power of imagination, the sleeping brain is impatient and can’t cling long to a plot of its own creation.

I shut my eyes and count to ten. That’s the thing about dreams: There is rarely much cohesion and never a plausible storyline with an arc, a climax and a denouement. Continuity is not a style requirement. I say the numbers out loud, one through ten, and when I reach the last one and open my eyes, I am in the same place and the light is still red. I look around to see if I can pinpoint any changes in the panorama. Maybe a small one, I decide: Far ahead, perhaps a quarter mile, a manhole is belching steam.

And nothing else. The rest is identical. I remain at the endless red light at precisely five o’clock in the morning inside a strange car, exactly where I was before my experiment.

But the car. I don’t necessarily claim ownership of it nor can I claim that I don’t own it; I’m simply not sure. But in either case, it is an old, old vehicle. I am conscious of a persistent redolence; the smell of moisture in the fittings, of must and decay and moldered fabric—the stale emanations of a vehicle that has been used for decades and then ignored for the same length of time. Everything about it is shabby and exhausted—the window is cranked down and the body panel where I rest my arm, once blue, has faded to cyanic grey; the hood is being consumed by rust across its expanse, windshield to the small hood scoop. The seat fabric is dry and cracked, and on the passenger side, it oozes a pus of latex foam. I glance over my shoulder at the rear seat—it’s empty.

In the rear view mirror, the receded city corridor is a throat filled with black meat and flitting shadows, and there are no other cars visible, not even parked. I look at the light, still red, and the clock, still five, and then I think to check the glovebox—maybe there is a clue in there. No panic yet—no reason for it; for now, this remains pastime, idle curiosity until the light changes. If it is a dream, it does not feel like one nor behave like one, and I now conclude that I am in the grip of a small psychological fugue that will pass and I’ll be on my way. To where? I’m sure that that will also become obvious soon enough.

Inside the glovebox, there is something: A fragile yellow document, folded in half, held with a rusted metal paperclip that has left a reddish stain on the material. It’s an insurance certificate from a company called Union Automobile Society. Squinting, I see that it is coverage for a 1958 Austin A55 Cambridge. So brittle is the paper that it begins to crumble as I unfold it, but not before I can read the section titled ‘Particulars’. Between brackets it merely says, in black typeface, ‘Name and address of the person to whom this Certificate of Insurance has been issued’ as if that section has not yet been filled in. There is no signatory, either, or any witness, only a space that reads, also typed in old font, ‘Signature or seal and postal address of Vehicle Insurer.’

There is date, though: June 11, 1963.

As I refold the certificate it falls apart in my fingers. When I try to return it gently back into the glovebox  it disintegrates into slivers of old desiccated parchment. I look upward: The light is still red. I look to my right, and then my left: The alley shadows are still pulpy and tangled; bulky shapes that I assume are trash bins show dark against darker. And lastly, I check the instrument panel. It is unmoved, even by a fraction—five o’clock exactly.

And I still can’t remember my own name.

I feel the slightest stir of panic now—a bubble beginning to agitate the surface. But since I am convinced that, in the extrinsic world at least, my problem is a broken clock and a broken traffic signal, I am ready to slam down on the accelerator and take off, if for no other reason than to slow my staccato thinking and re-direct my focus. But before I do that, something in my field of vision does change. Five floors up, in the building to my left, a reddish glow appears at one of the alley-facing windows, as if someone has just turned on the light. That’s enough to rivet my interest, although it probably shouldn’t since it is exactly what I expected and even predicted. Yet, having spent an inordinate amount of time considering this bizarre circumstance, there now seems significance in anything that is novel. 

In fact, in another moment, I see the curtain draw open, just for a flash, and in that instant, there is a human being at the window—a woman in a crocheted cap beneath which a wild shock of cropped hair shows. Behind her pursed and worried lips, I see a sharp-minded, sad and analytical young face with a dent of hostility. She looks downward, directly at me, and when she sees that I notice her, there is brief ephemeral interaction. And in this instant I believe, without a shred of doubt, that she wants to kill me.

Femina necans. And then the curtain closes and the light goes out. Now the impetus to take off grows intense as it might save my life. Like Oswald did in Kennedy’s book depository, she may have a sniper’s rifle. But then, there is something else: To my right, far down the alley, the light of an approaching vehicle heaves into view.

Here’s another scenario with which you may be familiar: The optical illusion of an oncoming train which seems briefly immobile to the viewer although it is not. It’s a trick played on the eyes by darkness and light; the train’s beam grows larger in such fine gradations that it does not seem to be enlarging at all, like the imperceptible progression of the minute hand on an analog clock.

So now, with a vehicle approaching the intersection, with my light still red and the opposing one green by default, it’s a delicious little problem. I could easily make it across by before the other vehicle gets here, but I am now actually curious if my fugue has a greater purpose; I glance up at the window, still dark, at the approaching vehicle, still far away, but suddenly, perceptively closer. Trains will do that too. I look at the dashboard clock: It is still five o’clock to the second.

I measure my breaths; I count them. To accelerate or not to accelerate, that is the question—at this point, ‘being’ has proven to be a bit less concrete. Through the truck's open window, I hear a faint jingling sound; chains on the pavement, perhaps, but also a lighter, merrier tinkle, like from sleigh bells, or ...it is a sound that reminds me of an ice cream trucks. This is a revelation; an apparent memory of ice cream trucks. I can’t place a single ice cream truck in a time or a place, but the mere ability to draw such analogy, make a mental connection, must mean something. I continue to count my breaths; I’m at twenty. This is something you cannot do in dreams.

But the vehicle that appears is something that only happens in dreams.

Again, a prompt piques me from deep in my neocortex—a truck from a Dr. Seuss picture book. In fact, it’s an old Bedford truck, perhaps as old as my Austin. The garish grill is lit up with multicolored Christmas lights and there is a large and unwieldy wooden crown on top painted with peacocks, movie stars, folk singers, animals, politicians, angels and army generals. Chains dangling off the bottom sway with the truck's movements, and that accounts for the jangling noise of the approach.

As the truck reaches the intersection and I can see the driver: He is a brown-skinned imp with a mouthful of pearly teeth glistening with saliva; his face is so bisected by the grin that I think his head will break in half. As the truck passes through the intersection, the wooden canopy strikes the traffic light and shatters it—shards of glass rain onto the rusting hood of my car. The driver blasts a monstrous toot from his truck horn, then squeezes a goofy little rubber clown bulb attached to his outside safety mirror. The body of the truck passes; the trailer is also painted in fluorescent colors with vibrant motifs of Hindu gods and Sikh gurus bedazzled in hanging metal embellishments that emulate jewelry. Windows crisscross the wooden top, and from each poke another grinning brown face; each one waves a dark hand at me and I am immediately washed with an overwhelming sense of foreboding.

The truck departs and exhaust whirls around in an array of patterned curlicues; I look back at the clock, still five, and back at the alley window, where the woman’s face has now reappeared.

I hit the gas pedal, run the red light, and the impact from the second truck occurs an instant later.

2.

We’re all on a runaway truck to oblivion; I awaken without opening my eyes. I can’t open them—they seem glued shut. My body writhes in pain and my headache is monumental. If I lay perfectly still, it evaporates briefly, but as quickly, re-condenses.

Now I think back and I remember the intersection; I remember the dashboard clock frozen in time like a wristwatch in a Hiroshima museum. I picture the face at the window and the silly circus truck and nothing else, and even these memories are now tainted with the stink of unreality, like when you try to find substance in the distorted fogs of a nightmare that moments before had seemed very real. Beyond that, I can pluck nothing further from my mind—it’s an amoebic protein network where the past is equally inaccessible and irrelevant to a bound present.

In time, I raise my arm—the right one, since the left one is numb and useless, no doubt shattered. My eyes are crusted over with blood and that’s the issue, and in rubbing out flakes of coppery brown, I can see through matted eyelashes. I survey myself; I am lying on a dirty canvas tarp, naked except for a pair of tan military-style briefs. My injuries, not dressed, are on full display. And they are appalling: there are burns across my body and a vast spread of lacerations of various sizes, many penetrating underlying tissue and muscle. Beside me lies a heap of bloody glass shards, some with flesh attached. Aside from the gruesomeness of the sight, it is to me, a suggestion that someone has taken rudimentary care of me.

Now I look around the room: It is stark, with some old, upended wooden furniture and a chalkboard on wheels with a photo taped to it; I am too far away to make out what the photograph is. There is a five gallon jug of Nestlé Pure Life water. There is a toilet bucket and a light bulb attached to an old car battery. And there is an alarm clock with a shattered face and stuck hands. No matter where they are stuck, you and I know the time: Now.

The bulb is off; natural light comes from a balustrade window on the far end of the room, and it is toward this open window that I drag myself with difficulty, pushing away the pain and concentrating on the task of crawling across the room until I can pull myself to standing by using the sill. The casement is thrown open, and the glass is gone from the panes.

Outside I see a city in death throes; a final stage before demolition or reconstruction—for now, abandoned, perhaps evacuated or fled from following an atomic cataclysm. It’s unlivable in any case. The magnitude of the destruction is overwhelming and the building I’m in seems more solid than most. Outside, stone and brick is blown to pieces, structures are roofless stalks and there is no living vegetation; the earth between the collapsing walls is seared to cinders and the few trees are black and leafless. This is not the same city I remember viewing at street level, in the old car at five in the morning, waiting for an interminable light to change, but perhaps it might have been the same city at one time, when the car was new.

Cargo cranes in a distant bay means I am near a body of water, but which one, I have no clue: They are components in a menacing verticality of emptiness. It is silent, but when I push a piece of concrete from the ledge, it drops and strikes without a sound.

I understand then that there is more to the quiet than I had guessed: I am deaf.

I inhale sharply. The air is smothering and stinks of raw sewage and petrochemicals ...and cordite. Below me, at an intersection, is the scene of a recent explosion. To one side and wedged against an alley wall is a smoldering MRAP—a tactical military vehicle with a V-shaped hull, not destroyed, but flipped on its side and severely damaged.

You’ve seen on crime shows how cops determine the trajectory of a fired bullet? It’s a complicated trick of forensics using air resistance, angle, air pressure and temperature, muzzle velocity, bullet shape and drag coefficient. Here at the window, it is much simpler: Placing myself in the cockpit of the MRAP (where it must have sat in the intersection below)  and remembering the girl with the woolen cap, I can determine easily that this is the window where I saw her watching me.

Something now impels me to turn. I am a foot away from the chalkboard and I can see in detail the photograph taped there: It’s that iconic image from the turbulent 1960s—you’ve seen it again and again through most of your life, no doubt: The Buddhist monk in Saigon, sitting in the middle of the street in a meditative lotus position, half consumed in flames through his act of self-immolation.

Behind him is a squat blue car: A 1958 Austin A55 Cambridge. The photo was taken on June 11, 1963.

The door bursts open suddenly and the young woman enters; she points a vintage Kalashnikov at my midsection, screaming words that I am unable to hear. Her eyes are a furnace; I raise my good hand and point to my ears, shaking my head, and she swings the rifle in an arc from me to the dirty canvas, and it is clear that she wants me away from the window, back on the floor. She is wearing fatigue trousers, rubber boots and a limp t-shirt; her arms are bare and there is a tattoo of a scorpion on her left arm. There is carnality about her features, blunt strangeness, savage and smeared with dirt and restrained within a ferocious scowl:

There is a hard round belly too—she’s pregnant.

I comply with the command as quickly as I can given my condition. I am immeasurably better off supine anyway. Once down and collapsed into my own gravity, the pain subsides to background radiation. The woman shoulders the rifle, then withdraws a cellphone and types furiously for a moment. She pushes the screen close to my face and I can smell her body—perspiration and grimy, oily musk. On the phone is a translator: ‘Go near window more I kill.'

I nod and she leaves. In a few moments, a piece of paper is snaked beneath the door. It appears to have once been an advertisement—there is a picture of a boxy refrigerator and all the words are written in strangely beautiful calligraphic script draped in mystical curlicues and diacritics utterly unknown to me.

But on the rear is written in stunted English: ‘You wait decision. Verily, party of God shall be victorious.’

In a while, I have a somewhat repulsive thought, but I see no alternative. I take a shard of broken glass and dip it in a sticky pool of my own blood and carefully scratch a question onto the advertisement below where she has written the message. Not the primary question haunting me, ‘Who am I?’ but a more pressing concern for survival: ‘Where am I?’

I push it beneath the door and in another moment, the paper is returned: ‘In hand of God as always. Await decision.’

But shortly, having apparently found some human value in this communication, and recognizing the macabre method I’d used to do it, a Mercury permanent marker is fed to me beneath the door and I see that as an immeasurable sign of hope.

Immobile under threat and given time to consider, I make what sense I can of my paltry immediate—a life, which as far as I can say with any certainty, began quite recently, inside an old blue car beneath a stuck red light. That entire sequence of waiting for the light to change was nothing but an elaborate mental extrapolation, of course, no matter how real it felt—the car exists only in the photograph on the blackboard. The only genuine scenario that makes sense is that I was a solder ambushed at the intersection, likely by a remotely detonated IED:

And I survived.  

I construct a different image: The device exploded on schedule—I can guess the time easily enough—and I was thrown from the vehicle, specially fitted with armored glass, a bullet–proof body, a nuclear protection system. Surviving the blast is not as surprising as having survived the aftermath: Did the woman in the window, having witnessed what happened (and more than likely, caused it) find a sudden kernel of empathy for her victim, perhaps as an emotional side-effect of pregnancy? Has she managed to get me up to the fifth floor? Despite the baby bump, there is a solid resilience about her; the wired sinews of her arm and the filth on her face make it obvious that she is used to exertion and deprivation—the scenario I imagine now is not only possible, but likely.

It occurs to me that I might have become a hostage; perhaps saving my life is less an act of empathy and more of making me a brokering chip in some military negotiation. It makes sense and could be the ‘decision’ she has mentioned twice. In the meantime, the wisest course (always) is to create a bond, to reverse the Stockholm syndrome, to make the captor unwilling to hurt a humanized captive.

There is an obvious place to start, of course, but in my state, it’s impossible: I can’t remember my name.

Still, what does it matter? Time, which stood still in fantasy, has become of critical importance in reality. I can buy time or I can squander it. It’s merely a ploy anyway, so the name I give is immaterial and any name will do. Right? Beyond a few inexplicable and random memory flares, my mind is a tabula rasa; my past is sounding clay and my identity can be molded into any shape. In the beginning, I was stuck at a red light by the throat of an alleyway in a huge city at some small and unforgiving hour; darkness hovered over the face of the deep.

So I take the scrap of paper and write on the back: ‘My name is Adam.’

There follows a long span during which I become convinced that the ruse has failed; that my textbook attempt is transparent and I have managed to anger the woman with the gun on the far side of the door. Ragtag militias tend to be better strategists than hierarchical armed force (such as I apparently belong to) and perhaps I should have known better. The organic intellect of revolutionaries is underestimated.

But I have nothing really to lose, do I? Infection will set it, and my arm needs setting. I’ll die without resolution. So I go for broke. I find a piece of shattered wooden molding reach and write, ‘What is your name?’ and jam it under the door.

And in a while, the original paper is slipped beneath the door again. On it she has written, ‘I can’t remember.’

It is a remarkable bonding indeed. None like it in history, I’d bet—save one. I write, ‘Did you set off the bomb?’

She writes back, ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t remember why.’

I send back: ‘Violence goes on after the cause is forgotten. Matter moves through eternal cycles, so I will tell you your name: It’s Hawwa. It's Eve.’

And that is the end of our communication. Paradisiacal calm engulfs me and I begin to drift, beyond pain, beyond dreams, but in this gentle passage, I have a memory that I believe to be genuine:

My father, in his library in the upstairs loft of my childhood home, books arranged by author on the top five shelves (Graham Greene precedes Hemingway and follows Faulkner) while the bottom two shelves contain the oversized coffee-table books he has collected by the dozen at flea markets and bargain tables at department stores. He has been shaped and comforted by these books; one is an old Bible that smells of vanilla and toasted hazelnuts. My father tells me that the story of Eden is allegory and that the apple represents sex, a common interpretation of Biblical symbology, especially by those with Puritan sentiment ...in fact, I later find non-symbolic sex magazines hidden in a drawer of this very study.

But I grow up to conclude that my father was wrong. In paradise, sex is not forbidden; it is mandated. Instead, I determine, the apple represents something far more evil and not nearly as imperative: The apple is a stand-in for Auschwitz; for Rwanda and Cambodia, for Nanking and Darfur; the list is infernal, the list is unforgivable and the list is very, very long.

The forbidden fruit is the impetus to do more harm than is necessary, to know better and do worse, to continue the violence after the cause is forgotten.

The struggle against self is no easier than that against the system in which we are raised—but we will try, won’t we? Among the hundreds of societies that have existed since the day Cain slew Abel, not one has lacked warriors or smiting stones; ritualized violence has been made fundamental; it is a rite of enlightenment, both for the oppressor and for the oppressed.

So here, my rite ends, and so does the parable: My sleep is interrupted by a huge blow on the door; the decision-maker enters holding a Makarov semi-automatic pistol. He is a stylized image of Homo sapiens—the wise man—ever surrounded by enemies, real and imagined, looking beyond now and into a future that will likely never be. He is formed from the clay of ego and a substance-less ideology drawn from a quintessence of fluid.

Behind him, the girl in the woolen cap cowers, feral and alive; her face, twitching in abysmal agony, is a horror mask of shame.

This is a parable about me, and she may represent you. I can’t be sure. But in this parable, I am not Homo necans, although in another parable, perhaps I am.

Homo necans is the one with the Makarov; he shoots and I die. But the parable was born before either of us and outlives us both.