Hungover on the Threshold of Eternity

The next chapter in The Shambella Saga! We again find ourselves eavesdropping on an exchange that happened before the Turning.

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Hungover on the Threshold of Eternity

Doose was hungover.

Cresting the age of forty made him rethink his drinking habits. In his twenties, he bounced back from a bender without the slightest repercussion. In his thirties, he could still recoup with the old hair of the dog. By midway through his fortieth year, every encounter with alcohol required a two-day reset.

He wasn’t an alcoholic in the sense that he had to drink every day. He could go weeks without it; but when he tied one on, as the old saying goes, he tied a double fucking knot to a sturdy branch of spontaneity and swung on the rope of stupidity into misadventure; and why wouldn’t he, so long as his body recovered with little consequence?

Oh, but today was consequential as Hell! He was irritable and overheated. His stomach churned like a ball of fire and his head felt as if some tiny imp was inside his skull, using a power drill to force its way out from behind his left eye.

He took some Tylenol and smoked a joint. That took the edge off, but he was worthless otherwise. All he could do was sit on his couch, lazily strum on his bass, and wait for the pain to recede.

So when someone knocked on his front door, he ignored it. Then they knocked again, and he ignored it. Then again. Who the fuck is this? One of his old pals looking for dope, maybe? Well, if it was, he didn’t have any, and if he did, he’d keep it to himself anyway.

Fuck off, man, he thought.

But this fucker was gently persistent. Not like someone trying to knock the door down to get his attention, as if he might be in another room and not hear it. Like they knew he was sitting right there, ignoring them, and they were going to quietly knock again and again in thirty second intervals until he opened the door.

Fuck, he thought, if I gotta get up I might as well answer the door.

Carrying his bass by the neck in his right hand, he unlocked and opened the front door with his left.

Before him was a woman of striking beauty.

This didn’t really impress him, because another thing about cresting the age of forty is that Doose had started to value his peace more than the company of others, and, generally speaking, because of competition from other men and the general obstacle course of shit tests and mind games that passed for the modern mating ritual, being alone was far more peaceful than wooing women.

Doose already blew all his chances for matrimonial bliss, if such a thing really existed. Solitude suited him just fine.

Yet here she was right at his door, looking serious, so he didn’t think she was here for romance; and why would she be?

“Hello, Doose. My name is Pantima. I’m here to talk to you about some things that will at first seem unbelievable, but which I am sure will be of interest to you.”

Doose unconsciously furrowed his brow, and in combination with the sunlight piercing the doorway around her silhouette, stabbing his eyes, it hurt all kinds of ways.

He unknotted his face, sighed, and waved her in, even if only so he could close the door.

He put his bass on its stand next to the couch and waved again for her to follow him into the kitchen. He pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table and went to the fridge. “Want something to drink?” he asked. “I got beer, whiskey, milk, water.”

“No, but thank you,” Pantima replied.

He grabbed a bottle of water. No hair of the dog today, though he might smoke another doobie after this lady left. He sat down across from her. “What’s this about?”

“I am an avatar of ethereal entities that oversee human fortune, and I’m here to ask you to play a major part in saving the world… or at least what will be left of it.”

“Get the fuck out,” Doose replied flatly.

“No, no, listen, I’m serious. I can show you if you’ll give me permission to enter your mind.”

“Lady, if you can enter my mind, then I will be inclined to believe you.”

“Is that a yes?”

Doose sighed. What did he have to lose? The sooner he let her try her silly act, whatever it was, the sooner he could kick her out. “Yeah, sure.”

His eyes widened. He sat straight up from his usual slouch for the first time in a long time.

He could feel her as a palpable presence, and the things she showed him, though mostly beyond his comprehension, made tears run down his cheeks and snot run out of his nose, like the most total grief he’d ever known.

At the same time, he was thrilled through with the ecstasy of the oneness of the universe, an experience he understood this lady experienced constantly, in that other-dimension whence she came.

He was electrified into a rigid state of ecstatic sobbing.

When she receded, he was sad to feel her withdrawal, but kind of wanted to hate her too, for making him feel that way, knowing that when she left he would feel emptied, hurt, alone.

Not that it was a new feeling to him, just that he had so carefully guarded against it for so long and here it was foisted upon him in the most intense and sudden fashion.

But he didn’t hate her. His silent experience of her, to the human eye, would have appeared as a few minutes of sheer madness, uncontrollable weeping, the delusions of a mentally unstable man influenced by a beautiful woman’s power of suggestion.

Yet in the interminable moment she occupied his mind, he understood all she asked of him, all that would happen if he didn’t agree, and, most of all, that her kind, unlike their opposition, would never force the issue, but would always ask permission.

“I agree,” he said, as he rose to grab a paper towel to wipe his face and blow his nose. He cleaned up at the sink, turned again and looked at her. She stared back into his eyes.

She was sad for him, frightened for him; but also, she loved him, in a motherly way.

Pantima knew Esmerelda would never want to acknowledge it, but this man was, like others before him, the living embodiment of their Dying God stories. From Osiris to Dionysus, from Jesus to Joan of Arc to Gandhi and so many beyond and in between, they were all doomed to an everlasting life of self-sacrificial torment.

They lived beyond the life of their bodies and became galvanizing ideas. Each was linked in an inextricable chain. The one, the only one, the reluctant hero, the tragic savior.

They sometimes wore the mask of comedy to cover the tragedy, like Dionysus, but sometimes exhibited an aura of ascetic sanctity, a pure drama, the tragedy incarnate, like Jesus going the cross.

Doose understood that in order to make the difference in the upcoming conflagration he would have to live forever, and that was the last thing he wanted.

He cherished what he had before believed to be his one and only life precisely because he knew that one day the misery would end with the joy and he could call it even.

The life to which he agreed was not to be like the one he already lived, but just knowing he was the only one who could do it, he took the job.

After what seemed even to an exalted being like Pantima to be a long silence, she broke his gaze.

He sighed and turned his back on her. “I’ll do what you ask. Now return the favor and get out. The sooner you leave, the sooner this will stop hurting.”

But she was already gone before he finished his sentence.

***** * *****

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