PIECE OF CAKE
On the day after Sunday the 32nd Dan Lazarus came back from the dead.”Hello, I’m back from the dead.” he said.
No, not really. He could have said that but neither you nor the rest of the characters in this story would take him seriously.
The Moruti (priests/preachers) gathered round him, flocked to his side like shoppers on a Fantastic Friday. I feel you might have been expecting me to say “like flies”, so feel free to remind the authorities that I didn’t. I get so paranoid sometimes. Sure that I am being suveilled sometimes. By the innocuous neighbour next door or a satellite in space. Communication satellites they call them; that”s a laugh. Authorities. I feel, and I know it’s crazy that somehow they are monitoring and recording each key stroke. That they have a complete record of everything I am writing here, that it is being subject to severest scrutiny, and that their state-of-the-art artificial intelligence is going to tell them how the story ends long before I have reached the midpoint turn. Authorities. They are the one category of reader who I really don’t want to go about suspending disbelief.
The Moruti gathered around him desperately needed a second, maybe even a third or fourth opinion on whether this Lazarus, apparently directly related to the one in the New Testament, had indeed come back from the dead. If confirmed, this would open the debate as to the miraculous nature of this event, and whether it could be cited for use against hard line physical materialists to establish the existence and the Divine Action of God.
No one could prove the case one way or the other. It was problemnatic. Only time could help. No one could nail the truth down, could prove that it had happened or that it hadn’t. Maybe he was caught betwixt and between two alternate realities, one in which was dead and the other in which hexwas alive, every moment spent constantly shuttling between them And academic experts in theology and every other discipline under the Sun had more torturous issues to contend with in fightimg their way up the ladder of institutional hierarchy. Cynics would later say that no one nailed anything because no one had a real inclination to do so. Cynics would say this, but then everyone forgot about the entire affair.
“Luckily”, the most celebrated Moruti — the one earmarked for political office — said, “people are fickle. People forget. This attitude was quite marked in its shift from an earlier enthusiasm. Here both parties, both Lazarus and the Moruti had benefitted fron metonymic association. “Surely it must have something to do with the spiritual power of these holy men”, was the argument that began to be popularly expressed. “Surely it must have something to do with us … as payback for all those years of dedicated service and unwavering faith.” was the line that, even if they themselves were careful not to express it, began to take root in the most devout of heads.
No longer feted, and then, eventually, no longer despised (human nature being so), in fact, as our lead Moruti had foreseen, completely forgotten by the nation as a whole, Dan lived on for another four years, before suddenly and quietly he died whilst watching a television football match. This time for good. No stetching out to penalties after extra time. Not that we can be sure that the four year surfeit added anything to or detracted anything from the value of his soul. The four years were not dedicated to any manner of improvement regime, physical, cultural or spiritual. And certainly not political. No, as best as we can tell, the four years were spent sleeping (a lot), eating, cooking (occasionally), washing (bare minimum), chilling, social media networking and watching football. I am not sure which, but I am reliably informed he followed one of the Manchester teams, and either Chiefs or Sundowns.
I guess that in some ways the four years was carefully measured out. That there was a kind of justice in this — justice being such an in-vogue word given the eyes of the world were on the trial of trials taking place in Bloemfontein over much of this four year period, with strange, may I say “surreal” implications for the country as a whole. Yes, when I think about the matter carefully it seems that there musr have been a kind of balancing of the books in which sums were added, units carried up, down and across and following the correct arithmetic with Swiss watchmaker precision, almanacs were consulted, tables printed and we arrived at the exact day and time his Sun did finally set.
****
Sorry but this beginning doesn’t work for me. It ends up with one of our two major characters dead and the other hasn”t even appeared and been introduced yet. It’s how i originally wanted to tell this story, create my fictional world but it’s not working for me and therefore i can safely assume it’s not working for you. It’s a pity to lose the “came back from the dead on the 32nd echoing of the “clock striking thirteen” opening to George Orwell’s 1984, but one can”t have everything. Or as Mick and Keith put it in their lovely 60s (or was it 70s?) song: you can’t always get what you want.
So let’s have another go, shall we. To echo that song, try and just might find what we all need.
****
This is actually how the story begins. You are driving along a deserted road early one morning far from the nearest town. No sign of civilization anywhere, just scrub bush, sand and rock. Company would be nice. Just then, out of nowhere a single figure appears, impossibly, yet there it is. There he is. Hitching, here, in the middle of nowhere. Empathy rules. You stop and pick him up. He seemed OK a few hundred metres back but now as he climbs into the passenger seat with a cursory expression of thanks you sense there is something a bit nightmarish about him and hope you have not made a horrible mistake. This is someone whose dress, body, eyes show a deep acquaintance with violence, and give an aura of total fearlessness. But when he speaks, the accent is rough South African, but their is eloquence and fierce intelligence. At which point fear gives way to mystery and intrigue. Jacket with cut off sleeves, battered jeans, thick well-worn belt with huge buckle. Rune tattoos on much of his exposed skin. A creature of denim and leather. And, as you are to learn, amongst all those mixed genes that gave him this very distinctive hard-to-place mixed, multi-ethnic look, some true Viking. Going back to Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar Lothbrok himself.
He is quiet for a long time, all the time grinning slightly. He relishes your uncomfortability, but has scrutinized you, and whilst not yet classifying you as “friend”, has by the same token decided that you are definitely not “foe”. Good for you! Good for you.
Then he engages you. You immediately sense that what he is about to say is going to come from so far out of left field that you are likely to be completely flabbergasted. That you are going to get the breath knocked out of you.
He immediately advises you to relax, telling you that you shouldn’t worry about anything. That you are safe. No, not safe. Better than safe. You are “protected”. He tells you he has a hunch about you. He cannot explain it, but he believes he knows you. Maybe you met once before and got “entangled”. Science says such a thing is not just possible, but crucial to life, to there being a universe at all. Maybe the two of you have never met before. And yet he is convinced he knows you. Knows pretty much everything about you.
You are now getting alarmed. This is beginning to sound more than a trifle lunatic. You are about to revise your positive assessment of his intelligence, when he drops the big one. He gives a flawless description and analysis of who you are. Worse, he rattles off your personal details like he is reading a computer printout.
Shocked, you almost crash the car, empty deserted road but you almost crash the car. He sits there nonchalant, as though he is impervious to anything, sheathed in a powerful personal force field.
“Hey, don’t worry. Just drive. I told you you are protected.”
He tells you stuff about himself. In fact he tells you everything about himself. It is an account that is so utterly far-fetched and yet which you know is absolutely true. The force of repulsion and the force of attraction cancelling each other out, holding you in perfect balance.
So, his name is Empire. There may be copycats out there but he sees himself as a unique individual. Master copy. One of a kind.
And, he has a story for you. He tells it masterfully, or so it appears to you, though you never been into books or stories or poetry or anything like that. Truth be told, you have never been into anything very much at all.
One seamless flow. The story and the road go on and on and on.
Wherever this leads, wherever it goes, you know you are going to remember all of this for a very long time.
****
The craziest — some would say the worst — of the strange and unnatural things to happen was thar a mountain appeared in the middle of nowhere, far from any town or city or even village settlement.
It wasn’t just any old mountain. Any upstart of a kleine bergtjie aspiring to that vaunted title and its own special name. For starters, it left Kilimanjaro down there somewhere. It was, in fact, a new death-zone mountain, over the 25,000 feet height required to put it in that category. Sharp, and angular and soaring to a needle-point, it looked, and for a while was, impossible to climb. People would try, give it their best shot and fail. Perhaps die. Until they didn’t. We had a hero conqueror subsidized and supported by a host of commercial organizations whose brandnames similarly soared up towards the heavens as everyone basked in the triumph of this conquest.
They measured its height and discovered that in height (as in climber death toll) it fell just short of number two. Just beloe the formidable icy queen of the Karakans, that formidable peak that stands right on the border between Pakistan and China. So quite naturally and unimaginatively someone uttered the two syllables, and they stuck: K3. For better or for worse, this invader, whose very coming into existence now created radical implications for climate, air and other forms of transportation, tourism, culture, sense of national identity, provincial boundaries and all of the official languages spoken in the land, this beautiful monster, rising like an apparition out of nowhere, was officially accepted, sanctified, brought into national iconography (pictures of the mountain appearing at rugby internationals with a springbok perched on top), accorded full South African citizenship and nationality and given its very own government department: the all-new Department of Mountain Affairs, commonly referred to as the K3D.
All of this, unbeknownst to the world, and you can imagine the impact all of this had on the world’s media, occurred a few days after Dan Lazarus had had a crazy dream in which Empire had asked him to join him for a cup of expresso “on the top of K3”. When Empire asks, however politely, it is always more in the nature of a command than a request. As in “I gave him a request he could not refuse”. This even in a dream. “What’s K3, abd why a cup of expresso?”, Dan (dream Dan) asked anyway. “Oh, what’s K3?”
Empire retorted. “You will find out. Everybody will find out. And you will know when to be there, so be there. It will be fun. As for ‘why expresso?’ The answer is that we need to drink something that we can drink very fast, down in one go. Do you think we could spend time on K3 eating a three course meal, sharing a bottle of red wine, or trading shots of witblits? We would freeze to death.”
At which point Dan woke up. Even though it was all just a dream he was troubled about that word “fun”. He was pretty sure that North Pole, South Pole, his and Empire’s concepts of fun lay poles apart.
And then, of couse, out of nowhere: K3.
****
The phone kept ringing every five minutes. Different number. Different person. Same company. Same infernal, diabolical Debt Recovery Company whose sole purpose in life is to harass and hound our protagonist until he loses his will to resist and has repeated the same story explaining why he is not in arrears a fantastic amount of times. The sharks and the pitbulls of contemporary corporate capitalism. But he is no intellectual has no idea of the big picture and thus no sense as to exactly why this is happening.
And funnily enough he thought he had escaped by virtue of being dead. Yet miraculously, he did come back to life. It seems that if you owe money you cannot die. You are not allowed to leave this world if you are in the red. A future, much-reincarnated self would remember having to go to the bank. a new style mid-21st century bank, where everything is gleefully branded “proudly this” and “proudly that”, and informing everybody how “we are all going to make a profit in this together”.Dan 9.0 had turned up as summoned to try and negotiate paying off a lifetime of debt (or in his case, several lifetimes of debt) in a way that would not cripple him for the rest of his days, so to speak. They suggested to him that he could get some good capital in order to service aforementioned debt by selling his limbs at organs to the bank, who would in turn sell them in need of such parts in order to continue their comparatively successful lives, being persons of higher class, entirely more financially successful. How things have changed in this final, consummate state of capitalism, he thought to himself. But how could it have not changed given that in the year 2026 the second world nuclear war pretty much completed the damge initaited by the first one just a yoear earler. Two whole continents left totally unihabitable, but if the radiation problem ever gets solved, what real estate there waiting for development and investment! Ah, but before the two nuclear wars, the golden days of relatively soft capitalism. How fondly he sort of remembered them. There nobody was born into debt (“the price of life” as the mid twenty-first centuryists now call it), no debt to your name on the day of baptism that you will battle against the odds to pay back for the rest of your life. And so he signed up, initialled every page and signed the last one on the dotted line. Donating his kidney, his eyes and all four limbs, would give him, or rather, give the bank, a reasonable amount that might even allow him to break even.
****
At a crossroads he met a strange, very violent looking man who called himself Europe. He suggesred they strike a deal: Empire would sort out his debt “the old way” and he, Dan Lazarus would cede all rights to the storu of his life, bequeathing them to his new, most intimidating friend. Being at the crossroads, and much more statute when it came to such matters having read, as he said, “everything there is to read.” Europe was quick to reassure Dan that there was no Devil’s bargain involved here, no sellimg of a soul in any size, shape or totally dubious on-line form. “It is what it is”, he snarled joyously, “no hidden clauses or fine print on any rigmarole of that ilk.” And so, the deal was struck. As Europe so succinctly put it: “From here on in, it’s my fucking story now, right?”
Now legend has it that there was a writer, a pretty timid man who did not find much success at anything. Then he dreamt of a pretty tereifying character who was in terms of his aggressive instincts and totally fearless demeanour, his complete antithesis. And so he created him but could not create the story that would bring him into the world. And so in frustration and sheer will to live he did an unprecedented thing: he simply walked through the fourth wall as if it were a veil of sheerest silk. So doing, first thing he noticed was the author, his creator, sleeping. Secomd thing he noticed was a book open upside down on the bed. The book was called “Frankenstein” and the book was open at the very end where Dr Victor Frankenstein is abducted by his creation and carried across the frozrn Arctic icecap to their jpint demise. Reading this he sighed, thought for a moment, woke him up and throttled the life out of him. But not before greeting him politely, explaining exactly who he was, thanking him for bringing him into this world and assuring him that a part of him (yhe author) wpuld live on in him. Perhaps until the end of time. Legend has it, as the reader has probably guessed quite easily, this is the genesis of our friend Empire, telling of the dark and rather magical way he came into the world.
The reason why these two gentleman did meet at the crossroads will soon be divulged. The reader should give me this space to tell things in their proper order and not rush me into making a mess of things by their rampant impatience, however excusable and understandable this may be.
Returning home from the crossroads however, Dan found himself the focus of great interest and attention. A celebrated philosophical double-act, the renowed Greek and German philosophers, had met in Heidelberg, travelled South via Athens to the Oliver Tambo international airport in Johannesburg, and thence by hired car all of the 300km to Dan’s home town in near record time. Others too had gathered to deal with this odd phenomenon. After all, it is not every day someone pops back to life after being dead.
When we talk about contradictions in South African society and within the lives of its people which the ending of apartheid and the institution of universal democracy did not resolve, the walking, breathing and extremely violent, killing on a quite awful scale embodiment of this would be Empire. There are lots of legends about how he came into the world, his escaping from maximum security prison after maximum security prison, and how he terrified the other inmates, guards and the Warder alike. The most extreme story (and its obviously quite ridiculous) was that there was a mass break out at a particular prison because the inmates couldn’t take his being there any more and just had to get away from him. When Dan Lazarus met Empire at the crossroads, he could not be absolutely sure, without a shadow of doubt whether he were a real, flesh-and-blood humsn being, some kind of projected alter-ego, or other figment of his by now much-troubled imagination. There he was carrying a huge bright blue plastic bag and something (he absolutely dared not ask what the Hell it was).
Some say he was taking the bag and its contents down to Bloemfontein to be submitted into evidence at the Devil’s trial, the Devil currently being arraigned in court there upon charges of extreme and supreme human rights’ violation, and the total hatred of humanity itself. Some also attributed the strange and somewhar unnatural events that appeared to be taking place all over South Africa, and indeed, the whole world to the presence of the Devil in Bloemfontein after being summoned and arrested and brought before human justice at this trial.
Empire via his clothing his hairstyle his whole deportment and the colour of skin seemed about as “mixed” as a single human being could possibly be both in terms of culture and ethnicity. Asked about this by Dan, who instantly froze when he realized the faux pas, Empire smiled crookedly and as genial as it was possible for him to be give what seemed to be a detailed account of where not only every strand of DNA, but well-nigh every molecule in his body had come from. And the je ne sais quoi of this entire biological confection that was Empire was proudly announced to be a direct bloodline connection to the offspring of Viking leader Ragnar Lothbrok’s son Ivor, the Boneless and the beautiful Slavonic princess who was his love.
Dan was rehearsing what he was going to tell the Debt Recovery people to try and get himself off the hook when in an unrestrained moment of excited joy that he had outwitted them by claiming to be dead he actually died. This is the current orthodoxy. The reader is entitled, if not exactly encouraged, to come to their own, possibly different conclusion after reaching the end of our tale.
When the Debt Recovery people phoned, not initially, but for the thousandth or so time, he told them he waa very sorry to have to report his death to them, having been tragically killed in sn automobile accident that very morning. He gave the guy on the phone, obviously unprepared for anything like this a viciously torrid time on the phone, accusing him and his company of wishing to extend their thieving talons into the afterlife (he dod not speak of “debt slavery” because he had never heard of or encountered it. It’s a bit like that old joke much beloved the the Angel of Death himself: sorry I couldn’t do what you wanted me to, someone died, someone in the family with whom I have always been very close: me!
It seems that Europe did uphold his part of the bargain, though not in a way that Dan Lazarus might have expected, and most certainly not in a way that he would have condoned. It was all over the television news, the horrified and tramatized survivots shocking the entire country with their account of the terror and carnage experienced at the offices of the Debt Recovery Company for which they worked. I could repeat these fragmentary narratives but it would be second hand information, all in bits and pieces thar would have to be cut and paste together, posdibly distorted and exaggerated as such narratives end up being, but most of all, giving due consideration to the reader, it would be most disturbing and upsetting. So let me put you on the inside track and tell you what went down.
Europe approached the door to the offices of the Debt Recovery company munching a steak pie, half of which he charitably donated to a stray cat ourside the building. As he approached the reception desk he seemed, despite his intimidating appearance, to the receptionist be humming some kind of pleasant tune, when actually he was uttering an old Viking death curse. A weapon was produced and all the employees were told to gather together. He told them first to remain absolutely silent, noncrying murmuring or sobbing or expressions of fear whatsoever. He questioned their moral standing and their rigjt to and expectations of surviving the ordeal thaf would follow. He did not think of them, by virue of their occupation, to be amongst the best examples of the human race. But who was he to judge. And they were going to play a game. The game would be a game of life and death. He asked them if they knew the difference between life and death, scanning the throng for a face that looked reasonably innocent before putting a bullet right through it. No doubt you saw the television clips of her son, daughter and husband and the rest of her grieving family.
The game was simple. They all had to reveal their darkest, most terrible secret. Only the worst of them, the one whose secret waa indeed the darkest and most terrible would survive. The winner would be judged by the level of horror this revelation produced. He enthusiastically rushed them into the comnencement of proceedings, telling them that they should go in turn moving from right to left, with the following exhortation: “Quick! Quick! The devils are queuing up to drag you off to Hell as is right and just and it would be most impolite to make them visit. Just think of this as a reality TV show and I’m your engaging host and friendly compere.”
And so the game proceeded, and true or imagined, the srories did have things to revolt and sicken. But one stood out above all. Empire congratulated him on having such a sublimely evil secret life, shot him dead and then, well, just disapoeared.
The Moruti could not tell on theological (Western or traditional) grounds whethet he was alive or not. The medical experts at the local hospital were similarly confounded. Likewise the academics across the various faculties at the town’s university. Even sangomas from the town and surrounding areas were reluctant to risk an educated guess. Ultimately, it came down to our five human senses, and though these gave a clear indication that something was not quite right, they consistently failed to pinpoint exactly what it was.
They even called in (for a reason he was not equipped to fathom, not being alone in this ) an expert in narrative writing whose speciality was the short story. Perhaps his life had been turned into a short story. Not a very good or plausible short story, but a short story nonetheless. However, the expert did appear to have a point when he asserted that the radical and uncettain nature of his status did appear to be destabilizing conceptual boundaries, and was likely to “hook” (ie intrigue) the would-be reader, especially a reader in this digital age, where readers tend to have seen it all before, whether on Netflix, TikTok or YouTube, and are desperate for something out of the ordinaru. Maybe because a short story gives the author such limited spacd within which to work that he felt so “compressed”, having such a strong feeling of his life and everything about his life being concentrated, epochal, but alson curtailed.
Dan sat in the shadows. He had seen better days. Not so great a feeling to know that people are unsure whether you are in a state of death (ie dead) or in a state of life (ie alive). Surely someone should be able to figure it out and fix it so that there could not be the slightest shadow of doubt
Supposedly neither alive nor dead Dan sat in the growing dark. He was not sure, could not be sure, but felt he might have experienced a revelation. But who to tell and what to say? The Moruti was the man to find but how to contact him? Where to find him? It was Friday evening. The weekend was here. In the village all dials went up to full volume, the party was starting. The decibels soared, withinnan hour his ears were being assaulted by a thunderous battery of sound. Total relief finding ultimate expression but no sense of synchrony or harmony as the sound drowned everyrhing around.
And so our story ends with a battle royal whose implications for the study and writing of history could not be plainer. Squaring up to each other. In the Southern corner the Moruti, in the Northern corner, covered from head to foot with knife scars and tattoos, the figure of Europe. Order versus Chaos. Apologies for leaving you with an open-ending when the suspense is unbearable and everybody is privately betting on who they believe will win. Order versus Chaos. Chaos versus Order. I leave it here for you to decide for yourself which of our two contenders is Chaos and which is Order. And which of our two warriors is going to win. This might not be quite the no-brainer you are possibly convinced it is going to be.
Before the battle there was almost a moment or rapprochement between Empire and the Moruti. Thr Moruti seized upon the opportunity to ask him the question that he so desperately needed to ask.
“What do you fear, Empire? Do you fear anything at all?”
” I fear the Readers. I fear their power to take me back to that limbo world inside a book that is never ever going to get completed. Neither here, nor there. Neither in, nor out. The eternal damnation of waiting, waiting, waiting, forever in vain.”
“Who are these readers? Any old readers?”
“No my curious friend, they are special readers. The Readers. They have that you, and I cannot fully comprehend. I fear they are on to me. Hunting me down.”
This spectre of annihilation will, I suspect, have put our readers in a quandry. Some rooting for the readers to abort the monster before he creates anymore carnage, chaos and mayhem. Some, who see their own shadow clearly delineated and have been fighting that ancient battle of complete integration, and the healing of the fragmented self, absolutely comnited to the cause of Empire, no matter how conflicted and contradictory that cause might be. Even if it seems outright evil. Especially if it seems outright evil.
Now remember the thing in the blue plastic bag that Empire was carrying during his first encounter with Dan Lazarus at the crossroads? The object he was going to take down to Bloemfontein to submit into evidence at the trial? The question we now must ask is, could it have been a severed head? I ask this because a head did disappear from the crossroads in question at around the same time Empire was there
The story of this head must have become legend. To cut a long story short, there was a road rage altercation at the crossroads and someone got his head sawn off with a chainsaw. That’s the nuts and bolts of it.
For a while that head was treated as a trophy and put on display in a family home. Being there it served a number of purposes: it created a myth, established an identity, and provided a subject for everyday conversation. It may well also have served as a prop for humour, like but not exactly like the way in which Shakespeare uses Yorick’s skull in Hamlet — as a vehicle for verbal comedy and as a boon to some serious metaohysical questioning and speculation.
You are unhappy with the paucity of detail on the actual road rage battle? Ok let me back track for a moment. So what did happen? Well from what I can gather from what I have heard, there was an altercation at a crossroads that had a four-way stop. The drivers got their timing wrong and bumped into each other. There was shouting, screaming and then threats and then the violence. Those who were there said they felt totally mesmerized, frozen in space and time as if they were watching something on a screen. A huge screen, like the used to have at the old drive-in cinemas I think one of the winesses told the police. Everything went blurry, no one could provide a clear description and the police were left without any clear leads. So, to put it in a quick montage nutshell, a nothing-soecial ego-driven dispute as to who had actually arrived at the crossroads first and therefore had right of way got ugly fast. Absolutely degnerated into primal threat law of the jungle. They had both climbed out their cars exploding with rage, dived back in to look for a weapon to-teach-this-bastard-a-lesson. A weapon, any weapon, the more lethal the better. The other guy had found a crowbar and a screwdiver, our ultimate victor had found a chain-saw with a?petrol tank more than five-eighths full. I leave what ensued to the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.But please note thar the detail i provide on the fraction of the chain-saw petrol tank that was full as opposed to the fraction that was empty has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that when the chainsaw was deployed some serious cutting up into pieces was the inevitable end result.
And so, finding himself in possession of a severed head and apparently getting away with such a horrendous crime scot free, he figured that the head might be of use, could take it home to his house and put it on display. The house, typically lower middle-class, lacked ornaments, plants and other distinctive, “humanizing” features and therefore he thought it would be a good solution to all of the problems racing through his head if he brought it home and put it in the living room, dead centre of the mantlepiece, the pride of place.
It did not take long for everybody to feel that the head had become part of the family. It actually led to a bit of grotesque humour where the head would be referred to as “the head of the family”. The consensus was that the head’s presence did much to lighten moods, relieve tension and remind everyone of the ultimate futility of human life, and thus to live in the moment, as the Zen sages suggest.
Someone — the eldest or youngest son perhaps — once suggested that they hollow out the head, replace the eyes with glass lenses, install a bulb, a cord and a switch and then they would have a funky, multi-functional lamp. Imagine the light shining through those eyes — indisputable proof of thec soul’s eternal presence. Much argument followed — curiously the key debate was not over ethical or human concerns, or matters of taste and propriety, but regarding the practicities of what size (wattage) and type of bulb to install.
No one asked the head how it felt and what kind of globe it would prefer. Strangely, it failed to puzzle them how, without embalming or special treatment, the head, transparently, did not even begin to decay or degenerate.
Perhaps it was another miracle. The word pretty much the buzz word of the moment thanks to Mr Dan Lazarus’ astounding claim. Maybe, however, this is the kind of miracle that must not at all costs — people might desperately feel — not be associated with the word “miracle” whatsoever. But if miracle is not the word, what word might take its place here, step in and do that word’s work? The good work and the bad work. The hardly ever talked about work that the word would seem to have to be called upon to perform.
A matter of perspective? One man’s good miracle another’s really bad one?
And so the head in the living room and the object in Empire’s bag. Are they one and the same? Does it matter if they are? Does it matter if they aren’t? How might this change things reader? Tell me. Pray tell me.
Does it matter if I decline to commit myself one way or the other? But then, you say, suppose it is the head — then there is a big hole in your story. You need to tell us how Empire came into possession of the head and what is the real (symbolic) significance of the head such that Empire says he is going to take it down to Bloemfontein for the Devil’s trial and present it into evidence.
Yes, readets I do get your point. But there is something important you appear to have forgotten. “What is this?” you ask. “What have you we forgotten?”
You have forgotten the bargain. The bargain Empire struck with Dan. In terms of the conditions of the bargain, Dan’s narrative is his narrative. He is in charge now.
****
You drop me outside the Courthouse. I wonder how lomg it will take you to recover from my insight into who you are. My knowing everything there is to know about you. Your shock at hearing this and then the sheer weight of the story I just told will probably have worn you down for some time, judging by your reaction.
You failed to ask anything about the bag I had with me. No curiosity whatsoever. It’s like you didn’t see it. Good that you didn’t because technically it’s stolen property. But what evidence it is. Equally devastating for the prosecution as for the defence. Just have to decide which side to give it to. Choices, choices, choices. What was the line in that other song by Mick and Keith, that song based on the Bulgarov book? Ah yes, “it was you and me”.
This is the court case which could go either way and whichever way it goes could mean the end of the Universe. Ending both of us. Unless, of course my friend, those Readers get us first.
That battle royal with the Moruti. Now that should have been the ending to die for. I know i could have taken him. Wizardry or no wizardry. Politicsl connections or no political connections. Piece of cake.
Meawhile back at the ranch as we South Africans like to say, Dan Lazarus social calendar is filled up with invitation to funeral after funeral — by the deceaseds. They love to chat with him and reminisce, maybe even theologize or philosophize whilst watching the proceedings from the sidelines, always breaking off the conversation, as they rightly should, as, with all due ceremony, the casket ( I almost said “cake”) gets lowered into the ground.
poems 2 die for 