Chapter 22 (Closing)
(Significant number of Chapters?)
Marcus Curry dreamt.
A Masonic dream—a pastoral scene of the deep south, of broad, flat salt marshes in a humid summer sky, of the sweet, clean taste of honeysuckle and freshly picked blackberries, of the buzzing katydid whose song ushers in the tempest of an afternoon rain shower, and of the rich smells of black dirt, home to wriggling earthworms who collude with the bayou sunfish, bass, and trout in the great conspiracy to leave men humbled by partaking eight fold of their time and yielding but one of their flesh. And evermore insistently does man beseech the Gods to give up the secrets of the unseen depths where only the owl and eagle are fed by the rarity of their vision and the scarcity of their cry.
On such a field, beside such a babbling bayou, the rain came and went, depositing sparkling beads upon a checkered-cloth picnic table, near to which his family lounged in the sun. They broke bread and drank wine upon this Taurus of heaven and thus were they freed from all linear time.
He was as a ghost to his father, Quentin the impaler, who soundlessly whistled as he worked his finery on the banks. His father drew forth worms from his bucket of earth and numbered them by imaginary integers such that each became God-microcosmic. Then with hands of gentle majesty he impaled them, baiting his JIIYod tied-off with Gordian knots, and drawing concentric circles in the air with the end of his rod, until the complexity of all caused a headache.
Next, his Grandparents stood, quietly proud in their youth and splendor even as his mother was near, seasoning the stews of his childhood, mastering the seven secret herbs and spices and bending light for her ALL who was Quentin—she who lived for, but barely after his diffusion.
And there… in the peaceful glade half-dappled by Julia-set rhythms of golden light was his core. A warm breeze sighed across Valerie, Kâce, and Annette who held a beautiful baby, his tiny velvet hand grasping at Naji who fawned and cooed.
He was their ghost as they were his Monad and through the ethereal silence, again, he felt his heart shatter into the stuff of a new and terrible cosmos. He wondered, who among these whom he loved most, would know of his God-microcosmic. Who would walk the world’s and epochs of his design. But even as he asked the question, he knew of but one whom he both loved and hated in a proportion equal to the mathematics of fractal evolution, of becoming and transcendence.
So she turned to him, his Lilith, the great betrayer and deceiver—his Valerie, who shrouded herself in veils disguised as flesh, yet flesh he had loved most of all. She extended her arms out to him—her lips unmoving, yet she caused the aether to vibrate into bittersweet sound.
She said, “We’re all together, my dear Marc. We’ll be waiting for you as always we have been.”
Her words echoed, blending, indistinguishable from the swirling, re-shattering of his heart, so alike the solar-dappled rustling of leaves. He listened…
The wind faded into the high whine of a 767 and the familiar ding of a service call button.
Marcus’ eyes sprang open, his head comfortable against a porthole window. A distant island of clouds betrayed their altitude, though no stars shone yet to outline their position. Below, was only an endless expanse of
Michael Mollick