The Revenant

They found the revenant by the side of the road, sleeping on a bed of pine needles, oblivious to the rain. After wrapping him in a raincoat, they drove him to the ruins of a small, stone warehouse on the side of a mountain, where they had made a makeshift camp. A good fire burned in a cast iron stove, and the fragrance of fresh coffee wafted through the den. They fed him pancakes and roasted chestnuts and gave him some cigarettes. Though he did not sob or speak much, thin rivulets of tears ran down his pale cheekbones. When he had eaten, they smoked in silence, giving him time. Their ravenous eyes were met by his calm, sorrowful gaze that never blinked. The revenant knew well what they wanted, and began to speak before they could ask any questions. Not long after I was buried, I woke up, and I saw myself at a distance. And I was much younger. It was that time of life when everything is on the edge. And I expected to see the harvest of all the rotten seeds I had sown, but there was no such thing. The man I saw was a good man, almost perfect. And she was perfect. I saw them looking after the garden, chopping firewood, rowing out onto the silver lake at dusk, whispering and laughing. Her eyes were often thoughtful, but never hurt, never sad. For ages, I watched, almost blinded by the radiance of their beauty that only burned and corroded me more from the inside out. And then I was sleeping on pine needles, and it was raining. I wonder if they’ll hang me again. The others exchanged glances. The world is not quite the same, they whispered. There hasn’t been a hanging in a hundred years. The revenant sighed. The fire crackled and the rain began again, making a strange orchestra of the sheet metal, stones, tarpaulin, the glittering boughs, the old army truck, the gravel, and his old white skeleton.

The Quarry

Not far past the reservoir, the quarry emerged from the pines, angular, terraced and bone-gray. The gravel crunched beneath the tires of the old lorry as it slowed to a stop by the edge. Rain had begun to spatter the stones like abstract painting. The worker got out and lit a cigarette, the yellow reflector bands on his dark duck cotton jacket gleaming in the dying light. He lit a fire in the firepit with some logs he had brought and sat down on a boulder to drink from a small flask of whiskey. Another pair of headlights flashed as another truck approached, stirred the gravel and stopped. It was the journalist that had been hounding him for some time. The young man got out and walked over, looking up briefly at the dark indigo of the dusk and rain, and then staring at the fire and the worker. Smoking quietly, the worker declined to answer any questions. All of this had been discussed before. The courts had sided with the quarry; there was nothing more to say. Frustrated, the journalist began to speak of destroyed habitats and climate change. The earth was dying every day, and this ignorant, illiterate worker had no idea what he was doing. The man looked at his large, old hands and laughed. “Not illiterate,” he said quietly. “And I am not sure you should mourn the earth the way you do. She is not your friend. In the First World War, mother earth killed 80,000 soldiers in avalanches along the Austrian front in the Alps. Snow and rocks—not bullets—killed them. Plague killed 100,000,000 during the reign of Justinian; the Black Death killed 200,000,000 starting in the 14th Century. 100,000,000 died of the Spanish flu of 1918. The Asian flu killed 2 million in 1957. 123,000 perished in a tsunami in Southern Italy in 1908; 500,000 in the Bhola cyclone in 1970; 4,000,000 in floods in China in 1931; 2,000,000 in the Yellow River Flood in 1887; 200,000 in the Gansu earthquake of 1920; 143,000 in the Tokyo earthquake of 1923; 200,000 in the Xining Earthquake of 1927; 110,000 in the Ashkabad earthquake of 1948; 200,000 in the Haiti Earthquake of 2010; 250,000 in the Antioch Earthquake in 526; 230,000 in the Aleppo Earthquake in 1138; 273,000 in Haiyuan Earthquake in 1920; 280,000 in the Indian Ocean Earthquake and tsunami in 2004. As many as 655,000 died in the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976; 830,000 had died long ago in the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556. 1.5 million died of drought in India in 1967-68. 5 million died from drought and famine in the Soviet Union in the late 50s. And that is just a sample of the dramatic events. One couldn’t count all of the other everyday murders the earth has committed if one tried. You said I am contributing to a mass extinction event. There were plenty before Homo erectus stood on his hindlegs, walked, and played with fire. Somewhere between five and twenty mass extinction events have occurred in the last 540 million years. There was a time the ocean was so toxic that only the horseshoe crab, the jellyfish and a handful of other species survived. The earth has no pity. I would say that destroying the planet were an act of revenge if I thought such a thing were possible. The earth may give us life sometimes, but she inevitably kills everything that grows on her surface. Nothing survives. That is the meaning of extinction. 99% of all life that has ever existed has gone into oblivion. Only one percent survived! And don’t look to other planets or stars for comfort, my young friend. The explosion of the Tunguska Event in 1908 slaughtered 2,000 square kilometres of trees instantly. Our lives are clouds and shadows at best. Arthur Schopenhauer once said: Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don’t believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other. The earth is eating us. And something will eat the earth one day. Your life is a mist! It will burn off before you want it to. The sky will fall, and the stars will avenge us. The only problem is that we don’t really know if they are still there—their light is millions and billions of years old. Would you like a drink?” The journalist stared with contempt, horror and embarassment at the man and his firepit. Time and again he had rehearsed this conversation on the drive up, and not once had he anticipated any of this. And so he turned around, got back into his car, and drove off into the darkness. The worker had another drink and lit another smoke. Then he looked up to the beauty of the almost obscured mountains of flint and the spiked crowns of the pines and firs blurring into the nightfall and rainfall, grateful and content in a place where nothing was lost. The fire lit up the wet gravel and the wind began to rush through the woods. The good earth was beautiful.

The Pit

The crucifix towered on the edge of the high cliffs of a pit at the end of the earth that fell into the sea, into a cove with a great churning corry. Night and day the whirlpool thrummed and soughed, the winds moaned and screamed. The sides of the pit were two crescent shaped promontories, again of sheer cliff, that gave the ends of the earth the appearance of a clamp or wrench, or two scythes curving towards each other. They may have whipped him lightly, if at all. They did not nail his hands or his feet. Instead, they secured him to the crucifix with ropes made from old whips and chains, but in such a way that hanging was not very torturous, though it was not painless. Ravens trained by augurs brought him food and water. For days, he listened to the horrifying song of the pit and its whirlpool, an incessant sound that magnified at times but never subsided. One by one, they came—pilgrims and outcasts, naked and clothed. They would murmur to the wind or weep before throwing themselves headlong into the darkness of the pit and its cold ocean spray. On moonlit nights or days of clear weather, centurions, legionnaires, the occasional augur and senator, even slaves would come to picnic below the giant cruxifix, eating roasted lambs, loaves of fragrant bread, black olives and figs. They drank heady wines, mocked the hanged man, laughed hideously like hyenas, sang paeans and hymns to their conquests, proclaimed their laws and lectured on their superior science and justice, before packing up to return to they city with its endless dramas, public hearings, lavish banquets and chariot races. The man hanged in silence. The pilgrims and outcasts returned, mumbling and weeping, or silent as the stones on the moor. Some prayed or sang before leaping; others took out parchment and wrote lengthy epistles. Some even burned their books or lit themselves on fire before jumping into the pit. Once, a beautiful maiden in a white chiton approached. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. They conversed, and he saw that she was a poet and an astronomer and a deaconess of the sacred way. His heart burned with love for her purity and beauty as she picked flowers and discoursed on the meaning of the constellations and the eternity of grace. Then, she suddenly plumbed the depths of her body with a dagger and threw herself away into the abyss. The hanged one wept until he lost consciousness. Perhaps he even briefly died. Travelers later reported that they had passed through this desolate country, and had seen the punished criminal still alive and still fed by ravens, speaking strange words to passersby. When they asked a ploughman or a cart driver who it was that sang proverbs and prayed old songs of hope and joy, they laughed and said he was an antiquated type of madman. And what type would that be? the travelers would inquire. A priest, they whispered, but one could hardly hear them for the roar of the wind and the waves in the pit.