By Dhruv Makhija
No coverage, not even one bar; the battery was dead anyway. It was still daytime, but there was an overcast and the sky had a perfectly even dullness, so there was no way to tell what time of day it was, much less which direction was north or south or anything else for that matter. A two-lane blacktop road snaked up into the distance and disappeared into some trees, or a forest if you wanted to get technical about it. It also snaked down toward some lumpy hills and disappeared there as well. What sounded like a two-stroke chainsaw could be heard in the distance, but it was impossible to tell whether it was up in the forest or down in the lumpy hills. This had been happening more often lately. Two different ways to go, with a dead battery and no bars, and nobody left to blame.
With the fortitude of resilience I had borne out the pain of the vile agony of my distempering nightmares, I woke up from another one. “How long has it been?” I asked him. Perseus had been a constant in my journey since I got struck with this rather arcane illness. The permanent pain in my arms was always overwhelming. His was a face you had never seen before, and yet, when it came to your life, you could trust him blindly. The scars on his face, the veins on his wrinkled hands all spoke of experience, and camaraderie.
“A quadrant. It has been the fifth in a row." His hoarse voice relaxed my ear drums as I looked into my convulsing arms, my vision blurred by the vastitude of suppressants I had taken to prevent the nightmare from happening again. In vain, all in vain.
I couldn't quite draw a definitive conclusion from the conflicting expressions on his face, whether he was repenting for dragging me into this hellhole or whether he was bemused by my unending suffering. my mind, however, was more concerned in navigating the clouds that were surrounding this…thing..for I was becoming convinced that my dreams were closer to reality than normal dreams are supposed to be.
“Let’s get moving” his voice seeped out from the pocket of lip he had opened to let out a puff from his cigar, the sun should be out, except we weren’t sure if it was. Unsurity. That was the third member in our party of two. What time was it? Where were we? Where were we headed to? Both of us being unlearnt in the art of uncertainty, were accompanied by a resounding answer that resonated inside both our hearts, “I’m unsure of it.” And our third, it agreed to it. What better time to look at the coppice in front of us and wonder, “Did we cross this once before?”
The visceral sound of the two stroke chainsaw that we had been chasing after, was inexplicably starting to follow us like a shadow.The more we approached or tried to approach it the more it seemed we were walking away from it, which created a kind of frustration in both of us.Walking through this maze of greenery seemed to amplify these emotions and add to them that treacherous drop of fatigue that made me want to give up.
I could look down upon the hilltops,a path that was waiting to be explored but in no way did I have enough curiosity at this juncture to explore things just for the sake of it. Looking down at the peaks which were covered by the blanket of smoke made me feel nauseous,not able
to distinguish between reality and the nightmares which had been so after me.So I moved along,hoping,praying,that this was the trail that was meant to take us to our journey's end.
I held in the sigh I had been clawing at my neck for so long to release, suppressing it, i looked up, at the vortex of innumerable clouds that had formed the shape of an eye, a rather monstrous looking one, I thought to myself. “They were right”, I mumbled as my hat covered what was but little remaining of my apathetic gaze.
Was the book really accursed? After all, when has greed not been a necessity in the growth of mankind? I would shovel dirt over their arguments with that one thought. But now, in the face of acute helplessness, where was I? Dwindling between the bridge that linked Earth to the heavens? Or in the fabled city the book called, “El Dorado”? I remember it fairly well. The witty narrative and the poised reputation that preceded the book. What did it say again? “For the imperishable desire, is lost Dorado,
For the fleeting, the adamant, is El Dorado.
For the forever mourning.
Is El dorado.”
So it was clear,I was finally here,this…thing for it surely cannot be labelled as a city,this was the infamous "El Dorado".The chainsaw kept buzzing,so much that by this point the sound of the chainsaw had become something that was integrated even within us like an addiction that one is so intertwined with, that it is impossible to rid of.
The ghosts of my past came rushing back all at once like a haphazard collage that wanted to taunt me by reminding me of my stupid decision to come here,this place that was for me,as close to hell as I ever wanted to get."You can't be serious!?" "What else do I have left here anyways?" "But this insanity will be the end of you" "The end of me was when you walked out that door when I needed you the most."
Although me and Helen had always been on opposite poles of a decision ever since our decision to tie the knot,not taking into account our decision to also separate due to this stark contrast which made it impossible for things to somehow work out,I was slowly starting to come around to her viewpoint and miss her despite all that had happened between us both.
The buzzing sound of chainsaw continued while I reminisced about the last time I saw my 5 year old angel,my Donna. She was the only reason I second guessed my decision. However, burying that fear of never seeing her again,it seems I actually carved the tombstone of our time together with the epitaph 'He wanted her to have a better life'.
At least most of my consciousness now stopped trying to battle my vision. I could finally take in the fact that the castle was floating and a hill was beneath the forest we were walking on. I could finally fathom that the trees were made of ash, and the acorns at the feet of the shrubs were a little more than just fruit. I could finally be sure that the vortex of silver clouds
overbearing the intensity of monstrosity the place engulfed, did in fact form a watchful eye.
Strange, the first thing that came to my mind upon looking at the clouds was the phrase, “And with Him are the keys of the unseen; none knows them except Him. And He knows what is on the land and in the sea. Not a leaf falls but that He knows it." Is this their God?
But who are they, and where are they? Are they even human? Are they lost wanderers like ourselves who, upon being filled with crude greed and unbearing suffering have found their way into this city?
Suddenly. Suddenly it felt like something was snatched away from me. Something so incorporated something so perfectly carved into my personality that the sheer absence of it was making my head hurt with an irrevocable intensity. Ah. The chainsaw had stopped working. After the endless ticking of time the chainsaw had finally stopped. For a minute I thought that due to my numb senses my ears had somehow stopped functioning and I had become deaf, because by this point the chainsaw was like an inseparable part of us but it was finally silence's noble presence which graced us.
"GONG",the sharp sound of the bell tower's bell which was visible to me from a mile away in the middle of the forest, rising above the trees,made me alarmed and I felt as if it was some kind of battle cry which was announced by my fate for everything was so quickly going downhill.
“Where are we?” I asked Perseus. And a foreboding inside me that defied any logical explanation whispered, “Eros” And simultaneously, my lips followed Perseus’ swiftly, tracing each of his movements with my own. And in broken voices we both whimpered together. “Eros’ forest”. We hesitated. And before taking the next step, we somehow find it alluring to approach the sound that was so clearly something that could even scare and keep death at bay. We moved onwards, slowly steadily but most importantly cautiously.
A crimson flash of red, spilling across the ground in front of our eyes which were slowly starting to water at the mere sight at all the rushing thoughts of what if it were us.The axe just pierced through that person's neck as cutting his trachea in half, as for the first time in life i actually saw what an Adam's apple looks like.Seeing his head being rolled across the ground a mere 100 metres away from where we stood made my mind crumble.
For some reason the passive expression of Perseus who was right next to me was something I didn't even observe for a minute. My mind was fixated on the gruesome sight in front of me.
“Afraid?” he asked me. “Of course I'm afraid, what do you mean? The man in front of us just got his head chopped off till it was dangling off of the single carotid artery and you’re taunting me saying that I am being feigned by fear? The people around him attacked the corpse as if they had been hungry for decades, and who even was the person? How do you distinguish if it wasn’t one of them? HOW DO YOU CONVINCE ME THE NEXT TARGET WON’T BE US? Say something, Oh goddamnit say something.” I say aggressively, holding his shoulders like the mirror I used to look at and see the monster inside of me.
“Because it is I that rules over them.” he whispers. “And it is by choice that you must not be harmed.” Everything starts spinning. I black out.
When my eyes opened again I wish I had become blind or had better never woken up again after that horrific change of events. In mere moments my world was turned upside down and my brain was split in half by the sheer confusion and fear it was filled with.The person who
was guiding me through my journey had just disappeared, a human was beheaded in front of me and where even was I?
I was dead sure that all that the book had stated was true as true as the truth that I had thrown away my life due to the infinite well of greed inside me.The forest like the one I was just in "Eros' Forest" the book had mentioned a place like that and if the book was correct I was in the midst of the rite of purification and this cave like place fit the exact description of the location mentioned.
This was a dark cave-like place that was as desolate as a graveyard which it might be, for I wondered whether this was the afterlife.Then something happened which made me realise that this was definitely real. The inside of my palm was bloodied, the crimson drops splashed on the floor and I noticed a scribble on it which supposedly was something written with the blood drawn from my hand. "For the imperishable desire is lost Dorado.You are on your own now."
Conceiving the realisation that I was in fact alone in this hell, something suddenly hit my foot and i realised that something was scattered all across the floors of this dungeon of sorts.Innumerable skeletons and rotting skulls that is the sight in this cave and now there was not a drop of fear present within me for this had been the most normal I had seen that day and my mind was preoccupied with something else.
Someone had just snatched my daughter from me, snatched the means with which I was going to give her a life worth living. This filled me with rage, rage beyond comprehension.Not remorse anymore. With a craziness with which I want to get up and kill. And stay alive. For it is I who is hungry. Hungry now not only for the gold for which I had come to this hell but also to find out who it is that is basically trying to push me through the gates of death. Few minutes ago, death to me seemed like an easy escape but now I won't let anything come between me and my goal.
“Someone”, this seemingly alluring place wasn’t a setting, but an entity. A personification of my morbid thoughts, the devil on my right shoulder guiding me to this forsaken rift in the culmination of human desires. “The rite of purification” I thought to myself. Cleansing, sacrificial cleansing was what I had just witnessed. The most terrifying thought for me, was the fact that I just saw the utter disgust of extreme human emotion into play. Cannibalism, gore and violence. The starvation of empathy, kindness and gentleness. Raw human emotion. The bestiality that each of us keeps trapped within us like a candle blotted out by a glass.
This entity, it removed the glass, kindling the flame within these creatures that their mortal selves fought so hard against and lost. Their crude desires now accompany them, in the lost city of greed and gore. “For the fleeting, the adamant, is El Dorado.”
I get up, the piece of my torn shirt wrapped around my bleeding palm, and my fingers wrapped around the axe of my purity. With divinity, I shall prosper kindness. Kindness into this hell. I will not end up like them. I will save them all.
I get up. Walking across what seemed like an endless abyss, I was mentally devastated and physically crushed, but still I carried on. Glancing at the skulls and skeletons could only make me imagine what if I was the only one who was there? The sheer thought of death now made me shiver, perhaps it was the first time I had been so close to it.
I could only think of the family of the people lying down.How did they cope up with this? Knowing that the greed of wealth granted the curse of death to their loved ones?Did that tarnish their image in the minds of their admirers?What would Donna think of me? Was it not my own decision to abandon her? To give up love and affection, and possibly attachment, for the pursuit of my own hedonistic pleasures?
I looked down over a gravestone that for some reason caught my attention out of all the others. Maybe it was even calling out to me. I bent down to look at the epitaph and cleaned the dust that shrouded the name of the deceased.
“Helen.” It was Helen's name on the gravestone coupled with her date of birth. The day of her death however was not visible; it was empty! The epitaph read
"HELEN:Desire-Money".for some reason I started to reminisce on the topic that were those three words.
Helen sure had that ambition,that greed deep rooted in her.Even though she tried to stop me for the sake of my own life and for the sake of Donna, I can't seem to forget that spark in her eye when I talked about the city of gold.Had fear not had a bigger influence I'm sure she would've been the first one to come to these pits of hell in search of the jewels of heaven.All our conflicts eventually leading to us separating actually centred around money that was the long and short of all the times we had to scream at each other during our short stint of being a married couple.Even after all that I'd give anything to see her face again for this life of deprivation had me realise to some extent the importance of living.
I had been walking for a while now, my thoughts, being completely numbed out of my feeble brain, had started to sink in as beliefs. It is a dangerous, volatile occurrence, the conversion of thoughts into beliefs, that is, for thoughts should be temporary, and they should not meddle with the construct of human nature one builds upon fighting grief and sorrow.
Sleeplessness, fatigue and hunger had taken control of the vehicle I had been the master of. Hence the relief. Relief that grief wasn’t the only driver in my life now. That my animalistic necessities had taken over sin. The certainty that i was not going to end up like them, the fact tha
I try to breathe. “The air is heavy, something is wrong. Something is very wrong.” I think, wheezing for air which had, in a blitz turned denser than a grain of sand. My consciousness was blurring, I had to crawl out of this cave, otherwise I would be buried in it.
The exit seemed as distant as the hope of seeing my daughter's face again but I wouldn't accept either circumstance without doing anything about it.I stumbled across the graveyard,half alive,then was it?could it be?
I thought I saw the exit for a fleeting moment but to no avail as my eyes were now blinded by the golden light. I was constantly thinking through all this about the many different ways I was going to liberate the mindless people I just saw by giving them the salvation of death for now i was determined to either die trying or achieve what I set out here for.The light was almost like it pierced my eyes but I carried on waiting,hoping for the fact that I was finally heading somewhere, or was I?
With intensified blood gushing out through the crevice of the cave’s rear, I found myself falling off of the cliff’s ledge. In that moment, closing my eyes, I wished for acceptance. Yeah, acceptance. The word now seemed to linger over my mind as the tentative notes of the fife back in my hometown. I see Donna’s hand reaching out to me, and I try to hold onto it. Try to convince myself that she needed me more than anyone or anything I could get for her. “Was I evil?” I think to myself. “Splash”
I wake up and find myself soaked to the knee. I had fallen in a muddy ditch, I presumed, and around me a lightning-struck tree, with red-eyed corvi glaring at me from the branches. Not me, it was the remains of the half eaten corpse that was beside me, floating, very lifeless and chewed up now. In a murder of cawks and cries they hurried upon the body now. Scavenging has always been a holy concept to me. “The remains of the dead”, the only instance where the dead were able to provide for the living. Funnily enough, it granted me solace. Maybe after death, I’d prove to be useful too.
I get up, and stoically wipe off the flesh from my jacket. Walk up to the shore and pick up my axe, ledging it by my shoulder. I look up, at God, the sky. It looked rather hungry, like the fading flame of burning desire in my heart.“A God. I thought to myself. The divine, the cosmic entity who resides in a different plane of existence. A plane far beyond the reach of any mortal. Yet, in mythology books and innumerable stories I had read of humans slaying the Gods. The absurdity to kill the idea they themselves created, always doted upon me as redundant.”
The skull bedded path that led to the honorary castle made of jadelite, the “cosmic gold” as the book said, was slowly receding in length. And with the castle closing in, so was my superfluous destiny. Murders of ravens flocked the dried willows, burnt with the ecstasy of gratification. Darker, denser, the foliage got, till there was left nothing but a great wall that i had to overcome. Wasn’t this much like the defences in my hearts wherein I kept locked the love which kept me human? I had penetrated it once, surely. Surely I can do it again.Strangely, I seemed to phase through the wall of jadelite, my mouth drooling of impulsive greed. “Wealth, so much wealth. Wealth equals power. Wealth equals satisfaction” I was finally here. Finally inside the premises of the seclusion of all accumulated wealth at the “Burgeoning castle”. My mouth now being full of drool, I sniffled to spit out a large chunk of it to the ground.
Horrifyingly, the honey dew coloured droplets now arranged themselves in letters. “The language of Caresia.” The book’s specific page dedicated to the understanding of the language of this immortal El Dorado, that I now realised had carved its unwavering script into my head. And by that surreal wisdom I could understand the letters arranged on the floor. The final key in the “Song of Elorada”, the final fate of every traveller in El dorado. "For the forever mourning, Is El dorado."
In a split second there occured something that managed to startle me even after all these ups and downs that I had never envisioned myself having.The honey dew droplets were now starting to separate into two masses of flesh.When I set sight upon Donna's face for the first time in a long while,it made me dumbfounded with sort of a shock mixed with that dim light of happiness as for some reason my feelings and senses were dumbing down each and every second I stayed in this accursed place.Seeing Donna made me completely forget about the other product of the rearrangement of those honey droplets.Standing there was the guide who had led me to this place,the guide who was the only one who had replied to my SOS messages and my cries of help when I met the first setback of this journey that was falling into a pit double my size,the guide who when we last met referred to himself as the one who reigned over this hell.There was Perseus standing a few feet in front of me.When I saw the knife that Perseus held up to my Donna's neck,it was the most beautiful piece of jadelite I had seen carved by a mortal's hand.Suddenly realising the utter disgust of my first reaction towards this predicament I screamed out ,"STOP IT!! I'D CHOOSE DONNA OVER ANYTHING ELSE EVEN BEFORE YOU LAY SUCH A CHOICE."My eyes still fixated on the knife, now saw its swift movement and noticed the red drops of blood trickling down the neck of my beloved Donna and to my surprise I was still as numb as blood is when it falls upon the snow.
Perseus spoke in the calmest way I had ever seen anyone speak, "Who said anything about such a choice? There goes the last domino in my successor's ascension to the throne of El Dorado:a city that many come in search for but only a special few like me and you,who have that spark are capable of ruling,are capable of utilising its infinite resources,are capable of handling the power that comes with it; simply because they are so powerless.Your choice was never about your daughter.In fact there is no choice,you had already made that choice when you chose to abandon your daughter.Yes you abandoned her no matter how much you try to console yourself saying you wanted her to have a better life, it is all a facade. All you wanted was to satisfy your own greed.Just like your former wife.The epitaph you saw was no coincidence.Oh yes she is here too because the reason you both got married in the first place was because you are both cut from the same cloth.All you ever wanted was power infinite without ever having to work for it. All you ever wanted was to somehow get to this place as soon as you read about it in that accursed book.The only difference was you were straight forward with it not trying to hide anything from anyone but your wife's greed surpassed yours and the enchantment set upon her by reading that book forced her to come to this place and try her hardest to win over this throne.Still she was never worthy because she had a more prominent spark of love in her heart .All you wanted was El Dorado. Here it is, then, accept it. "For the fleeting,the adamant,is El Dorado."That was what the book said,right?Then go ahead.Sit on that throne.It is yours. El Dorado is yours." I felt like my humanity was loosening just like my grip on the axe's handle. "Kill me and the throne is yours.Free me from this burden.Give me the gift of death.Then go out and admire your new kingdom and your new people.El Dorado was never a city or a castle.It was this throne,that is now waiting to be your servant."
“And a heirless El Dorado is to be consumed by the eternal flames of the Goddess, “Yajiranga” along with the all seeing deity in the sky, “Jadartyk”” those were the words of the final chapters in the book, along with the scenic description of the "Devastation of Dorado".
Walking outside with the warm edges on the cold blade of my axe, lathered with the most beautiful scarlet, dripping down as trails behind my footsteps, I exhale. “The choice wasn’t between my daughter and my greed. That was a gamble I had lost long ago.Perhaps Helen had too.Maybe I would see her here.The ambiguity of the actions of Perseus were tough to decipher, but ultimately, the deliverance of the being was of the question : “Will you give up what it means to be human to rule over this place?” That put a lot of things into perspective for me. At that instant, I wouldn't consider myself divine, or honoured, but rather introspective. I looked back at all the consequences, the affirmations of my past life woven into my present, and then rationally, I must say, I decided my course of action. I looked around at the people gathered amongst the trees, and the corvi glancing at me. In their eyes I saw the first dewdrop of human emotion that scarcity forbade they had ever carried in their hearts. I pulled up the case of my montecristo, the case which supposedly linked the earth and El dorado, at least in my heart. Picked one out and primed it and lit it from the lighter on its case. The corner of my eyes suddenly caught sight of a familiar face running towards me from amongst the crowd of the mindless inhabitants of el dorado. It was Helen. Clutching her back in my bloody arms, embracing her warm embrace, I felt alive? Or I did not feel anything whatsoever. I lit the cigar, took a generous puff, and looked at my phone.
“Ms. Bennett, who told this story to you?”, the little girl sitting around me asked. “Oh nina, no one, this was a very vivid dream i had when i was a little older than you are right now.A dream so weird where I wasn't even myself.I was someone else.” I say to her, looking into her big round eyes and caressing her cheeks gently. “Around that time, my mother had left me, and I remember my father going after her to chase her. Recently though, the images from the dream have been recurring to me, and my arm hurts so much more.” “Ms. Benett, please continue, Nina doesn’t know what questions to ask,” Wagner said. “Oh sure Wagner, I know your impatience doesn’t allow you to sit still till the story ends, so I’ll continue. But I'm exhausted, and so I will quickly wind up the ending.” The kids' eyes lightened up as they closed in around me. I took a deep breath and thought of my arms which were wra feeling much more relaxed now. I continued, then
They made their way through the crowd, and back to the El Dorado. And as they approached it, a crow flew directly over their heads and landed on the hood and then looked at them. They stood some distance away and watched the crow watching them. Another crow flew directly overhead and landed beside it. The first crow squawked and then both flew away. They watched the crows disappear, looked at each other, and then got in the Eldorado. Only one way to go this time, with five bars and full battery.
By Dhruv Makhija
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