A man stood when the scaffold fell. He stretched his naked legs and looked at Eve. He saw her mouth move, and had to blink, not understanding sight, or what smiles are, or where he was at all. His eyes drank the world around him anyway, like a man who had not a drink in years.
There was land. A horizon, a sky. But, this land was not a natural land. Not any more, it had been taken by growth of a form unknow. Shards of shale and fingers of tendril calcite, carbon wire wound round itself, as edifice — razor sharp, molecule thin, but tempered into behavioral structure recalling the flocking of birds.
He stood on a small plateau above and within it, as did Eve, ensconced by mounds of moss and grass. The right angles of the scaffold were ringing them as if a tiny rampart, on just three sides. A rope wound through the grass, but also, sprigs of green and tan eloped from the earth. Squirrels bounded, red and gray, nearly vaulting the man’s thawing feet. It was a preternatural place, but alive. The man looked down at the rope. Then he looked at Eve.
She seemed more sure in her body than his body allowed him, like she had risen some time ago. She was bemusedly plucking seeds from plant forms drying there in the unseen sun, flicking the seeds from her fingers, in a cascade of elation. The ground squirrels devoted themselves to consumption, and she danced, almost, as she fed them. Calmly, slowly, without pace, buoyed upon the grass blooms beneath her feet. Her head was crowned by a star, her skin was the color of night.
I knew Eve, before coming here, thought the man as he watched her.
He was shocked when Eve spoke, as though he did not know a voice was possible.
“You must be sore from hanging there for so long,” said Eve placidly.
How can I speak? His nerves were unwinding in a cascade of static.
“Hanging?” he asked, after a disorienting pause.
She laughed.
“Of course you can speak. You are a man.”
She had heard me?
He felt he had just been born. But yet, he stood strong enough, in the windless atmosphere, his naked skin erupting in feeling, his long hair dancing on his back. He felt a catching in his throat. The conduits of becoming had hardened in his body upon observation of the self, his consciousness was developing more understanding with each passing block. He looked at his hands, stretching his fingers like an infant. He was material, but, from where?
“You are the hanged man,” said Eve. “Did you not know that?”
She could read his thoughts.
“I have no memory,” he said.
He looked at the ground, and saw the rope again. He could picture himself now, hanging from the scaffold which lay prone upon the hill. Was he interpreting or recalling now? He did not know.
Fuck, he thought, this is so upside down.
Upside down. He remembered himself hanging now. Upside down, swinging lightly on this very hill, where there now is no wind. His foot felt the strain of the rope, which was fastened around his ankle in a like a root twisting over root. He was not in pain, he was unfeeling, in the ecstasy of something between meditation and laughter. His free foot was positioned spryly against the inside of his knee, his arms and hands beatifically arraigned, in a posture like those of the icons of old.
What is this image?
He did not know.
He sat on the ground, weakening with the failure of knowledge to comprehend, and held his head in his hand. He could not look at Eve, even as she placed her arm around him, even as the memories came to him. His birth, his coming here, it seemed a divine thing. He know nothing at all but yet he observed stories, thousands of stories, like an index. His mind was searching, hoping to find himself there.
“Am I Adam?” he asked at last.
She laughed.
“No, that is an ancient story. Now is only now. Names are not meaningful anymore. So sad, how the trenchant past finds its way into the clouds of becoming. Wake, sir. Wake and look out over this land, it is yours, it is mine. It has no need for those stories at all.”
He did, he looked. The arms of the city were goss, woven finely in patterns material and informatics. Ocular fibers, the constant humming of matter that was not matter sifting through protocol layers so dense that their keening trills sounded in every tonal register. His eyes widened as he noticed a pattern evoked in that green-gold-gray city, lit by no discernable sun. It was an aesthetic so strange that it woke something in him, something poetically engrained, but from nowhere but here. No time but now.
He stood to see it more clearly, the rope falling from his ankle. He craned his neck to see.
“What is it?”
“It is our city.”
It felt so close to him. So needful. He felt it calling him like a vortex. Suddenly, the music of humming matter became more clear, more fine, a soft song wound through the ether and entered his heart. She kissed his lips, and he closed his eyes and they swayed together. The music, it was welcoming him. She held him.
“Welcome.”
**************************
The Hanged man would never know if for sure, but when they fucked, he thought of her as a witch, burned many eons ago. He felt her dark skin, sweat building on it. She knew so deeply, he thought, so much more is there.
When they were done, she was Eve again, and back among the flowers as he lay in the grass. Their fine blades, before his eyes, blurred to a matrix of lossy nothing, sleep overtaking all that was.
He wondered a final, nonsensical thought, before succumbing. Do the machines of the city sleep?
***************************
He opened his eyes, and another was there, a winged thing, an orb, filled with mechanized nanite that grinded itself, like an infinite clock. Its wings spread out from it like an enormous bird, gold and copper feathered, muscled with actuators and hydraulics, slowly pulsing in the immaculate air. Its form against the sky, as impressive as it was, was nothing in the light of its detail. His eyes were drawing to its center, and he stood closer to look, feeling no fear.
Soon, he could not look away from it, wanting to be within it, to understand it despite its sublimity, pulsing with machine, gears becoming smaller and smaller, to the infinite of static, receding to zero scale.
“What are you” he asked.
There was no answer, the thing just hovered there. It was waiting. He put his hand on it, and from the center of the orb, a fine mucosa dripped, enveloping his hand.
“Be careful,” said Eve. She was sitting, not far away. “It is an Angel, but not like those from stories. It is not made with our souls in mind.”
The mucosa became more thick, and brightened with an internal light as it took his hand into it. He felt something being taken from him, but he did know what.
“That one is from the future. Keep an image in your mind that binds you to this hill, or you will become its slave.”
An image in his mind?
He was feeling ecstatic. Supplicant divisions of his body were falling to this being, this Angel of nether futures. He closed his eyes, however, and felt, in his other hand a pulsing heart. Blood dripped from it, and he saw it, behind his back, pooling on the ground, a darkness almost black. The grasses craned toward it, and flowers sprang from it, and the squirrels, red and gray, walked toward it, to drink. It was an awful scene to behold, real or not, and yet he felt himself thankful for it. The tension between the Angel’s grip on his one hand and the grisly, warmth in his other felt difficult to hold. It was ripping him apart, holding him there.
Good, said Eve, in his mind.
She was not smiling.
It is painful.
You are hanged again.
But, you and I are safe.
Hold this position, you must hold it forever, between the heart and the machine.
I love you, and it is your destiny. It is the only way.
