Yes
— Will Godwin
Evening, May 14, 2017
Citadel West
And the voice said:
[Blowhole-y of holies.]
[Ana! You’re alive!]
[Not…exactly.]
[Oh.]
[But sort of! Kabbalistic marriage seems to have some hidden features we didn’t realize. All those nights looking for clues in the Bible and we missed a doozy.]
[Should have checked Poe instead.]
[Poe?]
[“And not even the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, could ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Anna – ]
[Get a room, you two!]
[Erica?!]
[Surprised to see me here?]
[Yes!]
[I think I died just before Ana did. It seems to have put me inside Ana’s head, and then when Ana transferred into your head, I came with her.]
[There are two different other people inside my head?!]
[Hoo boy, mi compadre, you are not going to like this]
[What? How? Uh, do any of you know what’s going on here?]
[I DO NOT KNOW IF I AM INCLUDED IN “ANY OF YOU” BUT I THINK I HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA. CONSIDER RABBI SHIMON’S WRITINGS ON THE FIVE LEVELS OF THE SOUL. THE FIRST, THE NEFESH, REPRESENTS PHYSICAL LIFE. THE SECOND, THE RUACH…]
[Uriel! What did I tell you about infodumping directly into people’s minds?]
[I DO NOT REMEMBER, BUT I ASSUME IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT IT BEING VERY EFFICIENT]
[Sohu?!]
[Yeah, when Father killed me, I think I ended up in your mind too. And Uriel with me.]
[So…Ana…Erica…Dylan…Sohu…Uriel…is there anyone else I should know about?]
[Aaaaaaron, you thought you were going to marry everyone except me but I ended up inside your head aaaaannnyway.]
[Sarah? How! I thought you were part of THARMAS]
[I am. THARMAS is with us too. When it was destroyed, we ended up in Sohu, and when she died, we ended up in you. Now we’re together forevvvvvver]
[I’m stuck with seven people in my head?!]
[ACTUALLY, I BELIEVE THE CURRENT SITUATION IS UNSTABLE AND WE WILL GRADUALLY MERGE INTO A SINGLE ENTITY]
[How gradually?]
[Which of you said that?]
[Wait, which of us said that?]
[Aaron, was that you?]
[Sort of]
[Who are we?]
[Adam Kadmon]
[Albion]
[Albion? Who?]
[ALBION-EST, I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE YET]
[That wasn’t a knock-knock joke!]
[I AM ALMOST CERTAIN THAT IT WAS. ALSO, “IT IS ALBION-D MY UNDERSTANDING]
[All be one and one be all!]
[Wait a second, no, merging into a superorganism with you guys was the worst mistake of my life and I hope I die. Die again. Super-die. Whatever.]
[In William Blake’s prophecies, Albion was the entity formed at the end of time, when all of the different aspects of the human soul finally came together to remake the world.]
[Remake the world?]
[The Comet King will speak the Explicit Name to reshape Hell. But here on Earth, things aren’t great either. Physics is broken, the world is collapsing, the apocalypse is in full swing. We need to make things right. The Comet King told us the Name was a notarikon encoded in the speech Metatron gave Ana. Now all we need to do is speak it.]
[No one except the Comet King can speak the Shem haMephorash!]
[No one except him could speak it. No one except him could see the whole universe at once, understand its joints and facets, figure out how it needed to be broken and remade. But we’re part supercomputer.]
[Yes. This isn’t a coincidence. A supercomputer. An encyclopaedic knowledge of kabbalah and the secret structure of the universe. A passion for revolution. And an answer to the problem of evil. This is what we were made for.]
[There’s someone else we need.]
We all realized it. We all paused, reflecting on what had to be done. We all agreed.
There are many summoning rituals, but one is older and purer than the others. Speak of the Devil, and he will appear.
“Thamiel,” I said.
He appeared before us. Exhausted, wounded, still bleeding ichor from a thousand cuts and bruises. He leaned on his bident like a crutch, limped towards us.
“It’s time,” I said.
The second head turned to me, and the floodgates opened. It started crying and crying, like it would never stop. Finally, it asked, almost as if it didn’t dare hope, “Is it really?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Did I do good?” it asked.
I didn’t answer.
“So many centuries,” it pled. “So much misery, so many tears, so many years of suffering. You couldn’t imagine it, nobody could imagine it, but I did what God wanted, I did my duty, but you have to tell me, please, at the end of everything, did I do good?”
I thought about everything I had witnessed. I thought back to Malia Ngo, the scariest person I had ever met, scarier in her way than the Comet King even. I thought of her last revelation, that even though she was the daughter of Thamiel, everything she had done, she had done for the love of good. I thought of Dylan Alvarez, who I had known only as a bogeyman on the news shows. He too had only wanted to do what was right. And I thought of the Other King, the crimson-robed monster who had killed the Cometspawn with barely a second thought, and how everything he did he had done out of love. I thought of all the villains I had feared, revealed to be unsung heroes all along. And with a jolt, I realized that it was all true, the tzimtzum, the shattering of the vessels, the withdrawal of divinity to hide God from himself. I started to laugh. The dark facet of God, call it evil, call it hatred, call it Thamiel, was hollow, more brittle than glass, lighter than a feather. I started laughing that Ana had wasted her question on the existence of evil, when evil was thinner than a hair, tinier than a dust speck, so tiny it barely even existed at all. Evil was the world’s dumbest joke, the flimsiest illusion, a piece of wool God pulled over His own eyes with no expectation that it could possibly fool anybody.
I didn’t say anything to Thamiel.
He sobbed, then handed me the bident. I took it from its far end, the two points in my two hands, the single-pointed end facing the Devil. A unident. He kept sobbing. I held the unident undaunted. Finally, I thrust it at him, and he disappeared, a puff of smoke, a thread too weak to hold.
[Are you ready?] I asked myself.
[Let’s go] I answered.
I thought again of all I had seen, all I had hoped. Everything that could have been different and everything that couldn’t have been other than it was. I thought of God’s garden of universes, growing out there somewhere, staggering the imagination. I thought of God, and Adam Kadmon, and Thamiel, and the divine plan. My thoughts unfolded into dreams and blueprints and calculations, and I held all of them in my mind at once, a vision like a perfect crystal, a seed transformed into something new and wonderful. I felt a fearsome joy, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I felt the heart of Adam Kadmon beating within me, freed of its constraints at last, a fervent wish to reshape and redeem itself.
My voice only wavering a little, I spoke the Explicit Name of God.
Thank you for reading Unsong.
I have a few extra things I need to take care of. I promised some people a tosafot, and I’m thinking of a couple other very small projects as well. I also have Vague Long-Term Plans to publish this in some more serious way. If you want to be kept up-to-date, please subscribe to the mailing list using the box at the top right of the page.
I have gotten some very vague expressions of interest from some people who claim to represent publishers, and I’ll be gradually looking into those in a way that might take a long time to bear any fruit. In the meantime I will not be authorizing an official print copy. If other people want to make an ebook version, or small-scale non-public print copies in ways that don’t seem like obvious defections against future publishers, I’m okay with that. If you want updates on this kind of thing, subscribe as mentioned above.
There’s a video of me reading the final chapter up here (thanks Sophia!) and a video of me reading the Epilogue here (thanks Ben!)
Thanks also to everyone who attended the wrap party, thanks to the person who gave me some prints from William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job, thanks to the person who gave me a full-size functional bronze copy of the sword Sigh, and thanks (I think) to the person who hid six (possibly seven, if we still haven’t found one?) purple Beanie Baby dragons in the house where we had the afterparty. It is not my house and the people who live there are very confused.
Most of you probably know this, but I also write nonfiction and occasional short stories on my other blog, Slate Star Codex. There’s still the Unsong subreddit for anyone who wants to talk about the book more. And you might enjoy some of the other fiction on r/rational.
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If we are worthy, our Master will redeem us by justice, and if not, He will redeem us with mercy.
— Rabbinic saying
Evening, May 14, 2017
Citadel West
I.
Sohu pushed the heavy steel door open and entered the throne room.
“Hey,” she said.
The others ran towards her, hugged her, started firing questions at her. Even I ran towards her and hugged her, overcome with the spirit of the moment. Only Caelius stayed where he was, staring at his computer, occasionally reaching out a wavering finger to stab a key or flip a switch.
“You’re alive!” Nathanda said, sounding a little too surprised.
“Thamiel…not gonna bother us…for a while,” she said. “Summoned Uriel. He helped take care of things. I’m…tired. Anything to eat?”
It was hard to judge in the dim glow of the Luminous Name, but she looked drained. In the absence of the usual servants, I ran out to get her something. When I got back with a jar of cookies, there were a couple of soldiers talking to Nathanda.
“The Other King’s broken through the passes,” she announced to us. “Everybody’s retreating. Total rout. He’s flying here. Alone. Less than an hour. A few minutes.”
We were quiet. Sohu grabbed a cookie, jammed it into her mouth.
“While you were away, we’ve been reading up on this Acher,” Jinxiang told Sohu. “Elisha ben Abuyah. Strange guy. No obvious weaknesses. You know anything we don’t?”
“Always,” said Sohu. “But nothing useful.”
Caelius limped over, joined the circle, almost sunk into his chair. “She’s rebooting,” he said. “Don’t know how long it will take. Computer that size…” He trailed off. I couldn’t believe he was even still conscious. None of us dared suggest he leave. For a little while we all just sat there, quietly, in the dark. A few furtive glances at the entrance, as if the Other King was already through the big blast door and could walk in at any moment. Almost hopeful. Anything would have been better than waiting quietly in the dark room.
Finally, Nathanda picked up her book. “I guess I should talk,” she said. “There’s nothing in here about secret weaknesses or magic spells. But there are a lot of stories. There’s a story about how each year, on the Day of Atonement, a great voice would ring forth from the holy places, saying ‘Repent, o children of Israel, for the Lord your God is merciful and shall forgive you. Except you, Elisha ben Abuyah.’
“And the people went to Rabbi Meir, who’d been a disciple of Acher back when he was good, and who still loved him, because in those days people loved their teachers more than life itself, no matter what happened to them, and they told Rabbi Meir to give it up, that even God wasn’t going to forgive Acher, and Rabbi Meir just laughed, and said that the voice was a test, and that if Acher could repent, even knowing that God would not forgive him and it would gain him nothing, then that would be the truest repentance and all of his sins would be washed away, and he would rise up even brighter than before.”
Nathanda’s voice was hypnotizing. I felt myself falling away, I could see the scene, the old bearded Rabbi Meir standing in front of a Torah scroll, arguing with the people, defending his teacher even against God.
“And then I read – that one day Acher died, and the people said that it was not good, because he had never repented, and Rabbi Meir laughed and said that surely had had repented in his heart and was in Paradise. And then flames started coming out of Acher’s grave, and the people were like, we’re not rabbis, and we’re no experts in omens, but that doesn’t seem, to us, like the sort of thing that happens when you’re in Paradise. And Rabbi Meir said very well, but that God would relent and redeem him later. And the people said that, again, we’re no experts and you’re the one with the rabbinical degree, but a voice had very clearly rung forth from the holy places saying that wouldn’t happen. And Rabbi Meir said that very well, maybe He wouldn’t, but if God wouldn’t redeem Acher, then he, Rabbi Meir, would redeem Acher.
“And the people said, what, that doesn’t even make sense, is redemption not reserved for God alone? And Rabbi Meir said that wasn’t exactly true. That what we do during our lives echoes forward into history, and that good deeds that seemed tiny when they happened might grow and grow until they consumed the entire world, and if the recording angels had discounted them when they first reviewed the case, an appeal might be lodged. And that one day, when he was studying Torah under Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, Rabbi Meir had gotten something from him, some tiny spark of goodness, and that was what had inspired him to be good himself throughout his life. And so he would train his disciples to be good, and they would train their disciples to be good, until the world was safe and free, and all of it would be because of this one man, Acher, a wicked wicked man who would not repent, and God would be forced to credit those deeds to Acher’s name, and he would rise into Paradise, unrepentant still.”
The ground started to shake, as if someone was pummeling the mountain from afar, but Nathanda didn’t stop talking.
“And the people asked, huh, how does that even work? and Rabbi Meir said that this was all playing out on hidden levels, that the point was to redeem the sparks of divinity that had gotten caught among the klipot of the world, and that each of our actions changes and redirects the flow of subtle currents upon which the sparks are borne. And even though Acher had died without repenting, even though everything he did seemed to the material eye to be evil and without merit, behind the scenes the sparks had been pushed into new configurations, whole fiery rivers of sparks, flowing through Rabbi Meir and through all the other people he had touched in his life, and that when all those rivers met and reached the sea, we would get Moschiach, the savior, and the whole world would be reconciled to God. Say not, he told the people, that anything has worked only evil, that any life has been in vain. Say rather that while the visible world festers and decays, somewhere beyond our understanding the groundwork is being laid for Moschiach, and the final victory.”
The shaking intensified. I thought of that poem again, Erica’s poem. Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, but that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown – standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
“I guess that’s what I have to say to all of you today. Father’s gone now. We all thought he was Moschiach – we knew he was Moschiach – but now he’s gone, and sometimes it seems like he’s never been. We felt like we had this burden, of salvaging his legacy, taking what he made and finishing his work instead of letting it come to nothing. I…am not sure that we will. Maybe this strange experiment, this new intrusion of Heaven into history, is going to come to an end with us, and everything Father built will be torn down. But even if that happens, we’ve done good. The world may not remember it, but we’ve done good. The sparks are moving in a different pattern now, I can’t see them, none of us can see them, but maybe they’re moving in huge fiery rivers because of some of the things Father did, maybe if we could peel back the veil we would just see this amazing endless light, this inevitable tide, ready to sweep over everything, this tide that all of us helped draw. That’s…that’s what I think Rabbi Meir would say if he were here.”
I would never have dared follow Nathanda, never have dared to speak at a solemn council of the Cometspawn, except that Sohu felt my thoughts and prodded me on. [Yes, Aaron,] she thought. [Speak.] And then when I still held back, she stood up. “Aaron has something he wants to add to that,” she said. Then sat back down.
“Um.” Four pairs of eyes watched me. “When I first learned the Vital Name, my friend asked me what I wanted to do with it. And there were all of these possibilities, you know? Um. Get rich. Take power. Run for President. I told her we couldn’t do any of those things. I said…I said I wanted to become the next Comet King.”
I waited for the Cometspawn to laugh at me. They didn’t laugh. Far away, I heard a terrible crash.
“I said that, because I’d heard about everything your father did. I’d heard about him standing up to Thamiel single-handedly in Silverthorne. I heard about how he stopped the Drug Lord. I’d heard about his Crusade, where he marched to Yakutsk with a million men to try to save the souls of the damned. Everyone heard about these things. In a world that had the Comet King, it was impossible to just want to be rich or famous or important. You wanted that same thing he had. Call it goodness. Call it holiness. It was the most powerful thing I ever encountered. Acher might have inspired Rabbi Meir, but your father inspired everyone. And so did you. I’m nowhere near as good a kabbalist as any of you, but the sparks that you guys have kindled aren’t even hidden. They’re in plain sight. I’m glad I got to know you and I’m glad you existed. For whatever it’s worth.”
Then the door shattered and the Other King entered the room.
II.
I don’t know if I’d thought to contribute to the fight somehow, but the symbols and energies flaring across the room from both sides the moment the door began to creak disabused me of the notion instantly. [Spectral Name!] Sohu thought at me, and I spoke it faster than I’d ever spoken anything in my life and become invisible. The Other King floated almost leisurely through the mystical armaments hurled against him, pausing only to wipe away a few incantations here or there with a crimson sleeve.
Nathanda leapt onto the Black Opal Throne and traced a mem, lamed and kaf. Melek, meaning “royalty” or “kingship”, but also reminescent of malak, meaning “angel”. A powerful double meaning, the natural weapon of a queen descended from Heaven.
The Other King didn’t even flinch. Just pointed, adding with his finger a single dot, changing the vowels. Moloch, the god who accepted child sacrifices. The evil King Ahaz had offered his sons and daughters to Moloch, inciting the wrath of Jeremiah and causing him to prophecy the fall of Israel. The forces twisted, the symbolic meanings changed. The children of kings slain by demonic forces. A great nation falling. Nathanda gasped, collapsed to the ground, and before she could recover the Other King struck her with his bare hand. She screamed something unintelligible, then it became a gurgle, then her eyes closed.
At almost the same time, Caelius dragged himself up from his chair. He was barely able to stand, but still he stepped into Yetzirah. Moloch, god of child sacrifices. He drew upon the thread. Sacrifice. Here he was, broken, almost dead. He would offer himself as a sacrifice, sacrifice his life for Colorado and victory. Sacrifice. Korban. Kuf, resh, bet.
Without even taking his eyes off Nathanda, the Other King crossed the threads. Kuf, bet, resh. Keber. Grave. No sacrifice. Just a miserable death. Caelius opened his mouth to say something, then dropped to the floor. He crawled behind THARMAS, trying to use the supercomputers’ bulk to shield himself from the killing blow. The Other King pointed at him, and computers and Cometspawn alike burst briefly into blue flames before settling into ashes.
Jinxiang stepped back out of Yetzirah then, faced the Other King. “YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” she shouted. “YOU KILLED MY SISTER! YOU KILLED MY BROTHER! FUCK YOU!” Sohu was doing something with her hands, muttering to herself, bending the energies, quietly funneling power into Jinxiang, watching warily. “WELL GUESS WHAT? I HAVE YOUR TRUE NAME!”
The Other King didn’t answer, just stood there, as if waiting to hear her case.
“You’re Elisha ben Abuyah! You saw a kid steal a sparrow from a fucking tree and felt like it was some big deal and so you declared war on God! Well, guess what? When I was nineteen years old I saw my father drop out of the sky! You know why? Because you fucking killed him! And then you motherfuckers tried to keep his body, and I had to kill a hundred of you just to get him back! My father is more valuable than any sparrow! And instead of declaring war on God like a fucking maniac, I told myself I’d just kill the fucking hell out of everyone involved! Nathanda, all she ever wanted was to be a good wise queen! And Caelius, he just wanted to build nice things that made people happy! And you killed them! So now you’ve got me! And me? All I ever wanted was to plunge my magic sword into your motherfucking skull! So come on, motherfucker! I HAVE YOUR TRUE NAME!”
The great sword Sigh was in her hands, and she lunged at the Other King. Sohu’s magic spurred her on, and a thousand Hebraic and Enochian symbols whirled around her. She looked like a shooting star as she flew across the room, lambent with magic, sword fixed in front of her like a lance.
Somehow she managed to miss the Other King entirely.
[ELISHA BEN ABUYAH IS NOT MY TRUE NAME] thought the figure in scarlet.
I saw Jinxiang pick herself up, dust herself off, no longer sure of herself.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The Other King reached back and pulled the hood off his crimson robe.
What I remember from that moment was the total lack of surprise on Jinxiang’s face when she saw her father, as if she had known it all along on some level too terrible to mention.
Sigh flew from her grip, leapt into the hands of the Comet King. He lunged at her. She was unarmed. She jumped away, tripped, fell. A slice of Sigh. She screamed as she died, cursing her father’s name.
The Comet King advanced on Sohu.
I saw her marshal her powers. Symbols blazed around her, circling like fireflies, shooting off ten-colored light in all directions. I felt the mountains shake as she gathered strength. Whole passages of Torah, entire facets of Adam Kadmon multiplied and congealed around her, patterns of dizzying complexity.
“I don’t want to do this, Father,” she said. “I don’t want to fight you. This isn’t you. Stop.”
He kept advancing.
“But,” she said, “I swore to you I wouldn’t die before you did. See, Father. I won’t break my promise.”
Then she loosed her power, and I was briefly knocked over as a wave of ineffable white light filled the room. It crashed into the Comet King, stripped away his clothes and skin and muscle, left him a skeleton. But he didn’t fall. Slowly, painfully, the muscle and skin and clothes regenerated themselves out of light and magic, and he kept coming. He raised his sword.
“The prophecy says I’ll die screaming and cursing your name,” she told him. But I’m a celestial kabbalist. I stand above prophecy. You can kill me, Father, but I won’t curse your name. I trust you, Father. I won’t curse you. I won’t – ”
I closed my eyes in horror, but through the telepathic connection I still felt her die. It was awful and excruciating and sudden, but she didn’t curse him, even in her mind.
I opened my eyes.
The Comet King was staring straight at me.
“Aaron Smith-Teller,” he said.
III.
He sat on the Black Opal Throne like it was the most natural thing in the world. He had taken off his scarlet robes, and now wore the familiar black and silver. “Come,” he said, and I moved slowly, foggily, like I was in a dream. He’d always used chashmal as the Other King. Never spoken aloud. Because his voice was sorrowful and wise. The voice of the Comet King. No one could ever have mistaken it for anything else.
I sat on a chair, right in front of him, feeling naked before his deep brown eyes. “Aaron,” he asked me. He sounded kind, compassionate, he sounded like a good person, like I wanted to give him everything he wanted even though I’d just seen him kill all four of his children, and it made no sense and the tension made me want to burst, but terror held it in so I just sat there and stared at him. “Aaron, do you know the Name?”
Of course I knew it. I’d heard the true version during Sohu’s ill-starred attempt to ensoul THARMAS, now destroyed. ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON…
“Not that Name,” said the Comet King, reading my mind. “The real Name. The Shem haMephorash.”
“No,” I said.
“Hmm,” said the Comet King. He looked concerned.
As far as I could tell, my life was still in danger. The laws of physics had been broken and the world was crumbling all around me. And my childhood hero had suddenly appeared in the middle of all this, in the most horrifying and spectacular way possible, killed everyone, and was now watching me intently. This was a situation that required immediate decisive action.
I broke into tears.
I cried and cried and cried. Everyone was dead. Nathanda, Caelius, Jinxiang, Sohu. Even Ana and Erica were dead, I could feel it, a loosening of the links to where their minds ought to be. Bromis was dead. Sarah was dead. Uriel was dead. And they’d been ready for anything but this. Nathanda had pretty much said that as long as they could still keep their good memories of their father they could die happy. And then this! No, he was dead too. Everything was dead. I cried and cried.
By the time I stopped crying, the Comet King was kneeling in front of me, his hand on my knee. “Aaron,” he was saying, “Stop crying. We’ve won. Aaron, we’ve won.”
“What?”
He pulled up a chair, not the throne, just another chair, sat right in front of me. “Seventeen years ago I tried to speak the Shem haMephorash and destroy Hell. I failed. I was too far. I thought I could fight my way to Lake Baikal, and then I’d be near Hell and I’d have a clear shot. It doesn’t work that way. Hell’s not just a place. It’s like Milton said – the mind can make a Heaven out of Hell, or a Hell of Heaven. I was in Hell, but I wasn’t of it.
Isaiah says that the Moshiach will be counted as the worst of sinners. I realized I wasn’t going to destroy Hell from the outside, but getting into Hell is easy. Millions do it every day. I could do the same. Wipe out a lifetime of accumulated good deeds through terror and oppression.
The only thing that stood in my way was my own conscience. I couldn’t accumulate sin in order to get into Hell. I’d be doing it for the greater good. That itself would make me unworthy of Hell. A perfect paradox.
I would have given up then except for Robin. She saved me. She sacrificed herself to give me a chance.
Do you understand what I’ve done? I didn’t become a genocidal tyrant to save the billions of souls in Hell. I did it to save her. Fifteen years of murder and oppression, and I never once thought about anyone else. And if there had not been a single soul in Hell besides hers, I would have spent those fifteen years just the same. Do you realize how wicked that is? I damned myself, Aaron. Where all my angelic powers failed, my human weakness succeeded. My father must be laughing so hard right now.
I found the shreds of a defeated death cult in Las Vegas, made myself a backstory out of their ramblings. I borrowed a golem from Gadiriel, killed myself off, took on the new identity, and never showed my face. If they’d known it was me, they would have figured out my plan, and gone willingly to their deaths. There would have been devastation without suffering. It wouldn’t have worked. I thought I could do it. Conquering the West was easy. Killing people…easy, once you…get used to it. But part of me always knew it wasn’t enough. A million lesser sins don’t sum up to abomination. There was still good in me. I didn’t want to kill my children. I thought I could avoid it, thought if I just committed enough other sins, or studied until I found a loophole, I might still avoid it. Then you arrived. If your computer idea had worked, Colorado would have become invincible. I wouldn’t have been able to stand up to it. My children would have ushered in a new golden age, there would have been peace and plenty for everyone, and it would have been the greatest disaster the world had ever known. None of it would have mattered a hair’s width as long as Hell stayed intact, do you understand? They would have beaten me, I would have revealed myself or died a saint, and Hell would have continued regardless. I couldn’t let that happen. I was like Acher, pushed past the point of no return. My poor Robin, taken from her nest. How could I let God let that pass?
So I did the only thing I could. My uncle knew all along. I got in touch with him, told him to destroy the project. Then I destroyed Uriel’s machinery to prevent them from trying the same thing again. Then I came here. I couldn’t let Thamiel kill my children, I couldn’t. If they had to die, I would do it myself. And here we are. They died screaming, just like I always knew they would.” He was quiet for a second. “I despise myself, Aaron. I despise myself and I want to die. I’m not worried about not going to Hell. I’m in Hell already. But – when I first decided to do this, the archangel Metatron got angry, said that I was profaning the Name, that I couldn’t hold the Shem haMephorash in my head and be a murderer. He said that at the end of everything he’d give it back to me, if there was still enough left of my soul to speak it. I think there is. I think I am bound for Hell, that I’m utterly, atrociously evil, that pull every loophole he will Thamiel can’t keep me out, but that I still have the divine spark, the love of goodness. I can still speak the Name. But someone needs to give it to me. Have you ever read the Sepher haBashir?”
I nodded weakly.
“God writes the Shem-ha-Mephorash on the forehead of the high priest Aaron. And here you come, an Aaron, at the end of everything. Too many coincidences. Too strange a path that brought you here. You have the Name for me, whether you know it or not. Think!”
He said it like a commandment. So I thought. For some reason I thought of the poem, how they enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin. I thought of Las Vegas, where I’d glibly quoted it, used it to justify risking the whole world to save Ana. Quoted it to convince myself that allowing any evil, even for a greater good, was a compromise with sin. I thought of the Comet King. Who in one sense had just confessed to striking the greatest such compromise of all time. But who in another sense might have been the only person in history never to compromise with sin at all. He’d decided what was right. Then he’d done it. No excuses. No holding back. Just a single burning principle followed wherever it might lead, even to Hell itself. I thought of what Ana would think.
And then I thought of Ana. Memories not my own came flooding in. She had gone to the Captain’s cabin, confronted him, told him he was the Metatron and she wanted answers. He had asked her if she wanted the Explicit Name. She’d said no. I knew she would have said no. She’d always only wanted one thing. She demanded the captain produce the answer to Job she’d always wanted, and he’d given it to her. God is the summum bonum, the ultimate good, an unstoppable force maximizing joy and perfection among everything that existed. But in order to create, He had to withdraw; the more He withdrew, the more He created, endless forms most beautiful bought with those two silver coins of wickedness. The world was a delicate balance between a perfect good empty of thought and a multiplicity so unhappy that their scraps of goodness seemed a mockery. The created universe itself was set with fixing the balance, and when all the sparks had finally been sorted out, the good and the evil placed back in their respective vessels and every color pure, we would decide anew and the cycle could begin again.
“Oh God,” I said. “I’m so sorry. My friend Ana was supposed to get the Shem haMephorash from your ship, the same one you took, but when she found Metatron she didn’t want the Name, she asked him about theodicy instead. He never told her. Now she’s gone.”
But the Comet King was smiling.
“Yes,” he said. “I read your mind. It’s all in there. I had figured most of it out myself, but it is good to hear it spoken.”
“Why?”
“Because any good enough description of God is also a notarikon for His Most Holy Name.”
“…really?”
“God is One and His Name is One. God is One with His Name. People always say God isn’t a person, but then what is He? To me, He’s always been a sort of logical necessity. The necessity for everything in the cosmos to be as good as possible. Understand goodness and you understand God. Understand God and you understand His Name. Understand the Name and you can remake the world. That’s the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Excruciating, unbearable commentary that kills everyone you love.”
He stood up, started walking to the throne. “If anyone ever asks you what happened here, tell them everything. Don’t whitewash any of it. Tell them they screamed when they died.”
“Sohu didn’t scream.”
He stopped for a second. “No, I guess she didn’t. Faith is a strange thing.”
He sat on the Black Opal Throne. He took the great sword Sigh in his right hand, pointed it at his breast. Held back for a second, stared at it, black metal coated with blood.
I saw it as if in a vision. He would die. He would go to Hell, go for real this time. He would stand on a pillar, looking out at the fields of flame below him, hearing the screams for the last time. He would speak the seventy-two letters of the Explicit Name of God. The flames would cease. The cages would crumble. He would point a finger, and his wife would fly towards him. They would stand there together, above the wreckage. Rain would fall. Rivers would flow through the broken landscape. Flowers would spring from the ground. The people would limp forth, and by the waters they would sing the same song Miriam had sung at the Red Sea. ‘Sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted. The Lord reigns, for ever and ever.’
I saw all of this, and at the same time I saw the Comet King on his throne, holding his sword. Afraid, regretful, broken-hearted – any of a million things could have been holding him back. I thought of the old verse from the Rubaiyat, the same one I’d thought of when Ana read Job to us, long ago:
Oh, Thou who burns in Heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying, ‘Mercy on them, God!’
Why, who art Thou to teach, and He to learn?
Then the Comet King muttered to himself, almost too soft to hear: “Somebody has to and no one else will” and he plunged the sword into his heart and died.
IV.
The sound of my breath rose and fell. The blood made little rivulets, as if exploring the terrain, then settled down into irregular stagnant lakes. I just sat there, stunned. Sat in the chair, staring at the body of the Comet King, until the light of the Luminous Name dimmed and went out and everything was black. Nothing stirred. I wondered if the other inhabitants of the citadel had all run away, or if the Other King had killed them, or if they cowered in their chambers behind locked doors. The quiet and solitude were like a womb, or like the emptiness before Creation. In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Then the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said…
It was a faint voice, almost too faint to detect, audible not to the ears but to the innermost chambers of my thought. Had the darkness and silence been any less complete I might have missed it entirely. And the voice said:
[Blowhole-y of holies.]
The Berkeley wrap party will be at 4:30 on Sunday, location and directions here. There is no entrance fee, but donations to help cover the cost of the venue would be appreciated.
Other wrap parties include NYC, Tel Aviv, Boston; and Austin; I’m bolding the last one since I missed mentioning it on the last chapter.
I’m planning to release Chapter 72 around 8 PM EST on Sunday. If you’re going to hold a wrap party, want to read the chapter at the party, and need it before then, I can email it to you a little early (may not have last minute edits). If you want to do this, comment here with your email address.
There will be an Epilogue published next Wednesday. I’m still not sure whether I’ll read it at the wrap party. Let’s see how my voice is doing.
Ranma is doing an audiocast of Unsong and is up to Interlude Bet. Check it out here.
And James Koppel has an Unsong filk song “Far Into The Kingdom Of Heaven Bright” up here at his Soundcloud.
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Everybody already has enlightenment. Why did Buddha sit for six years, see a star, and then get enlightenment? That’s stupid! If you see a star, you get enlightenment now!
— Ch’unsong Sunim
Evening, May 14, 2017
Fire Island
I.
Opening the door to the Captain’s cabin, Ana saw a small room, dark and unadorned, with only a bare wooden bed. The Captain sat upon it, writing something, pages of notes strewn all about. He looked up at Ana, his face unreadable through the dark glasses. She hesitated for just a second, then spoke.
“I know your True Name,” she said.
II.
The overt meaning of “Leviathan” is “a giant sea monster”.
The kabbalistic meaning of “Leviathan” is “the world”.
This we derive from gematria, where both Leviathan and Malkuth – the sephirah corresponding to the material world – have identical values of 496. 496 is a perfect number, from which we can derive that the world is perfect – helpful, since we probably wouldn’t derive that otherwise.
The analogy between the world and a sea monster cuts across faiths. The Norse speak of Jormungand, the World Serpent, who circles the earth to grasp its own tail. The Babylonians say that the heavens and earth were built from the corpse of the primordial sea dragon Tiamat. Even the atheists represent the cosmos as part of a great whale, saying that the whole world is a gigantic fluke.
And the same motif of sea-monster-as-world is found in every form of art and scholarship. Herman Melville uses the whale Moby Dick as a symbol for the forces of Nature. Thomas Hobbes uses the Leviathan as his metaphor for human society. Even Leonard Cohen writes, in his Anthem, “There is a kraken: everything”.
The world, like Leviathan, is very big. The world, like Leviathan, is difficult for humans to understand, let alone subdue. The world, like Leviathan, holds out its promise – if only you could catch up with it, measure up to it, maybe things would make sense. The world, like Leviathan in Job 40:19, is “the first of the works of God”; like Leviathan in Job 41:9, it “humbles the mighty and lays them low”, like Leviathan in Psalm 104:25, it is “that who You formed to play with”.
And like Leviathan in Job 41:34, it is “king over all the sons of pride”. Those who are proud chase after worldly things, worship the world, treat it as their king. They obsess, they pursue, they seek to dominate and control. Even the English phrase has obvious kabbalistic echoes: “chasing your white whale”.
And those who seek God seek Him in the world, for where else could He be? They seek Him by acquiring riches, or by renouncing riches, or by gaining power, or by forsaking power. If all human acts take place in the world, then how but by interacting with the world can God be attained?
Yet Jesus said in Gospel of Thomas: “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
And Robert Wilson wrote the story of a man who looked through chamber after chamber of his soul, questing for his true self, only to give up and conclude that there was nobody there. “That’s odd”, the guru told him. “Who’s conducting the search?”
III.
“Come in,” said the Comet King.
He sat alone, on his bed, in prayer. For the first time since Ellis had met him, he looked afraid.
“Jala,” said Father Ellis, “you should go abovedecks. The crew is on the verge of breaking. The harpoon line’s holding so far, but the Leviathan – the crew is scared, Jala. And I should be abovedecks, working the blue sail. We don’t have men to spare.”
“Father,” said the Comet King, ignoring everything he had just said, “if you were going to devise a placebomantic ritual to summon God, how would you do it?”
“That’s easy. I wouldn’t. You don’t summon God.”
“But suppose that billions of people were suffering, and the only way to save them was to learn the Most Holy Name of God, which has to come from His own lips, and you thought – what’s there to lose? – and decided to summon Him anyway. How would you do it?”
Father Ellis thought for a while. “No. I still wouldn’t. The point is, you can’t summon God. He’s already everywhere.”
The Comet King smiled. “And that,” he said, “is why the Leviathan does not bother me.” He motioned for Ellis to sit down. “The ritual should conform to the Bible, of course,” he said. “And the Bible says that if you seek God, you will find Him, if you seek with all your heart. So. We have our ship, All Your Heart. Seven earthly sails for the seven earthly sephirot, three hidden in other planes. But the sails themselves aren’t enough. We need ritual. So we enact them in order. Various adventures, activating each aspect of God in turn. We start in my Kingdom. We go to San Francisco, the Foundation, where Heaven meets Earth. We shine with Glory. We win a Victory. We cross through Tiferet via the Canal. We cross Chesed by committing an act of great kindness, then Gevurah with an act of great harshness. We pass Da’at and its dark night, its collapse of everything earthly and recognizable. Now here we are. Binah, understanding. And Chokhmah, Wisdom. Which you have just displayed. Leaving us at the end of our road.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ellis. He didn’t like where this was going.
“God help us if we ever reeled the Leviathan all the way in,” said the Comet King. “No. We are going to very conspicuously demonstrate the ability to capture the Leviathan, and then we are going to complete the ritual exactly as you said. By realizing that God is already everywhere. Inside all of us. God isn’t out there in the world. He’s in all your heart. Tell me, Father, who of the crew seems most mysterious to you? Who doesn’t have a past?”
“Hm,” said Ellis, going over the crew in his mind, one crewmember per sail. “Orange sail…no, Clara came highly recommended from the Board of Ritual Magic. Yellow…Rabbi Pinson’s one of our greatest living kabbalists. Green…Leonard’s from Canada, his history checks out. Blue…that’s me. Purple…Gadiriel we all know. Black. That’s you. Everybody’s got a pretty clear history…wait. The First Mate. I…I don’t understand. Somehow I’ve known him this long and I…never thought to ask his name!”
“A common problem,” said the Comet King, smiling, “and one which we will soon correct. Bring him down here.”
A minute later, Ellis returned to the captain’s room, along with the First Mate. A big man, dressed in dark glasses. Ellis wondered why he’d never thought about him before, why it had never confused him that he didn’t know the name of one of the crew.
The Comet King fell to his knees.
Ellis had heard an old joke, once. The Pope was visiting New York City, but he was running late for his flight back to the Vatican. So he hailed a cab and told the taxi driver to floor it to LaGuardia airport, fast as he could. Well, the driver wasn’t going fast enough for the Pontiff, so he demanded they switch seats, and the Pope took the wheel and really started speeding down the freeway. Eventually a cop takes notice and pulls them over, then he gets cold feet. He radios the chief “Um,” he says “I think I accidentally pulled over someone really important.” “How important?” asks the chief. “Well,” said the cop, “all I know is that the Pope is his cabdriver.”
All Father Ellis knew was that the Comet King was kneeling before the big man, but that was enough. He dropped to his knees too.
“I know your True Name,” said the Comet King.
He just stared at them with those dark glasses.
And the Comet King said –
IV.
“Metatron.” Ana spoke the word without a hint of uncertainty. Then, realizing what she had gotten herself into, she fell to her knees.
The Captain took off his dark glasses, and Ana stared into the whirlwind.
V.
The Sepher Hekhalot states that when the patriarch Enoch died, God “turned his flesh to flame, his veins to fire, his eye-lashes to bolts of lightning, his eye-balls to flaming torches, and placed him on a throne next to the throne of glory.” Then he imbued him with the Most Holy Name, and thenceforward he was called the “Measure of the Lord”, the “Prince of the Divine Presence” and “the Lesser God”. All of these titles are blasphemous as hell to call anybody who isn’t God, and it was this that made Elisha ben Abuyah, in the throes of heresy, give his famous proclamation – “There are two gods. T-W-O. Deal with it.”
The orthodox conception was different. God is ineffable, invisible, unspeakable, unknowable. He is the author of the world, not an entity in it. But sometimes it’s useful for an author to have a self-insert character, so to speak. Thus Metatron. Not God. Definitely not God. But slightly less not-God than anything else in Creation. And the things in creation were already rather less not-God than most of them would have expected. So Metatron’s not-God-ness was very low indeed, practically a rounding error.
Low enough that he, of all creation, could speak with God’s voice to reveal the secrets of the world.
VI.
“Hey,” I’d said one night, months before. We were sitting in the living room in Ithaca, reading our respective books. “If you caught Metatron in his boat at the edge of the world, and you got to ask one question and hear the answer from the voice of God Himself, what would you ask?”
“The Explicit Name,” said Erica.
“The problem of evil,” said Ana at the same time.
Erica raised an eyebrow at her cousin. “What? No! So suppose God says oh, the reason there’s evil is that there’s a blockage on the path between Binah and Yesod, sorry about that. Then what? How do you – ”
“There’s no path between Binah and Yesod,” I interrupted.
“Aaron!” snapped Erica, then turned back to Ana. “So God says there’s a blockage between whatever and whatever, and you say okay, and then what? You’ve wasted your question. Me, I’d ask the Explicit Name. And then have the power to rebuild the universe according to my will. You got to admit that sounds useful.”
“Blockage between whatever and whatever is only boring because you don’t actually know what you’re talking about,” said Ana. “Like, if God said that, I’d ask – why would an infinitely good God allow the passage between whatever and whatever to be blocked? At some point, there’s got to be a meaningful answer.”
“Why?” I asked, though I felt bad about it.
“BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY I WOULD DO IT IF I WERE GOD,” said Ana.
“Maybe even God can’t answer,” suggested Erica. “It’s like, you know how Evil can’t possibly comprehend Good? Maybe Good can’t comprehend Evil either.”
“Evil is mostly made of fallen angels,” I said. “Who used to be regular angels. I am pretty sure Evil can comprehend good just fine.”
“Evil can’t possibly comprehend Aramaic,” Ana suggested.
“Better,” I said.
“You guys are making fun of me,” said Erica, “but I stick to what I said. Even if God gives some kind of supremely satisfying answer that explains everything about the existence of evil, in the end all you’re going to do is go ‘Huh’, but there’ll still be as much evil as ever. It’s like Marx said. The kabbalists are only trying to understand the world. The point is to change it.”
“I am pretty sure Marx didn’t mean ‘literally shatter it to pieces, then remake it in your own image'” said Ana.
“Actually,” I said, “that was kind of Marx’s thing.”
“But if I could ask God anything,” Erica continued despite us, “I wouldn’t waste it on philosophy stuff. In fact, I think that would be morally abhorrent. If you stumble across ultimate power, you’ve got a duty to use it for good. If I got the Explicit Name, you can bet things would be a lot different around here.”
“Erica,” I said, “you couldn’t use the Explicit Name. It shatters the world and rebuilds it according to the desires of the speaker. Are you one hundred percent sure that you have a clear, consistent set of desires about the world detailed enough to serve as a blueprint?”
“I just want people to be free,” said Erica.
“Boom,” I said. “Everyone’s living on a separate planet. Now they’re free. Is that what you want?”
“The Name isn’t going to be some kind of evil genie that twists your words to trick you.”
“The Name wasn’t meant to be used by humans! And the quatrain that turned out to be kabbalistically equivalent starts out ‘O Love, could thou and I with Him conspire / to grasp the sorry scheme of things entire.’ It very clearly says that visualizing the structure of the entire universe is a prerequisite.”
“And,” said Ana, “that’s why I would ask God about the problem of evil. Unless you know why God added evil in the first place, it’s irresponsible to try to recreate the universe without any. What if something bad happens?”
“By definition, it wouldn’t,” I said.
“You know what I mean!” said Ana. “And if you’re so smart, what would you ask God?”
“Um,” I thought for a second, then was gratified to be able to give a clear answer. “What is the ordered pair whose first value is the best possible question that I could ask you, and whose second value is your answer to it?”
“You are so annoying,” said Erica.
“The ordered pair would be ‘the question you just asked me’, and ‘this answer right here’,” said Ana. “Then God would laugh, and all your worldly wisdom would be to no avail.”
“No,” I corrected. “Jonah whale. Noah ark. I thought we already had this discussion.”
Ana stuck out her tongue.
“If God ever met either of you, He would smite you before you even got a chance to even open your mouth,” said Erica. “And if He was too busy, I’d do it for Him. With a smile.”
She flashed an exaggerated smile at both of us, and held it just a little too long. It was kind of creepy.
“Whereas He’d be totally okay with you asking Him for the keys to the World-Destroying-Machine because you wanted to make a couple little adjustments, right?” I retorted.
“I know what I want,” said Erica. “I spent my whole life trying to fix this stupid world, I’m not about to stop just because I’m in front of the Throne of Glory. And if God ever offers me a question, it’ll be because He knows what He’s getting into.”
“And I spent my entire life trying to figure out the problem of evil, and God knows exactly what He’s getting into with me too,” said Ana.
“And I,” I concluded, “spent my entire life coming up with weird munchkin-style responses to serious situations, and God – ”
“Shut it,” said Erica.
“You act like I’m being more annoying than you are,” I said. “But seriously. God, please tell me your Name so I can destroy everything and remake it according to whichever form of Marxism was recommended in the latest book I read. God, please give me a clear answer to the fundamental paradox of the universe in one hundred words or less, single-spaced. At least I’m honest about how ridiculous I am!”
“There is an answer,” said Ana. “There has to be. William Blake said that God appears and God is light to those who dwell in realms of night, but God can human form display to those who dwell in realms of day. All of these things like ‘it’s an ineffable paradox’ and ‘God works in mysterious ways’ – they’re just light. Vague, fuzzy, warm, reassuring. But our minds were created in the image of God. Things God can understand, we can understand. Maybe not actually. I can’t understand quantum chromodynamics. But it’s the sort of thing I could understand, if I were smarter. There are a lot of things beyond my intelligence. But I don’t know if there are things beyond my ken. I want to think that there aren’t.”
I made an expansive gesture that was supposed to indicate something like “Look at the universe”, but this was hard, and I ended up just making a really big arm movement. Luckily Ana got my point anyway, because telepathy.
“Look,” she said, “you know the story of Rabbi Joshua and Elijah, right? Joshua asks to accompany Elijah on his journeys, Elijah agrees as long as Joshua doesn’t ask questions. The first night they stay with a family who are desperately poor and own only a single cow; still, they take the two travelers in and share what little they have. The next morning, before leaving, Elijah kills their cow. The second night, they stay with a rich man who condescends to them and tells them they can stay in the barn with the cows, because beggars deserve no better. The next morning, before leaving, Elijah magically repairs a wall of his mansion which was about to fall. Joshua says he can’t keep it in any longer, he knows he’s not supposed to ask questions, but what is Elijah doing? Elijah says that the first man’s wife was destined to die the next day, but he prayed to God to accept the death of the cow instead. The second man was going to repair the crumbling wall of his mansion and discover buried treasure hidden underneath; he fixed it so this wouldn’t happen. And I feel like if we’re supposed to draw any conclusion at all from this story, it’s that even seemingly unjust actions have hidden reasons that we can understand, if only someone will explain them.”
“So,” I asked, you think the reason there’s evil in the world is a series of post hoc adjustments for implausible coincidences, some of which involved buried treasure?”
“It’s a metaphor! I think the reason there’s evil in the world is something that will make at least as much sense when I hear it as Elijah’s explanation did to Rabbi Joshua.”
“Elijah’s explanation only makes sense because he passes the buck. Okay, the virtuous woman was going to die, and Elijah has to kill the cow to prevent that. Fine. How come the virtuous woman was going to die young in the first place? How come Elijah doesn’t answer that?”
“It’s a metaphor!”
“Of course it’s a metaphor! Kabbalah says that everything is a metaphor for God, the only thing that’s not a metaphor for God is God Himself. That doesn’t mean you can just dismiss things as metaphors and fail to explain how they correspond.”
“Look, I’m just saying, there has to be a reason. And one day, I’m going to figure out what it is.”
In the sea off Fire Island in New York, on a ship with seven sails, Ana Thurmond thought and remembered. Then she told the Captain: “My question is: why would a perfectly good God create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”
VII.
Then God spoke to Ana out of the whirlwind, and He said:
“THE REASON EVIL EXISTS IS TO MAXIMIZE THE WHOLE COSMOS’ TOTAL SUM GOODNESS. SUPPOSE WE RANK POSSIBLE WORLDS FROM BEST TO WORST. EVEN AFTER CREATING THE BEST, ONE SHOULD CREATE THE SECOND-BEST, BECAUSE IT STILL CONTAINS SOME BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS. THEN CONTINUE THROUGH THE SERIES, CREATING EACH UNTIL REACHING THOSE WHERE WICKEDNESS AND SUFFERING OUTWEIGH GOOD. SOME WORLDS WILL INCLUDE MUCH INIQUITY BUT STILL BE GOOD ON NET. THIS IS ONE SUCH.”
And before Ana could answer, the whirlwind intensified, and caught her in its maelstrom, and she fell into a vision.
VIII.
Job asked: “God, why would You, who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WOULD YOU PREFER I HAD NOT CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, EVIL AS IT IS? WOULD YOU PREFER TO BE VOID AND EMPTINESS?”
“No!” said Job. “I would prefer to live in a universe that was perfect and just!”
“I CREATED SUCH A UNIVERSE,” said God. “IN THAT UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON GOLDEN THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS.
YET I ALSO CREATED YOUR UNIVERSE, THAT YOU MIGHT LIVE. TELL ME, JOB, IF I UNCREATED YOUR WORLD, WOULD YOU BE HAPPIER? OR WOULD YOU BE DEAD, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR GOLDEN THRONES REGARDLESS?”
“I would prefer to be one of those perfect beings on their golden thrones.”
“WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR YOU TO BE SUCH A BEING? THEY HAVE NO BODIES, NO EMOTIONS, NO DESIRES, NO LANGUAGE. WHAT WOULD IT MEAN FOR ME TO CREATE A VERSION OF YOU WITHOUT BODY EMOTION DESIRE OR LANGUAGE, VERSUS TO CREATE SUCH A BEING BUT NOT HAVE IT BE YOU AT ALL? IS A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS INFINITELY WISE STILL YOU? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS A WICKED IDOLATOR? A VERSION OF YOU WHO IS EXACTLY LIKE NOAH, IN EVERY WAY? THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”
“Huh?”
“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. THERE ARE VARIOUS CREATURES MORE OR LESS LIKE YOU. IF I UNCREATED YOU AND YOUR WORLD OF SUFFERING, THEY WOULD REMAIN, AND YOU WOULD DIE. WOULD THIS BE A FAVOR TO YOU?”
“I still don’t understand. Certainly I, who exist, want to continue existing. But instead of creating one perfect universe and some flawed universes, couldn’t you just have created many perfect universes?”
“TELL ME, JOB, WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR RIGHT AND LEFT HANDS?”
“Uh…one is on my right, and the other is on my left. And they’re mirror images of each other.”
“I AM BEYOND SPACE. TO ME THERE IS NEITHER LEFT NOR RIGHT NOR MIRRORED REFLECTION. IF TWO THINGS ARE THE SAME, THEY ARE ONE THING. IF I CREATED TWO PERFECT UNIVERSES, I WOULD ONLY HAVE CREATED ONE UNIVERSE. IN ORDER TO DIFFERENTIATE A UNIVERSE FROM THE PERFECT UNIVERSE, IT MUST BE DIFFERENT IN ITS SEED, ITS SECRET UNDERLYING STRUCTURE.”
“Then create one perfect universe, and some universes whose structures have tiny flaws that no one will ever notice.”
“I DID. I CREATED MYRIADS OF SUCH UNIVERSES. WHEN I HAD EXHAUSTED ALL POSSIBLE UNIVERSES WITH ONE FLAW, I MOVED ON TO UNIVERSES WITH TWO FLAWS, THEN UNIVERSES WITH THREE FLAWS, THEN SO ON, AN ENTIRE GARDEN OF FLAWED UNIVERSES GROWING ALONGSIDE ONE ANOTHER.”
“Including mine.”
“YOUR WORLD IS AT THE FARTHEST EDGES OF MY GARDEN,” God admitted, “FAR FROM THE BRIGHT CENTER WHERE EVERYTHING IS PERFECT AND SIMPLE. THERE IS A WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS, WITH A GIANT ALEPH IN THE CENTER. THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD MADE OF NOTHING BUT BLISS WITH A GIANT BET IN THE CENTER. AND SO ON, BUT MAKE A MILLION MILLION WORLDS LIKE THOSE, AND YOU START NEEDING TO BECOME MORE CREATIVE. YOU NEED MORE AND MORE STRATAGEMS TO SEPARATE WORLDS FROM ONE ANOTHER. WORLDS WHERE INCREDIBLY BIZARRE THINGS HAPPEN AS A MATTER OF COURSE. WORLDS WHERE RANDOM COMBINATIONS OF SYLLABLES INVOKE DIVINE POWERS. AND THE MORE SUCH THINGS I ADD, THE MORE CHANCE THAT THEY TEND TOWARD EVIL. YOUR WORLD IS VERY FAR FROM THE CENTER INDEED. IT IS IN THE MIDDLE OF A VAST WASTE, WHERE NOTHING ELSE GROWS. ALL OF THE WORLDS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PLANTED THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABOMINATIONS OF WICKEDNESS. BUT BY COINCIDENCE PILED UPON COINCIDENCE, YOURS WAS NOT. YOURS WILL GROW INTO A THING OF BEAUTY THAT WILL GLORIFY MY HOLY NAME.”
“It will?”
“GENESIS 1:31. I LOOKED AT THE WORLD, AND I SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD. I BEHELD ADAM KADMON, THE SEED OF YOUR WORLD, AND SAW THAT IT WAS A GOOD SEED. THAT IT WOULD GROW INTO MORE GOOD THAN EVIL. THAT IT DESERVED A PLACE IN MY GARDEN, BESIDE THE MILLION MILLION OTHER SEEDS THAT WOULD GROW INTO OTHER WORDS, SO THAT AS MUCH GOODNESS AS POSSIBLE COULD BE INSTANTIATED IN THE COSMOS.”
“God,” said Job, “what about me?”
“WHAT ABOUT YOU?”
“All my children are dead. All my wealth is gone. I’m covered in boils. And you’re telling me, basically, that the reason I’m covered in boils is so that you can have one universe where I’m covered in boils, and another universe where I’m not covered in boils, and then you’ll have one more universe than if you committed to not covering me in boils?”
“NOT EXACTLY. I DO NOT SPECIFICALLY MAKE EVERY DECISION ABOUT BOILS. I CREATE THE SEEDS OF UNIVERSES, WHICH GROW ACCORDING TO THEIR SECRET STRUCTURE. BUT IT IS TRUE THAT I COULD HAVE LIMITED MYSELF TO CREATING UNIVERSES WHERE NO ONE EVER BECAME COVERED IN BOILS, AND I DID NOT DO SO. FOR THE UNIVERSES WHERE SOME PEOPLE GET COVERED IN BOILS ALSO HAVE MYRIADS OF WONDERS, AND JOYS, AND SAINTS, AND I WILL NOT DENY THEM EXISTENCE FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE COVERED IN BOILS.”
“How many wonders and joys and saints is one case of boils worth, God?”
“BE CAREFUL, JOB. I HAD THIS CONVERSATION WITH ABRAHAM BEFORE YOU. HE ASKED WHETHER I WOULD SPARE MY JUDGMENT ON SODOM LEST FIFTY RIGHTEOUS MEN SHOULD SUFFER. WHEN I AGREED, HE PLED FOR FORTY, THIRTY, TWENTY, AND TEN. BUT BELOW TEN HE DID NOT GO, SO I DESTROYED THE CITY. AND IF I WOULD NOT RESTRAIN MYSELF FROM DESTROYING FOR THE SAKE OF A HANDFUL OF RIGHTEOUS MEN SUFFERING, HOW MUCH LESS I SHOULD RESTRAIN MYSELF FROM CREATING.”
“So I should just sit here and suffer quietly?”
“UNTIL YOU DIE, AND YOUR SOUL IS REMOVED FROM THE WORLD, AND I CAN GRANT IT ETERNAL BLISS WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT ANY OF THIS.”
“That’s not a fucking lot of consolation, God.”
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying: “HAVE YOU BEHELD THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH? SEEN ITS FOOTINGS AND ITS CORNERSTONE? WATCHED AS THE SONS OF GOD ALL SANG TOGETHER AND THE MORNING STARS SHOUTED FOR JOY? HAVE YOU SEEN THE DOORS OF THE SEA? THE CHAINS OF THE PLEIADES AND ORION’S BELT? THE LIONS, THE RAVENS, THE YOUNG OF THE DOE AND BEAR? BEHOLD THE BEHEMOTH, WHICH I MADE BESIDE YOU, AND THE LEVIATHAN WHO RESIDES IN THE SEA. CAN YOU SAY THAT ALL THESE WONDERS SHOULD NOT BE, SO THAT YOU COULD AVOID A CASE OF BOILS? SHALL I SMITE THEM FOR YOU? SPEAK, AND I SHALL END THE WORLD WITH A WORD.”
And as He spoke, the whirlwind took form, and Job saw all of these things, the boundaries of the Earth and the gateways of the Heavens, the myriad animals from Leviathan down to the smallest microbe, the glory of the lightning and the gloom of the deepest caves, the pyramids of Egypt and the pagodas of China. And he knew more surely than he had ever known anything before that God could end all of them with a word, and he knew that the existence of all of them, every single one, depended on the same seed that had given him a case of boils.
And Job said “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. But…why couldn’t you have told me this before? Why did I have to suffer in ignorance?”
“YOUR WORLD IS AT THE EDGES OF MY GARDEN. IF NOT FOR COINCIDENCE PILED UPON COINCIDENCE, IT WOULD NEVER BLOSSOM INTO GOODNESS, AND SO COULD NOT HAVE BEEN CREATED. YOUR IGNORANCE OF MY PURPOSE BEGINS A CHAIN OF COINCIDENCES WHICH WILL GROW AND GROW UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, WHEN IT WILL COME TO FRUITION. THAT PURPOSE IS NOW COMPLETE. GO, AND REGAIN EVERYTHING YOU HAVE LOST, BUT TELL NOBODY WHAT I HAVE TOLD YOU.”
“But…I told everybody I was going to ask You about the purpose of evil. When they want to know what You answered, what should I tell them?”
“TELL THEM I SAID ‘GO FISH’.”
IX.
Ana beheld in the whirlwind the trials of Job, and the answer of the Lord, and the whole chain of being, and the Pleiades and Orion, and Leviathan and Behemoth, and all the wonders and joys and saints of the world, placed in dazzling array, God’s answer to the problem of evil spoken with a tornadic fury that stripped the universe to its roots.
“I don’t buy it,” said Ana Thurmond.
“YOU DON’T THINK IT IS WORTH IT?”
“I think you should have offered us the choice.”
“BEFORE THE WORLD, I SPOKE TO ADAM KADMON IN MY GARDEN. I OFFERED HIM THE CHOICE TO REMAIN IN THE PARADISE BEYOND EXISTENCE, OR TO TASTE OF GOOD AND EVIL, BE SEPARATED FROM ME, AND ATTAIN INDEPENDENT BEING. HE CHOSE THE LATTER.”
“No, what about us? Not the grand purpose of the cosmos, not Adam Kadmon before the world, us. What about me?”
The voice of God said out of the whirlwind, “YOU, WHO ONLY TWO DAYS AGO SOARED SO HIGH SHE ALMOST ESCAPED THE WORLD AND MERGED HER IDENTITY INTO THE JOY BEYOND ALL BEING, BEFORE SHE WAS RESCUED BY MY SHIP AND CREW? AND WHO SAID, AND I QUOTE, ‘OH GOD, I ALMOST FELT TRANSCENDENT JOY. IT WAS AWFUL'”.
“Then…” Ana was almost crying now. “What about Hell? What about everybody who lives their life and dies and ends up suffering eternally with no way to get out. Shouldn’t they have gotten the choice? You said that our world was good on net. Well, it isn’t. I don’t know what kind of calculus you use, or how you rank these things, but I don’t care. As long as there’s a Hell, whatever you saw in Genesis 1:31 that caused you to pronounce our world, and I quote, ‘good’, you were wrong. Yeah, I said it. My name is Ana Thurmond of San Jose, California, and I hereby accuse you of getting it wrong. As long as Hell exists and is eternal, you were wrong to create the world, you are wrong to sustain it, and I don’t care how awesome a fish you’ve got, you are wrong about the problem of evil.”
“YES,” said God. “WHICH IMPLIES THAT HELL MUST NOT BE ETERNAL. I DID NOT SAY, ANA THURMOND, THAT YOUR WORLD IS GOOD NOW. I SAID THAT ADAM KADMON, ITS SEED, WAS A GOOD SEED. THAT IT WILL UNFOLD, BIT BY BIT, RINGING CONCLUSION AFTER CONCLUSION FROM ITS PREMISES, UNTIL FINALLY ITS OWN INTERNAL LOGIC CULMINATES IN ITS SALVATION.”
“How?” asked Ana, begging, pleading, shouting.
“COME AND SEE,” said God.
Then the Leviathan wheeled around, opened its colossal maw, and engulfed the Not A Metaphor. The ship spent a single wild moment in its mouth before the monster closed its jaws and crushed all of them into tiny pieces.
The final chapter will be posted next week. I will be doing a dramatic reading of Chapter 72 in Berkeley, very tentatively at the CFAR office on the 7th floor of 2030 Addison St at 4:30 PM on Sunday May 14, but I need to double-check this will fit everybody. If you’re interested in coming, please fill out this RSVP and give me your email address so I can tell you about any changes. There will be other related events in NYC, Tel Aviv, Boston; and Austin; ask on the linked Facebook pages for details.
]]>I.
It was called Tava, or “sun mountain”, by the Ute. El Capitan, meaning “the leader”, by the Spanish. But its modern name “Pike’s Peak” comes from explorer Zebulon Pike, and his name in turn comes from the Biblical Zebulon, son of Jacob.
Moses says in Deuteronomy 33: “Rejoice, Zebulon, in your journeys. You call the people to your mountain, and there they will offer a sacrifice of the righteous.” Taken to refer to Mr. Pike, the journeys part checks out. The mountain part definitely checks out. The sacrifice of the righteous part is kind of obscure.
Sohu hoped, as she rematerialized on the summit of Pike’s Peak, that it didn’t have anything to do with her.
She had chosen her terrain carefully. She was north of Citadel West; Thamiel would have to come through here to get to her family. She could see in every direction. The bunker to her south, the highway to her north, the city to her east. If she had to do something drastic, she was far enough from human habitation that they would escape collateral damage. Poor, lovely Colorado Springs! It was so small from up here, still smaller than Denver after forty years as the capital. They all thought her father had decided to stay because of the bunker, or the air force base, or the nuclear silos scattered in the hills. But he’d stayed because it was where he’d grown up, and that was always the thing that scared him, losing his humanity, falling completely into his form of stars and fire and night. Colorado Springs was small and lovely and it was home, and even when he was two thousand feet underground in the mountain it had been near and that had made him happy.
What were the odds it would survive another twenty-four hours?
She felt it before she saw it, a low buzz that seemed to wax and wane like the beating of an enormous heart. Then it filled the northern sky, a cross between a black storm cloud and a colony of bats. She had seen Thamiel before, but never this, never an entire host.
It saw her. The dark cloud changed directions, headed right towards her. Its radius must have measured miles. Finally it was atop her, buzzing over her, like her own personal rainstorm.
A familiar form separated from the formless mass, and Thamiel slid through the air effortlessly to join Sohu on the peak. He opened his mouth to say something, but Sohu interrupted.
“Thamiel, if this were a book, and you were at the head of a demonic army, and the only thing standing in your way was a little girl, on a mountaintop, with a sword forged from a fallen star, how do you think it would end?”
“This again?” Thamiel snorted. “First of all, you don’t have – ”
The great sword Sigh appeared in Sohu’s hands.
” – your father’s abilities,” Thamiel finished, fluidly, with only the slightest pause. “And Sohu, I killed him. He resisted me for a season only, with a stupid trick, and in the end I killed him. The Other King got the empty husk, but I was the one who killed his spirit. Do you know why videos still work, Sohu? That wasn’t Uriel. That was me. I kept it working so that every month, I could send him videos of his wife, burning. Updates, if you will. I never missed one. I killed him slowly, protractedly, until finally the Other King stuck a sword through his chest and put him out of his misery. Now my powers are stronger. What do you think I will do to you? Be afraid, Sohu. I am the left hand of God.”
Sohu didn’t say anything, just rolled down her sleeve to show the scarred stump where her own left hand used to be.
Then she stepped into Yetzirah and struck. She called on the town to their east, its first streetlights starting to glow in the twilight gloom. Colorado Springs. Colorado is Spanish for colorful. Color comes from Indo-European *kel, to conceal. Spring. To burst forth. Colorado Springs. That which had been concealed, bursting forth. Revelation of secrets. The essence of kabbalah. Her hometown and her birthright. She filled herself with love for her city and her family and her people, and the essence of kabbalah arced out of her, filled the mountaintops with light.
Thamiel held out his bident, parted the glowing streams of meaning. Colorado, color, *kel, concealment. Cognate with Greek, kalypto, to conceal. To unconceal, to reveal, apokalypto. John had named his revelation Apokalypto, thence the modern Apocalypse. Revelation 9:3: “And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power.” With the practiced mastery of thousands of years, Thamiel took each line of force that Sohu fed him, channeled the semantic energies from Colorado to apocalypse and to the power given to demons to rule the earth.
She saw what he was doing, wouldn’t let him, raised her sword, traced two minus signs of flame into the air. Revelation 9:3 minus two, Revelation 9:1. “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.” The star that sought the key to the pit. The line of Comet West, Heaven touching upon Earth, the source of Sohu’s gifts and the meaning that drove her life. The meaning burst into sparks of starlight all around her, protecting her, wrapping around her like a cloak.
Thamiel rolled two of his eyes and made a motion with his bident.
The whole cloud of demons crashed down on her. The three great hosts of the hellish princes Adramelech, Asmodeus, and Rahab, all turned against a single human. It was like falling night, like rushing water. The shield of starlight crackled, started to crumble. She constructed forms and glyphs in Briah and Yetzirah, shrieked a desperate cry for help through the aether to anything that could hear. She couldn’t waste her real weapons on these things. She needed them for Thamiel. She had lost him in the cacophony. She traced desperate patterns to ward off the horde, surrounded herself with glittering polyhedra of light.
Then came a great wind from the south, and she saw an army of spirits, skull-like faces crowned with quetzal feathers. A Mesoamerican war-band crashed into the host of Adramelech. Sohu felt the assault on her subside as they turned to face these new intruders.
“You thought I forgot!” Samyazaz yelled into the towering nimbus of demons. He was in his true angelic form now, neither priest-king nor cactus, a brilliant creature of ivory-white wings and unbearably intense eyes. “Well, now it’s the apocalypse, and there’s nothing left to be afraid of, so you know what? I never forget! YOU DESTROYED MY ZIGGURAT, YOU TWO-HEADED CREEP!” The air rang with the thunder of their combat.
Sohu took advantage of the distraction, shot out from Pike’s Peak, ascended into the open air above, still searching for Thamiel. Asmodeus and Rahab’s hosts followed. They crashed into her in the cirrus clouds above the highest mountain, two tongues of dark flame that whirled around her among the noctilucent drops of ice. Sohu spoke words of fire and night, drove great spinning wheels of flame into the hearts of the horde, called the winds to scatter her assailants. She spoke the Names of God, the secret ones UNSONG had spent the work of decades gathering, and slashed huge swathes of destruction into the darkness. But slowly they began to close in again, the starlight weakening, Sohu’s breath and voice starting to fail.
Then the cavalry rode in. Hundreds of beautiful tall angels riding bright white horses, and…was that the William Tell Overture? At their head, wearing cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, rode Gadiriel, the Lady of Los Angeles. “YEEEEHAW!” she shouted, heedless of the Third Commandment. She fired her revolver twice, and each shot blossomed into a miniature sun. She saw Asmodeus, jumped off her horse, landed in front of him with her gun drawn. “I reckon you better turn around and go right back where you came from, pardner,” she drawled. “There’s a new seraph in town!”
Sohu didn’t wait to see what happened next. She flew through a hole in the darkness, still seeking Thamiel. He was nowhere to be found. The host of Rahab pursued, indistinct dark forms that looked from different angles like ravens, bats, or locusts. She tried to evade them, rose even higher, coursed through the ionosphere in a crackle of light into the dark spaces beyond Earth’s atmosphere, where the fixed stars and moon glowed unimpeded by any envelope of air. She let the lines of starlight intersect around her, reflect off each other, congeal into a luminous labyrinth of protection. Still the host of Rahab came against her, teasing through her vulnerabilities, wresting cracks in her own shield to match the cracks in the sky above them. And she realized then that she couldn’t stand on her own against even a single demonic host, that this would finally be the end of her.
Then a million figures shot up from the earth below on pillars of fire. Old men, children, women with flowers in their hair, all singing songs of love and praise. The people of San Francisco, who had passed while still alive into the eternity outside of time. All listening to her call, coming to her aid. At their head, still clad in a white NASA spacesuit, rose Neil Armstrong, who had returned from the space beyond the world as the Right Hand of God. He rocketed into the horde of demons until he reached Rahab, and grabbed his neck, and slew him. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of Psalm 89:10: “Thou hast slain Rahab with thy strong arm”
Sohu plummeted back down to Earth, burned like a meteor as she pierced the heavens, landed back on the summit of Pike’s Peak, newly invigorated. “I’m coming for you, Thamiel!” she shouted, and she found him on the side of the mountain, landed with enough force to clear a crater, turned to face her adversary within the still-smoking arena. Still not quite time. She had to weaken him first.
Thamiel didn’t say anything, just called forth terror and nightmare. From Pike’s Peak itself he took a profusion of Ps and Ks. Apep and Kek, the two Egyptian gods of primordial darkness. Poop and kaka, two terms for human excrement. Pikey and Paki and kike and kook, all terms of fear and prejudice and hatred.
As it closed in on her, Sohu took the same letters and turned them into pikuach. Pikuach nefesh, to save a life, the holiest of principles, the one that took precedence over almost any other. Kippah, the cap worn by the holy to remind them that God was above them at all times, to protect them from the unbearable radiance of the Divine Presence. Cop. A protector, an agent of Law. Pope. The vicar of God on Earth. Kook. The first Chief Rabbi of Israel, who said that “the pure righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light”. Keep. “If you will enter into life, keep the commandments”. Kayak, her own word, on which she had begun her studies so many years ago. The shield of starlight flickered desperately, but did not give in.
Thamiel slashed at her with his bident; Sohu stepped back, and the bident struck empty air, leaving two glowing lines. Two. Sohu took the gematria, transmuted it into bet, added it to the kayak still gleaming above her, made it into kokab, star.
Thamiel removed the leftmost kaf from the word. Kaf. Palm. The left hand of God. The remaining letters he turned it into bakah, weeping. Job 16:16, “My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of death.” From the verse Thamiel took foulness, and the shadow of death, and the number 616. That left him with a 1. “I have won”, he said.
And he had. The foulness and death, the Number of the Beast, the Left Hand of God, all the concepts were too tight, Sohu was too exhausted to tease any more meaning out of her. They closed together, tore apart her shield.
Thamiel raised the bident high. “Any last words?” he asked.
“Two…of them,” sputtered Sohu. “Knock…knock.”
“What?” asked Thamiel, his eyes narrowing. His second head bobbed back and forth in excitement and confusion.
“Knock knock,” said Sohu. “Don’t tell me you’re not familiar with the setup.”
“Who’s there?” he asked suspiciously.
II.
Sohu woke up on a bed of cloudstuff, just as she had done thousands of times before. But today was different. Today was her last day here. She would get in the flying kayak and go home and cry at her father’s funeral and help her family. What she had learned would have to be enough.
She walked out of the little cottage. There was Uriel in his spot in the center of the storm, great gold eyes gleaming with excitement.
“THINGS HAVE HAPPENED,” said Uriel.
“Huh?” asked Sohu, still half asleep, rubbing her eyes. She wasn’t nearly awake enough yet to deal with the sort of weirdness Uriel was constantly springing on her.
“YOU ASKED WHY YOU SHOULD STAY AN EXTRA DAY. I TOLD YOU MANY THINGS COULD HAPPEN IN A DAY. NOW THEY HAVE HAPPENED. FOR EXAMPLE, THERE ARE SEVERAL NEW VERSES IN THE BIBLE.”
“Uriel, please. What are you talking about?”
“I DO NOT WANT YOU TO LEAVE ME, BUT I KNOW YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO COLORADO. SO I HAVE REARRANGED THE FUNDAMENTAL SPATIAL AND MYSTICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE SOMEWHAT. IT WAS VERY HARD. I COULD NOT DO IT IN YETZIRAH OR EVEN BRIAH. I HAD TO EDIT ATZILUTH DIRECTLY.”
“…doesn’t that destroy the world?”
“USUALLY. THAT IS WHY I MOSTLY AVOID IT. BUT I TRIED VERY HARD TO MAKE SURE THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. IN THIS CASE ALL IT DID WAS CHANGE THE BIBLE. IT IS SO WEIRD TO BEGIN WITH THAT I DOUBT VERY MANY PEOPLE WILL NOTICE.”
“Uriel, everyone notices the Bible. People have been studying every letter of it for thousands of years.”
“OH.”
“What did you do anyway?”
“I HAVE CREATED A RITUAL THAT LETS TWO MINDS JOIN TOGETHER. NO MATTER HOW FAR AWAY, THEY CAN TALK TO EACH OTHER, SHARE THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES, FEEL THE SAME EMOTION. THEY WILL BE WITH EACH OTHER ALL THE TIME, BEYOND DISTANCE OR DEATH.
“…what does that mean?”
“I WILL SHOW YOU. I HAVE MADE A MAGIC CIRCLE. PLEASE STEP INTO IT.”
“This isn’t going to be like the time you made me eight years old forever and couldn’t change it back, is it?”
“LIKE THAT IN WHAT WAY?”
Sohu sighed. Conversations with Uriel would never be remotely normal. But they were something whose absence would leave a great gaping void in her life. What would it be like to live with ordinary people, who would answer questions with simple yeses or nos instead of asking for absurd specifics and then going off on tangents about which proto-Quechua root words it reminded them of? It was too awful to contemplate.
She stepped into the magic circle.
“REPEAT AFTER ME, BUT CHANGE THE NAME. I, THE ARCHANGEL URIEL, IN FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE CONSEQUENCES…”
“I, Sohu West, in…bah…full knowledge of the consequences…”
And so they went, the archangel first, then the child, through the long ritual of the Sacred Kabbalistic Marriage of Minds. The winds of the storm around them went strangely quiet. The sun darkened, as if covered by clouds, then brightened as if reflected by a million jewels. The sky became a deeper shade of blue.
“FOR GOD IS ONE”
“For God is One”
“AND HIS NAME IS ONE”
“And His Name is One”
“AND WE ARE ONE”
“And we are one”
“AND IT IS DONE”
“And it is done”
Sohu felt something new in her mind, a presence, a spark of gold.
[Are you in my head?] she asked the archangel.
[WELL, I WOULD NOT SAY I AM LITERALLY IN YOUR HEAD, SINCE YOUR HEAD IS VERY SMALL. HOWEVER, IF YOU WANT TO USE SPATIAL METAPHORS TO GROUND THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CHASHMAL, YOU MIGHT SAY THAT…]
III.
Thamiel raised the bident high, chuckled. “Any last words?” he asked.
“Two…of them,” sputtered Sohu. “Knock…knock.”
“What?” asked Thamiel, his eyes narrowing. His second head bobbed back and forth in excitement and confusion.
“Knock knock,” said Sohu. “Don’t tell me you’re not familiar with the setup.”
“Who’s there?” he finally asked, suspiciously.
Sohu closed her eyes. When she opened them, there was no sclera, no iris, no pupil. Just a sea of burning gold.
“URIEL,” she said.
“What?” asked Thamiel, jumping back. “How? What are you – ”
“YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO SAY ‘URIEL WHO’,” said Sohu.
“You’re dead! The Other King killed you, destroyed your machine, and good riddance! That’s why my powers are – ”
“YOU DO NOT SEEM LIKE YOU ARE GOING TO SAY ‘URIEL WHO’ SO I WILL PRETEND YOU SAID IT AND CONTINUE THE JOKE ANYWAY. THE ANSWER I WAS GOING TO GIVE WAS: ‘URIEL-LY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO THINK I WOULD ABANDON MY FRIEND.'”
Then there was light.
Beautiful, multicolored light, ten colors, the seven colors of the earthly rainbow and the three extra colors you only get in Heaven. Ten colors corresponding to the ten sephirot and the ten fingers and the Ten Commandments and the ten digits of the number system and the ten pip cards of the Tarot and all the other tens in all the correspondences of the world. Thamiel tried to flee, but it consumed him, melted him like the sun melts snowflakes. All of the demons of the great swarm that hovered above Colorado Springs melted away in that conflagration, the release of all the stored energy of all the spheres, eons of careful collection loosed into a single brilliant flowering.
Sohu blinked again, and her eyes were deep brown.
[THAT IS ALL OF IT] said Uriel, in Sohu’s head. [THERE IS NO MORE DIVINE LIGHT.]
[It did what we needed it to.]
[HE IS GONE FOR A BRIEF TIME ONLY. HE WILL RETURN LATER.]
[Something else will have killed us by then, so that’s fine.]
[YOU ARE VERY PESSIMISTIC.]
[It’s the apocalypse. You wrote the Book of Revelation, didn’t you?]
[UM. I WAS GOING TO. BUT THEN THE JET STREAM STARTED FLOWING THE WRONG WAY AND I HAD TO FIX IT. I THINK I JUST GAVE JOHN OF PATMOS A BUCKET OF PSILOCYBE MUSHROOMS AND TOLD HIM TO WRITE WHATEVER CAME TO MIND.]
[Well, take my word for it, things are really bad.]
[I AM IN A GOOD MOOD. IT HAS BEEN THREE HOURS AND FOUR MINUTES SINCE MY MACHINE WAS DESTROYED. THIS IS THE LONGEST I HAVE EVER GONE WITHOUT HAVING TO FIX ANY CATASTROPHIC SYSTEM ERRORS.]
[I’m glad one of us is enjoying this. Let’s go help Nathanda.]
[OKAY.]
Sohu turned to lightning and disappeared. The last few ashes and sparks fell to the base of Pike’s Peak. The force of the battle had split the mountain in two.
[Author’s Note 10 is now up.]
]]>This is by Raymond Arnold. And hopefully you didn’t miss the Bayesian Choir’s rendition of the title song.
Relevant wiki articles: Garden of the Gods, Samuel Butler, the Butlerian Jihad, The Red Wheelbarrow, The New Colossus, Eli, Eli, Pike’s Peak, Pikuach nefesh, Rabbi Kook.
I am going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area on Sunday May 14, and I would like to hold reading of the final chapter of Unsong and an end-of-book party for anyone who’s interested. If fans would like to organize this themselves, that would make my life easier. Otherwise I’ll figure something out and let you know at the bottom of the next chapter.
]]>The alarms went silent. North American airspace went black. The lights went out. THARMAS went quiet, then released an arc of electrical energy which briefly lit the otherwise pitch-black room before dying back down. Sohu gave a horrible primal scream.
“THEY KILLED URIEL!” she screamed. “THEY KILLED URIEL! THEY BROKE MALKUTH! EVERYTHING IS…” She gave a horrible noise, like she was being pulled apart.
Someone said the Luminous Name, and I saw her there, clutching her head. I saw the rest of them. Nathanda looking grave, Jinxiang looking angry, Caelius still mangled and bloody, sitting with THARMAS, hitting it, trying to get it to turn back on. I saw Sarah, her face emotionless.
“Sohu!” said Nathanda, placing her hands on her sister’s head. “Can you hear me, Sohu? Tell me what’s going on?”
“THEY KILLED URIEL!” she screamed. “THEY KILLED URIEL AND NOW IT’S ALL…” She looked like she was trying to find a word for how bad things were. She started saying something else, but I wasn’t sure whether she was speaking some language I didn’t know or just having a seizure.
The real power of angels and demons was unplumbably immense. They’d been hobbled to a semi-human level by Uriel’s filters, which denied them the divine light they devoured for sustenance. If that was gone, there was nothing hyperbolic about Sohu’s reaction. We had lost in the most final and terrifying way possible.
“Sohu,” said Caelius, very quietly, and I could see he was having trouble staying conscious, but he was Cometspawn, and there was a job to be done. “Sohu, we need THARMAS back. This must have been the Other King’s plan all along. He would deny us THARMAS and the Names by – ” he stopped for a second, took a deep breath ” – by preventing computer technology from working at all. I need to know, can you bring THARMAS back? The lights can wait. The airspace map can wait. But Sohu, we need THARMAS.”
“Can’t…do it,” said Sohu, panting. “Never could…get Briah…right. Computers…too hard.”
Now it was General Bromis’ turn. “Can you at least get radio connections back up? We’re flying blind in here! I need to hear from the armies!”
Sohu paused for a second. “Kay…did it…radio…works,” she said. “Can’t manage anything more. Also, all of…the rivers in the world are…running in reverse.” She laughed fatalistically. “Never fails. Hardly…matters now.” She grabbed her head again. “Oh God…Uriel. It’s too much.”
Bromis and his soldiers had left, probably trying to radio their battalions, tell them that the artillery wasn’t going to fire, that the tanks would just stand motionless. “Got…to get…THARMAS back,” Caelius was saying, but his words were slurred and he sounded half-asleep. For the first time, I thought I saw Nathanda…not at a loss, exactly. Just sitting quietly, trying to figure out what to do.
“Put me in THARMAS,” Sarah said suddenly, and we all turned to her.
“What?” asked Nathanda.
“Put me in THARMAS. I’m still working. I have a soul, a divine spark, so I’m mind and not machinery. If Vihaan hadn’t bombed the original THARMAS, the one with the soul, and forced Caelius to switch it to a different configuration, it would be working too. But he did and it isn’t. If you dissect me for parts and put them in THARMAS, it will have a soul and it can work.”
“You’d die!” I protested.
“Of course I would!” she spat back at me. “You don’t love me, Aaron! Admit it!”
“It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that…”
“No. You gave me life, Aaron, but you didn’t give me a purpose. You people have so much purpose. Breathing, eating, having sex, making money. It’s all so easy for you! I had to make my own purpose, and the only thing I had was you, and now you’ve rejected me, and all I want is to become THARMAS so that I won’t have to go back into the darkness but also I’ll never be able to think for more than a quarter of a millisecond and I’ll never be able to remember your name. I want to know every Name in the cosmos except yours.”
“Listen, Sarah – ”
“Um,” said Caelius. “I know this is – look, we really need to do this.”
As if synchronized, all of us turned to Nathanda.
“Do it,” she said.
With what almost looked like a smirk on her face, Sarah walked over to where Caelius sat at the computer terminal. “It’s my heart,” she said. “The computer. It’s inside my chest.”
Caelius held out his hands, and the sword Sigh appeared inside them, the sword that always came when the Cometspawn needed it.
I ran towards Sarah.
Caelius cut her chest open. There was no blood. He sliced through skin easily, like he was cutting a cake, and I saw the smooth white form of my old MacBook inside.
“Sarah!” I yelled, and I hugged her.
“You said,” she whispered to me, “that you would love me if I was good.”
Then Caelius pulled the laptop out of her body, and the golem crumbled into dust.
I watched numbly as his expert hands pried open the bottom lid and started popping out parts. I was vaguely aware of a commotion all around me, and finally I turned and saw Bromis was back with his soldiers.
“Thamiel,” he said, and something in me had expected it. “The demons are swarming. They’re moving…faster than we can track them, given what’s happened to our technology. They’re swarming in Siberia and they’re heading our direction. No clear target besides just ‘North America’ at the moment, but I’ve told the military to be on alert.”
“Alert won’t help,” snapped Sohu. “Their bonds have been broken. Almost no limits on their power.”
“Could they have figured out what we’re doing here?” asked Nathanda.
Sohu glared at her sister like she was an idiot. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the least they could have done.”
“Then it’s safe to say they’re headed this direction. Come to stop us before we succeed, just like the Other King. Well, they’ll have to wait in line.”
“No,” said Bromis. “The Other King is still trying to break through the passes. The demons will come from the north, where we’re defenseless. They’ll fly across the Bering Strait, go through Canada, cross the border near the Dakotas, and swoop down the Front Range Urban Corridor. They’ll make it in hours. Maybe minutes. We may be able to relocate troops onto the 87 north of the city before then, but with the guns only working intermittently I don’t know how much help they’ll be.”
“Zero,” said Sohu. “Zero help.” At least didn’t seem to be seizing or anything now. I felt at the telepathic link. Sohu’s mind was a swirl of horror and dismay, parts of it had settled down, and other parts had gotten stronger, or opened up into new configurations I couldn’t quite detect. She sounded hopeless, but her mind didn’t feel hopeless. “Keep the troops in the passes,” she finally said. “Let them hold off the Other King. I’ll take care of Thamiel.”
“You?” asked Nathanda and Jinxiang together.
“Yeah,” said Sohu, defiantly. I saw her glance at the stump of her left hand, the one that used to have the Comet King’s mark on it. “I never told you guys this, because I thought Father would freak out, but I met Thamiel. Three times. He came to harass Uriel when I was staying with him. He…he wasn’t nice to me. There’s stuff I need to settle with him.”
“He’s the Devil!” said Jinxiang. “Everyone has stuff they need to settle with him! Sohu, don’t do it! You were sitting here clutching your head in pain just a second ago. Stay here where it’s – ”
“Were you going to say safe?” asked Sohu. “Hah. Look. This is what you guys keep me around for, right?”
“I’ll go with you,” said Jinxiang.
“No you won’t,” said Nathanda and Sohu together.
“Fuck you both,” said Jinxiang. She looked at Sohu, but more pleading than angry. “Sohu,” she said. “I know you’re great. I’ve seen what you can do. But don’t go alone. Please, don’t.”
“I’m never alone,” said Sohu. “And you haven’t seen what I can do. Not really. The mountains are still in one piece.”
Then she walked out of the room.
“Fuck,” said Jinxiang.
“Your highness,” said Bromis, “permission to leave. Please. For the passes. If the Other King shows up in person, our lines won’t be able to resist him. Let me go find my men, see what defenses I can hold together.”
“Granted,” said Nathanda. The general saluted. “And Bromis? My father always said you were one of the bravest men he knew. Make of that what you will.” Bromis stood there awkwardly, then saluted again, hurried out.
“He was asking to permission to go die with his men,” Nathanda explained to Jinxiang, when the latter raised an eyebrow. “He knows the passes can’t hold. That’s why I won’t let you go help Sohu. Because when the defenses along the Rockies fall, the Other King and his legions will be headed right here. Fast. You and me, we’re going to defend Citadel West. Together.”
“You’re more afraid of the Other King than Thamiel?” asked Jinxiang, not contradicting her sister, just not quite believing her.
“Yes. Father could beat Thamiel. If Sohu thinks she can take him on, I trust her. The Other King…Father…” She turned to me. The soldiers had gone with Bromis; me, Jinxiang, and Caelius were the only ones left in the giant throne room, and Caelius was still feverishly hacking away at Sarah and THARMAS, trying to connect the pieces into a unified whole. I couldn’t tell if he was just working with the unpredictable genius of a Cometspawn or whether his wounds had gotten the better of him, whether his actions looked random and flailing because they really were random and flailing. I tried to tune out the dust of Sarah’s decayed body.
“Aaron,” said Nathanda. “Sohu showed you the library? Go get me all the books you can find on Elisha ben Abuyah. It’s time to learn everything we can about the Other King.”
]]>[A picture of the Comet King, aged beyond his years, his face looking haggard but determined, lost in shadows. The text says “Somebody had to, no one would / I tried to do the best I could / And now it’s done, and now they can’t ignore us / And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand against the whole unsong / With nothing on my tongue but HaMephorash”. Image credit to my girlfriend Eloise, who also made this picture of Sohu]
Thanks to the Bayesian Choir, you can now hear all of HaMephorash sung the way it was intended. Listen to them here.
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For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighty’s Bow
— William Blake, The Grey Monk
December 21, 1999
Colorado Springs
No analogy suffices. They came in like what they were, the greatest army ever collected, marching back home in in a frustrating mix of victory and defeat.
The people acted like it was otherwise. They lined the streets. They threw flowers. Songs were sung about the Conquerors of Yakutsk, the Vanquishers of Demons. Many even believed it. For them it had been another war. Our country hated their country. Now their country was gone. That was victory, wasn’t it?
A few knew better. The whole war, even the conquest of Yakutsk, had been a means to an end. An end to suffering. The destruction of Hell forever. They had failed. They had completed every step except the only one which counted. Those who knew better joined in the street-lining and flower-throwing, because the alternative was to sit inside and become lost in their thoughts.
And for the same reason, the Comet King accepted their praise. He rode in a big black car, with his generals beside him, and people threw confetti and held up banners and some of them even ran up and hugged him. He accepted it gracefully, lest he become lost in his thoughts.
Robin came to meet him as the parade crossed Uintah Street. There was a cheer as she climbed into the black car and kissed the King. He raised his fist in a gesture that could be interpreted as some form of positive emotion. Everyone cheered again.
The parade broke up as they crossed Fountain Creek and the 140, and they began driving home in earnest. Robin looked at the sky. It was high noon.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
He heard fear in her voice. “Yes?”
“Not now,” she said. “Wait until we get home.”
He stopped the car with a screech, grabbed her in his arms, flew into the air, turned to lightning. He shot southwest, burning through the sky like a meteor. The great blast doors of the bunker-palace opened before him as he landed, changed back. Before she even knew what was happening, she was seated on the bed in their bedroom, her husband beside her.
“I’ve never heard you sound so afraid before,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
She looked around. The familiar objects of their bedroom. The spruce desk. The woven blankets. The painting of the Rocky Mountains. And now he was here with her. She started to cry.
The furrows on his brow deepened.
“Jala, I’ve done something terrible.”
“We can fix it.”
“I know we can.”
“Then don’t cry. Tell me.”
She gulped, took in a deep breath. “I sold my soul to Thamiel.”
He didn’t react. If, as the psychologists say, our brain works by fitting data to plausible models, his thoughts stopped for lack of any model to fit it to. He just stared. Finally he said the only thing he could.
“What did you sell it for?”
“Nothing in particular. I didn’t want anything, that was the problem. I had to make something up. He didn’t believe me in the end, but it was all right, he took the deal anyway. I had to give you a chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“The great work! The destruction of Hell! The end of suffering!”
“Is impossible!”
“I know! If it wasn’t impossible, you would have done it, I believe you, I swear.”
“Robin, what…”
“That’s the thing, Jala. You did everything possible. So I had to give you a chance. It’s like you always say. Somebody has to and no one else will. But you couldn’t. But you love me. I don’t know why but you do. While I’m in Hell, you’ve got another reason, you can cut through the paradox…”
It hit him. It hit him like an asteroid hits a planet, killing all life, boiling away the seas, a giant sterilizing wave of fire. “Robin…you…no…how…no…” and just like that the human part of him disappeared, was consumed, his eyes flashed with white fire, what had once seemed like hair stretched out behind him like the tail of a comet, the air turned cold, the room turned grey, the lights turned off, he stood there, raw, celestial, enraged.
“THIS IS NOT HOW IT ENDS!” he shouted, less at her than at everything. “NO. YOU CAN’T DO THIS. THIS. IS. NOT. HOW. IT. ENDS.”
“No,” she said. “It ends with you rescuing me from Hell. After however long it takes. I don’t know how you’ll do it, but I know it will be something wonderful.”
“THIS! IS! NOT! HOW! IT! ENDS!”
“Jala,” she said, “come off it. I have until sunset tonight with you. Don’t shout. Don’t say anything. Just sit here and be with me.”
The light came back to the room. The flames trailing behind him settled into snow-white hair. The unearthly light almost left his eyes.
“Will you stay with me for the next,” she looked at her watch “hour and and forty minutes?”
He hugged her.
“I’ll stay,” he said.
For an hour and forty minutes, they lay there on the bed. They held each other. They talked about Nathanda, and Caelius, and Jinxiang, and Sohu. They talked about the time they met, in the dining room of the palace, and how confused Father Ellis had been when Jalaketu asked him to officiate their wedding.
Finally, Robin said: “Promise me.”
And Jalaketu said: “I promise.”
An hour and forty minutes later, Thamiel swaggered through the big spruce wood door with a gigantic grin on his tiny face, “Well!” he said, “It looks like we…”
The Comet King had his hands around the demon’s neck in an instant. “Listen,” he said. “I know the rules as well as you do. Take her. But as God is my witness, the next time we meet face to face I will speak a Name, and you and everything you have created will be excised from the universe forever, and if you say even a single unnecessary word right now I will make it hurt.”
The grin disappeared from the demon’s face.
“You can’t harm me,” said Thamiel. “I am a facet of God.”
“I will recarve God without that facet,” said the Comet King.
Very quietly, Thamiel shuffled to Robin and touched her with a single misshapen finger.
The two of them disappeared.
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied.
— Leonard Cohen
Evening, May 14, 2017
Fire Island
I.
Only a few minutes before sunset now. The sea blazed orange. Fire Island rose as a dark line to the north.
“James,” said Ana. “We need to talk.”
The first mate glanced toward the east, where the calculations said God’s boat would soon appear.
“I’ll be quick,” she said. “It’s about the Captain.”
“No,” said James.
“I’m sorry, I promise I’ll be quick, but it’s the end of the world, James, please just hear me out. Simeon thought the Captain was the Comet King. He’d gathered all this evidence. John was…”
“Tomas,” James called, “keep a lookout.” He checked his watch, then turned to Ana. “We have eleven minutes before all of this starts in earnest,” he said, “and in that time I’m going to take you down to the cabin where we can talk properly and we’re going to have a discussion about this.” He motioned Ana down the ladder. Then:
“Listen. Most of the rich bozos who sign on here want to find God for one or another boneheaded reason. But the rest – a fifth? Maybe a tenth? – want to find the Comet King. Every single one of them eventually shouts at the Captain and gives a stirring speech about how he needs to reclaim his throne and lead the nation. The Captain listens patiently, then orders them sent off the ship. This happens four, five times a year? If the Captain is the Comet King, and I don’t have the slightest interest in knowing whether that’s true, then it is always a safe bet that the Comet King knows what he’s doing. He is not one stirring speech and a reminder of his dead wife away from reclaiming all he has lost. He’s here for a reason. Simeon didn’t respect that, so he’s out. If you don’t respect it, you’re out too, no matter how good you are with winds. Do you understand?”
“But…”
“No buts. If you can fathom the mind of the Comet King, you can talk to him as an equal. Until then…”
Ana sighed. “The world’s falling apart,” she said. “He’s got to do something.”
James glanced at his watch. “It’s time, Ana.”
They climbed back upstairs into the last light of the setting sun. At the very moment it dipped below the horizon, Amoxiel cried “Sail ho!”, and they all turned their heads east to where a solitary purple light shone against the dimming grey sky.
“That’s it!” James shouted. “Let’s go!”
II.
The red sail flapped in the wind. Mark McCarthy traced pentagrams on the orange. Ana spoke the Zephyr Name, called the winds to the yellow. Tomas sang to the green. Father O’Connor prayed before the blue. Amoxiel drank a flask of holy water and the violet sail opened. “Once more to give pursuit upon the sea!” he said joyfully.
The black sail stood silent and alone. Ana tried not to look at it.
Not A Metaphor shot east, like a bullet, like a rocket, like a comet. The sea became glassy and weird. The cracks in the sky seemed to glow with new vigor. Strange scents wafted in on the rushing winds.
Erin Hope stood alone on the bow of the ship. Crane was dead. Azore had forfeit his ticket. She was the only passenger left. She stared into the distance at the purple light that she hoped would mean her salvation, the light of God. Then she retched off the front of the boat.
Faster and faster went Not A Metaphor. The wind became almost unbearable, then stopped entirely as they crossed some magical threshold. The ship shook like a plastic bag in a hurricane. Ana wondered if the autopilot driving them on had thoughts, and if so what it was thinking right now.
But still the light of God grew dimmer and further away.
“This is bullshit!” said Father O’Connor, who kept praying in between expletives. Ana wondered exactly what kind of a priest he was. Apparently the type who would agree to join an expedition to hunt down God if they paid him enough. Probably not Pope material.
“This is the usual,” said James. He’d been through it all before. Sure, this was a special run. They had Ana and the yellow sail for the first time. The autopilot was steering, so James could stand outside and help coordinate the Symphony. And the fall of Uriel’s machine was a wild card. But in the end, James had chased and failed to catch the sacred ship a few dozen times. He expected this to be another such failure, and it bothered him not at all.
Erin Hope left the bow, walked over to the green sail. She was still shaking a little bit; Ana was half-surprised she hadn’t gotten off in New York to pick up some heroin, but who knew? Maybe she really believed. “You say this runs on song?” she asked Tomas. The Mexican nodded.
Then Erin sang. There was something shocking about her voice. Her face was lined with premature wrinkles, her arms were lined with track marks, she looked like some ancient witch who’d been buried a thousand years, but when she sang it was with the voice of America’s pop goddess, sounding a clear note among the winds and darkness. She sang an old Jewish song, Eli, Eli, though God only knew where she learned it. It went “My God, my God, I pray that these things never end. The sand and the sea. The rush of the water. The crash of the heavens. The prayer of the heart.”
The seas surged. The sky seethed with sudden storm-clouds. But the green sail opened wider than they had ever seen before, a great green banner in the twilight, and emerald sparks flashed along the rigging.
Their quarry ceased to recede. But it didn’t get any closer either.
“This is bullshit,” Father O’Connor repeated, in between Confiteors. “Why can’t you guys get the black sail open?”
“Less braying, more praying,” said James, who had taken a quick dislike to the priest.
Ana shot it a quick glance, then upbraided herself. If Simeon was right, this was the end of the world. Why shouldn’t she look at the black sail? She stared straight at the thing. It hurt, the way looking too close at an Escher painting hurt, but worse. What was it? How did it work?
The Comet King, John had said, would stand beneath the black sail and raise his magic sword, and the sail had opened to him alone. So they needed either the Comet King – which if Simeon was right, might actually be a viable plan – or his sword.
But who was the Comet King? He was angelic, and his sword was angelic, but angels powered the violet sail, and no two were alike. If the secret of the black sail was just angels or their artifacts, Amoxiel would have opened it long ago. Think like a kabbalist. Seven sails for the seven sublunary sephirot. The red sail for the material world, that was Malkuth. The orange sail for ritual magic, that could be Netzach. The yellow for kabbalah, that was Yesod, the foundation, the superstructure of the world. The green sail for music, that was beauty, Tiferet. The blue sail for prayer, that was Hod. The violet sail for angels, that was Chesed, righteousness.
That left Gevurah. Severity. God’s goodness dealt out in a form that looks like harshness. The judgment all must fear.
The Comet King’s sword was fearsome. A dangerous weapon. But was it really…
Then Ana thought about what was on the sword.
Something opened in Ana’s mind. New memories. Knowledge she shouldn’t have. A deep loss. She didn’t cry, because time was running short, and she knew how she was going to open the black sail. She told the winds to stay for her, then ran fore, where Mark McCarthy labored beneath the orange sail. “Mr. McCarthy!” she said over the howling winds, holding out her hand. “I need your opal amulet!”
“How did you…,” but something in her face spooked him. He looked at the orange sail, considered his options, and decided it wasn’t worth a fight. He unclasped his necklace and handed it to her.
Ana Thurmond advanced on the black sail, and something was terribly wrong. She wanted to avert her gaze, but she kept looking, even though something was terribly wrong. She reached the final mast, saw the ship’s wake behind her, a wake of multicolored sparks spiralling into the void, but she held on to the mast and didn’t run, even though something was terribly wrong.
“Black mast,” she said. She felt silly talking to it, but she wasn’t sure how else to get it working. It didn’t recognize her like it did the Comet King. Forty-odd years ago, young Jalaketu had stood below Silverthorne and defended the pass against an army of demons. Before the holy water had washed them away, he had faced Thamiel in single combat and drawn blood. Blood like that, she figured, never washed away. It was still on the great sword Sigh. Ready to be used. The final facet of God.
“Black mast, this amulet contains the blood of Malia Ngo. She’s the daughter of Thamiel and Robin West. His blood runs in her veins. Just like on the Comet King’s sword. This is the blood of Thamiel, and I call you to our aid.”
The seventh sail opened, and there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
III.
Psalm 107: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.”
This is maybe not true in general. Cruise passengers, for example, mostly see the wonders of a buffet table. But if you were to arrange all your seafarers from least-seeing-the-works-of-the-Lord-and-His-wonders to most-, with cruise passengers on one end and Coleridge characters on the other, the poor crew of Not A Metaphor would be several nautical miles off the right-hand side of the chart.
The seven sails shone in the dusk like the banners of psychedelic armies. The sea and sky dissolved into one another. The sun and moon were both clearly visible, but it was neither day nor night. The bubbles they traced in their wake shot from the end of the ship like fireworks celebrating an apocalypse. They sailed a sea outside the world, and they sailed it really fast.
They started gaining on the blob of purple light.
James shouted commands at the crew with military efficiency, but Ana could see fear in his face. He had been happy, she realized, living quietly at sea, talking about hunting God. Actually catching Him hadn’t been part of his plans, and beneath the well-practiced orders she could sense his reluctance.
Erin wouldn’t stop singing. It was that same song, Eli, Eli, and she was going at it like a madwoman. Green sparks flew out of her mouth with each word, but it didn’t even seem to faze her. Ana remembered the rush when she had first called the winds to the yellow sail. She wondered if it was better or worse than heroin.
Amoxiel was talking to himself almost too quickly for her to make out. She strained to hear him over the din, and caught the phrase “Sir Francis Drake, the Tudors, Duke of York”. Enochian. The language of angels. He was so far gone he couldn’t even ramble in English anymore.
Tomas was at the bow, holding James’ binoculars and trying to make out features of the purple speck ahead of them. Ana delicately lay the amulet on the ground before the black mast, then headed fore to join him.
“Do you see anything?” she asked.
He handed her the binoculars.
They’d always said that the boat of Metatron was royal purple with golden sails, and she could sort of see it. A purple splotch, and golden blobs above it. But the shape was wrong. Too squat. Too round. The sails were too short. She strained to see better, then gave up, rubbed her eyes, and handed the binoculars back to Tomas. He placed the cord around his neck and let them dangle, just staring out ahead of them. Even with the naked eye, they could see the purple ship making weird zigs and zags that shouldn’t have been possible.
The sky looked like a hurricane had taken LSD. The sea looked like a coral reef had read Lovecraft. The sails were too bright to stare at directly, and the deck was starting to bubble or maybe crawl. Erin still sung Eli, Eli with demented ferocity amidships.
The boat in front of them began to take on more features. The purple deck at first seemed formless, then revealed fissures like gigantic scales. The golden sails had no masts, but stuck up ridged and angular like huge fins.
Ana and Tomas figured it out at the same time.
“That’s not a ship at all!” Ana cried.
“It’s the Leviathan!” Tom said superficially.
Erin heard the shout, stared at the huge bulk before her, and yelled at James. “The harpoon, man! Get the harpoon!”
IV.
The first time I saw Ana was on a ladder outside a pawn shop. But the first time I really felt Ana – heard her in her element and knew her mind – was around the dinner table in Ithaca, listening to her read the Book of Job. I remember the chill that came over me as she read the exquisite poetry describing Leviathan, the monster with whose glories God terrified Job:
His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.
His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.
In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.
The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved.
His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.
When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves.
The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.
He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble.
Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear
So no spears, no darts, no habergeon (whatever that is), no iron, no arrows, no slingshots, a second reminder about the darts, and a second reminder about the spears.
But nothing about harpoons.
James was not happy. He stared at the harpoon in obvious discomfort. Harpooning the Leviathan seemed like the worst idea. But they were a business outfit. They had made a promise. If we find God, they’d said, we’ll bring you to Him. If God was on a sea monster, then there was only one way to do that.
But the most important reason to use the harpoon was the same reason people climbed Everest: because it was there. If the Comet King had a harpoon on his yacht, it was because he expected to need it. If James refused to shoot, then it would be obvious to the world what was now obvious to Ana: that the whole thing had been intended as theater and that none of them had had any intention of winning the chase.
“Amoxiel!” James called the angel, and the angel flew to him. “You’re our expert on this kind of stuff. What’s your assessment?”
“Earl of Leicester religious settlement Westminster Abbey,” said Amoxiel. It wasn’t entirely clear where his mind was, and it wasn’t entirely clear where the ship was, but it seemed pretty certain that the two weren’t the same place.
“You would have to be a goddamn idiot,” said Father O’Connor. The sails were pretty much self-sustaining now. Maybe the crew could stop them if they wanted to, maybe not. O’Connor had stopped praying and joined the growing debate by the harpoon stand.
“What about the Captain?” asked Mark. “Where is he? Of all the times not to be on deck…we should get the Captain and make him decide.”
“The Captain is not to be disturbed for any reason,” said James, “and that means any reason.”
He looked at the Leviathan. The monster was almost entirely submerged. It was impossible to tell how big it was. Rabbi Johanan bar Nafcha said that he had once been out at sea and seen a fish three hundred miles long. Upon the fish’s head was written the sentence “I am one of the meanest creatures that inhabit the sea, I am three hundred miles in length, and today I will enter into the jaws of the Leviathan.” This story raises way more questions than it answers, like who had enough waterproof ink in 200 AD to write a three hundred mile long message on a fish, but if it was to be taken seriously the Leviathan was really, really big.
On the other hand, James was a military man, and he had backed himself into a corner, and now he had to do his duty. “Everyone hold on,” he said. “We’re doing this.”
He aimed the harpoon and fired.
The thing that came out the other end was neither spear nor dart nor arrow. I don’t know what a habergeon is, but I doubt it was that either. It looked more like a meteor, a seething projectile of light, trailing a shining silver thread behind it. The weapon zipped through the boiling air, leaving a violent purple linear afterglow, then struck the Leviathan right on its back.
The line gave a brutal jerk, and the ship plunged forward like a maniac water-skiing behind a rocketship. Murderous pulling feelings in dimensions not quite visible. The silver thread looked too thin to support a falling leaf, but somehow it held.
“Structural integrity down to NaN percent,” said a voice. It was the ship.
“You can talk outside of the bridge?”
“Yes. Structural integrity down to NaN percent,” the ship repeated.
“Um. Is there a device on that harpoon to help us reel the thing in?” James sounded like he was hoping there wasn’t.
“Yes, this is the primary purpose of the ship’s power supply.”
“I thought going fast was the – ”
“Yes, that is the secondary purpose.”
“Well, uh, reel away.”
The ship lurched more. “Structural integrity now down to NaN percent,” said the pleasant synthetic voice.
“Well, uh, tell me if it gets any lower than that,” said James. He wrung his hands.
V.
“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?” asked Ana, that night at the dinner table. “Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put a hook into his nose? Or bore his jaw through with a thorn?”
Erica idly brushed her leg against Eli Foss’ under the table.
“Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee?”
Bill Dodd was trying to think of a suitably witty way to make fun of the passage.
“Wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? WILT THOU PLAY WITH HIM AS WITH A BIRD?”
“Sheesh,” said Ally Hu, who was reading ahead. “God is so obsessed with this whole Leviathan thing. First He is talking about the earth and the stars and the clouds, and then He decides no, I’ll just drop everything and focus on Leviathan for three chapters.”
“You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”
“Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a pleiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”
“And you don’t think he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.
“It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.
“So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”
“What I think my esteemed cousin meant,” Ana had said, “is that God argues here that we’re too weak and ignorant to be worthy to know these things. But then the question becomes – exactly how smart do we have to be to deserve an answer? Now that we can, as Bill puts it, send lightning through the sky, now that we can capture whales and make them do tricks for us, does that mean we have a right to ask God for an explanation? Discuss!”
VI.
“Where is Metatron?” asked Erin, that final night on the Not A Metaphor. “Is he riding Leviathan? Is he in his belly? Will he come out to meet us once we’re close enough?”
“Lady,” said James. “We don’t know any more than you do. We’ll…all find out soon enough.”
Amoxiel gibbered softly. For some reason Erin started to cry. James and Father O’Connor got into some argument, and Mark McCarthy wouldn’t stop drawing pentagrams around everything. Ana realized she was shaking. She very deliberately extricated herself from the assembly around the harpoon and went midship to the yellow sail. The yellow sail was her safe place, she told herself, as swirling stars sputtered overhead.
When she was very young, she read the Book of Job for the first time and was so confused that she had resolved to study theodicy for the rest of her life. Here she was, at the end of the world, a nationally recognized expert, and she had to admit it made no more sense to her than it had the first time around. Could she draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Empirically, yes. So what? Erica had asked exactly the right question. So if you can defeat a really big whale, you win the Bible? Why? Why had God said so in Job, and why had the Comet King himself been so certain it was true that he’d built the world’s fastest ship and the world’s most fabulous harpoon? She started going over the Book of Job again in her mind, line by line. Job suffers. Job complains. Job’s friends tell him everything happens for a reason. Job complains more. God arrives in a whirlwind. God asks if Job can defeat the Leviathan. Job has to admit he cannot, and therefore he does not deserve to know the secret order of the world. God accepts his apology and gives him free things. Not the most satisfying narrative.
Think like a kabbalist.
She thought with all her strength, and with strength beyond her own. She felt oppressed by a terrible cleverness and a wild rebellion. Finally she came to a decision.
“I’ll be gone for just a moment,” she told James. “The yellow sail knows what to do. If you need me, come get me.”
The first mate’s eyes didn’t leave the Leviathan, but he nodded.
Ana climbed belowdecks and knocked on the door to the Captain’s quarters.
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