Iron awoke to find himself in a large, fancy carpeted hall decked out in
colorful drapes and littered with all manner of elegant aristocratic furniture gleaned
with gold and silver lief.
At this point he stopped taking in the surroundings and pondered a more
pressing issue. Shouldn't he have been splattered all over Manhattan’s financial
district by now; limbs and entrails adorning the sterile City State's best known
monuments like bloodthirsty Christmas fairy lights? Well; categorically yes was the
only answer he could muster.
He frisked his body in search of those gaping bullet holes which by rights
should have been spewing whatever blood he may have left all over that lovely
carpet and sure enough, there they were; sizable uneven craters in his flesh which
he could even push his fingers right into as if pulling sunken golf balls out of their
holes, but curiously there was no bleeding.
"Look up in the presence of your leader." Someone was trying to interrupt his
investigation; tease him away from the discovery that something had happened
which really should never have been. But realizing that the answers may well have
lurked around him rather than inside, he did as he was told and was immediately
presented with a further conundrum as that most certainly now deceased nemesis of
his sat arms crossed on a gem encrusted throne before him showing none of the
expected breaks, twists and contortions which he would have rightfully associated
with being thrown off the top of the highest building in New York City.
"Confused, Mr. Iron; I would assume. Confused that all your energetic efforts
failed to defeat me; to destroy me." Actually, he was far more concerned with how
he himself appeared to cling to life; a life he was really rather pleased to have
finished with. Needless to say there was something not quite right here, but for the
moment he had little alternative but to go along with it; to obediently play his part as
he had always done.
Volscenzi continued with an unusual haste; keen, it would appear, to further
the puzzle. To both stop Iron thinking independently and to instill certain solutions in
his mind which to the inquisitive may well have resembled some sensible retort, but
which on the other hand didn't quite wash.
"You see, Mr. Iron; I am not just me; I am not a simple man; a peon. I would
not allow you to annihilate me; to storm my castle; to proclaim victory." Of course, it
was a hollow victory if the upshot of it was that you had died a gruesome death;
allegedly. He reminded himself to keep that observation quiet.
"You do not understand the game; the adventure. This was all a spectator
sport. We picked players; took bets." Tisarana Jiriki; the self appointed monarch's
personal bodyguard, tossed a coin in reference to the fact that he had claimed the
pot on that aforementioned wager, and giggled privately as he weighed up the
performance of his junior Abreru; a player in Volscenzi's grand game who had fallen
flat and would most likely do so again in a real life situation.
"I do not only own Manhattan, Mr. Iron; I own the world." Now this was
worryingly plausible. It had never made sense that Volscenzi needed the capitol of
wealthy consumers despite the fact that money had become an irrelevance long
ago. It had always confused him that security; opposition, had been so poor, or was
he just playing down his own ability? The 'game' scenario explained all this away
neatly. It was ludicrous but at the same time it all made sense. But then again, the
bullet holes. They did seem a little too convincing to be makeup. This was a clue,
perhaps. He stuck a finger all the way up to the joint in a heart level hole just to
reassure himself of the mystery and actually felt each double beat as if he was
indeed closer to it.
"There is not just one me; there are many. Cloning is a wonderful thing. Do
you seriously think I would allow the real me to wander around vulnerable? Open to
physical harm? To be brought down to earth by you? There are many City States;
many arenas. Many locations in which the game can be played. You see, in a game
there must be a finite environment; a set of rules. There must be a progression; a
development. I like my fun, Mr. Iron. I must have my fun."
Iron had already turned before two uniformed guards sauntered in. He had
known they were about to enter before they actually made a sound. Whatever was
going on, it appeared he had acquired the ability to predict the future.
Volscenzi quickly dragged him away from this subject; confusing him further
as Rinzai Rishi and Buji Moksha slithered in next to him and whispered
simultaneously; one in each ear, as if advising a newsreader as a big story broke
while on air.
"It may well have been the real me who killed your parents, but only to initiate
the game. To push you into action. These things happen all over the world; Tokyo;
Singapore... All my arenas. The playing fields. Everywhere there are revolutionaries
like yourself; intended as pawns in the game from the beginning. Each arena has a
leader; a copy of yours truly. Most fail young. On the streets as kids bawling their
eyes out at their loss. Liberty island; that's a killer. The dark rooms in the Tower. You
did well; destroyed one of my automatons; completed the game. It will not happen
again. The troops were badly trained. I will perfect the program."
So there were hundreds of Volscenzis around; millions. Life had been a joke;
a 'game'. Volscenzi smiled, triumphant, before Iron remembered where his finger
was; that is, halfway through his body. This rose an objection. "Wait a minute; the
bullet holes." Volscenzi gibbered; trying to avoid the question. This time Iron held a
finger up to indicate that another door was about to open behind him to allow
Johnson, Japingka and Acrasia to wander through as if nothing had happened these
past few days, all clad in military attire which instead of persuading Iron that he had
been taken for a ride by the brash boxer, only served to cement his growing
understanding that it was this reality which was nothing of the sort. It was a
construction of his bedraggled mind.
He giggled aloud; a reaction to the stupidity of it all which the dictator did not
appreciate. By now Iron was not listening to his endless babble, he was beyond it. It
was funny. You spent all your life living as convention dictates. Doing what you are
supposed to, and then in the end its all a big joke. You avoid death like the plague;
shy away from everything which your body deems harmful and dangerous. Then you
die and surprise surprise, you happen to be immortal. The soul can't die. What never
really is in a physical sense can never cease to be. This was a kind of trial; a test. It
was like he was standing in a court room as an unseen jury debated his sentence.
Would he be born again in a new body? Would the next life be better or worse?
Would he ascend to heaven or drop ungraciously to hell? Really it mattered little, as
long as he didn't stay where he was.
The next witnesses Volscenzi wheeled in were friends rather than foes; or at
least so he thought, but both Alice and the monk arrived in an uneasy hush dressed
in the military uniform of the fallen establishment. Rather than make Iron feel
uncomfortable as their apparent unlikely change of allegiance should have done,
Volscenzi was enraged to see it simply cause him to laugh out loud. Reality; if this
was what it was, was growing more surreal all the time. Chen was a man of high
virtue; of egalitarian spirit. It was hardly likely that he would be swayed by anything
Volscenzi could offer him, which admittedly was not very much aside from riches
and hierarchical positions which the priest had happily neglected when joining the
monkhood in the first place. And Alice just looked so ridiculous in that uniform that
some scathingly sarcastic comedian must have been pulling the by now almost
observable strings.
But as these thoughts came to him, something even stranger happened. At
the moment he objected to the two zombie like character's unfitting getup, reality
switched back to normal and there they were dressed as he had remembered them.
Volscenzi jumped in his seat and surrendered a worried frown. A broad, ravenous
smile spread over Iron's face. He had obtained the ability to alter reality through
thought alone. The devil's puzzle had been solved.
Iron looked up at him with a knowing, vindictive gleam in his eyes. The big
question had been raised; what was reality; what was 'real'? Obviously, the
surrounding cast of bodyguards could hardly fit this description. Even in the more
convincing past, they had been weak links; one dimensional cut outs in a three
dimensional set. They disappeared as if made of thin ice, shattering into a brilliant
white which cut through reality like a knife through the back of a cinema screen.
Volscenzi looked around fearfully like a child lost in a busy shopping arcade
searching for its parents; hoping to catch the gaze of somebody merciful enough or
misguided enough to save him.
The physical world had not entirely convinced Iron for a while, and that was
next to go; again dissolving into a wonderful brightness which seared through
Volscenzi's false flesh like a corrosive venom. It was difficult to describe a world
which was no longer physical and yet nonetheless still existed.
Perhaps this was some kind of bardo state; between life and death; a greater
spiritual realm. Iron even had to concede that his friends; that Chen and Alice; were
not real. That they too were symbolic representations of things of his own faltering
mind. Of wisdom and lost childhood; opposite and yet identical sides of an all
encompassing circle. The director was just about to scream 'cut!' and partake of a
leap of sackings, but even He had to take a back seat as Iron's revelation continued;
unless of course He chose to stand back.
Iron had saved Volscenzi for last. He had killed him once as he killed himself.
That should have been the end. But he had still had somewhere to go. This
nonsense about cloning; about his miniature City State being but one on a blighted
globeful of them; perhaps even a universe full; was the devil's plaything. A game,
yes, but an unconvincing one to those who knew better.
Of course Volscenzi wasn't real. He was the least real of them all; the worst
excuse for a human being. He represented all that misled Iron; all that convinced
him the world was naturally evil. He was his own mind; the tangled web; the
constricting penitentiary. The devil he carried around with him. Sin and sinner in one.
As Volscenzi too evaporated into the sunny nothing, Iron's mind was freed; freed in
that it could no longer conceivably exist.
But incredibly there was still something; the annihilation was complete, but
something remained. Though he had been relieved of the ability to logically or
linguistically appreciate such things, it had become clear that at the root; as the
center stone and in the beginning there was still an everlasting thing. His heart and
soul were real, even though his bullet battered, life scarred body was not. Even
memory had deluded him, but still there was a connection; a something so vast in
encapsulated everything. So huge it had become nothing. And there was that deep,
deep emotion.
He remembered, if such terms could ever be applied to this experience, that
he was now two people; inseparable. At peace. Lincoln had most certainly died, but
Volscenzi; the devil; had been unable to conjure her up.
She could not have existed in this world anymore; gone the same way he
was going now. But she did exist in his heart and soul. This was all that came with
him; all he could now conceive. It was a wonderful totality into which he was
beckoned. By the hand of God, perhaps. Irrefutably it was by some monumental
force.
Nothing existed; all the emotions; all of the worlds; all of those people.
All that existed was existence itself; the eternal nothing which was at once
the all pervading everything.
He was not alone on this journey because love remained. That was all there
was. All there ever really had been.
On to next chapter
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