All I Know to do is Scream
The older I get, the less I can account for the things I see around me. Life had a certain certainty in my youth that erodes more every year, and I’m afraid what will happen when the last plank that forms the floor of my understanding finally rots away and sends me plummeting into whatever chaos awaits.
I had it all figured out. A beautiful bride with strong legs and good teeth and three healthy boys. I owned, at last count, four big rams and twenty sturdy ewes. I was a respected elder in the local assembly and a dedicated patron of the mountain god. I rarely hit my slaves and only made use of whores when my bride was on her cycle. I was everything a man of my time was expected to be.
And yet one day, by some cruel twist of fate, I found myself here, alive, in this waking hell you call the twenty-first century. I can only tell you what I myself bore witness to. I have no more answers than what you might discern from the haze that is my memory.
It was a feast day; a holy day. I had certain duties at the temple in town and set out from my farm at dawn, taking the same road I always took on errands of this sort. The path, as always, led me first by the Spring of Narkissos, then the grove of petrified trees, before taking two sharp switchbacks down an open stretch of mountain face and wrapping eastward around the three-mile post. But there, where the path normally dipped down and followed a dry riverbed for the last three miles into town, there was, by some weird act of magic, a bridge now spanning the width of the riverbed.
I invoked the god and approached. The bridge was of a make I’d never seen; never in my life before and never in the many years since. Its four posts were like gold, but pulsed with an inner life not too unlike the way the webbing on a person’s fingers glow when caught in the sun. The pathway was a humming translucent plane of soft pink light that rang aloud like steel when my boots touched the surface. But strangest of all, there was a ball of white light floating above the center of the platform. It was no larger than your modern basketball, and the sound of a choir emanated from within.
I approached with great caution, invoking the god with every other step. The orb sang ever as before, dancing gently on the currents of the wind. I came within mere inches of the thing and watched the spinning webs of its inner world dance with the mad abandon of leaves on the breeze. I implored to know its name, its origin, and the purpose of its presence. But the orb kept singing and dancing, and the voices in the choir seemed to multiply.
By this time unnerved, I started to back away when the orb started expanding. I was engulfed within seconds, and found myself tumbling through a realm of vast unnatural shapes and colors and noises I’d never before borne witness to. I tried to scream but the only sound that emerged was the same choir that sang from within the orb.
Then, as quickly as my journey began, the visions collapsed and I found myself awake and alive in a dumpster in a place I learned you call the Bronx. Sheridan Avenue and 167th Street.
As you might expect, I spent several hours screaming as I mindlessly wandered the crumbling and ash-covered stretch of waste you call a city, dodging colorful autonomous chariots and made almost deaf by the perpetual wail of sirens and the rumbling of machines beneath the ground. But screaming lunatics are far from uncommon in New York City, and I went unnoticed in the daily thrum of people shitting in bus stops and masturbating on street corners.
After my voice wore out, and the reality of my insanity settled in, I stumbled across a paper advertisement for a man selling stolen prepaid cellphones near St. Mary’s Park. It was printed in a rudimentary bastardization of my glorious language, and I was able to parse enough to surmise that I had not lost my mind, but found myself instead somehow in a remote part of the world in which Mankind has devised all kinds of strange and glorious inventions. The lands of the Phaeakians, perhaps.
I spent many days approaching people at random and showing them the advertisement. I was beaten up only twice in all that time, and after six days of fruitless search — in which I subsisted on a bone broth I made from a leftover fried chicken meal — I found someone who knew the man and could point me in his direction.
His store was little more than a hallway between a bail bonds office and a pawn shop. It was crammed full of boxes of stolen electronics: cheap watches, cellphones, and calculators. The merchant himself, a fat old man with crooked teeth and a bald head, was reclined in an office chair in the back of the shop. His eyes were fixed on a small TV set that displayed a grainy image of a soccer match.
“What?” he mumbled, turning to face me.
His mouth fell open at the sight of my clothes. He blinked. He switched from English to my language. What I quickly learned is now an ancient language. A language that’s been dead for nearly twenty centuries.
“Not you, too,” he said.