Running (Part 3)

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It was possible to create and animate images of things that had never happened. These things moved along a flattish panel. If your eyes once locked into this panel, you first almost couldn't turn away and later the "almost" was taken away and you were hooked. According to the media experts -- and the prophets -- there were people all through the kingdom who had started as noble structures -- humans -- and had at one time taken responsibility for themselves -- but now spent their days gazing at flat pictures -- at pictures flatter than flat -- to the point where they too had taken on the flatness of unreality -- having no real past, no real future, just the reductive annihilation of zen, you couldn't even call them unhappy. Not even that. There "were" such people if you could say they still "were", if the word "were" could still be fastened to them. And this was the devil's realm.

They sat in bus stations watching. The bus had gone without them and there was nobody to rouse them, only others liewise afflicted, such as Ainsley, depicted on the everpresent screen, now nothing but bones, clutching a doll like a child. You need to lose a little more weight, just above your hips, you're so close to your target, dear, her trainer said, a familiar, a witch, omeone very well known. Duessa looked out of the screen into the sports bar and saw her daughter running, a speck. So there you are.

Let us step out of this telenovela.

The girl Ainsley, the affluent anarchist, was surrounded on the screen by raffish beaux, dressed in the cutesy pseudo-ruffian style that the top designers liked. Tattoos were sited according to the highest principles of feng shui, etc. They looked like pet poodles dressed as thugs but were not for that reason necessarily "safe", in fact not by any means. There were strategic rips in their expensive cloth and 2 day's growth of beard, no more, never less, trimmed every day by an expert to be exactly 2 days' and never more. And certainly never less. Nevermore ravens. Go get her and destroy her, Duessa said, and the pasty young men dispersed like hungry dark birds, white thugs, passing right through the TV screen and alighting on the bad block where they lived, forever overcast and grim, the contagious block of "hopeless" poverty. Where whatever you had was taken from another.

Now they flapped and shifted into the punks who had so often terrorized her walking home. The leader had a bandage on the finger Elf once tore, in the days of her violence. They surrounded her now.

I cannot be a pacifist -- it's just a theory. The world is other than the wishes one has.

Elf knew *well* from her mother how to hurt the young men, how to maim them and pluck their glossy feathers. But she was a -- well, almost was -- well, she was a Christian now, or trying to be, and she was going to kick over that "almost" and rise aloft, any day now. Almost was almost over. She wanted to be what she was born to be and she was resolved not to hurt anyone. She was not going to hurt anyone. She was through hurting people. She wanted to imitate Christ.

A difference sustained her spirit and paralyzed her attack reflexes. No one must be hurt.

*

Dear God! They could hurt her if they wanted to. If that was what they did. "Every day is a good day because God is good." I will not play this game of endless escalating violence. Christ set me free from that.

Moving forward she felt like a surfer riding a polluted set of waves, a stacked form of terror that would be banished from the kingdom of God, if she ever made it there. As her two feet balanced, her image darkened and blurred on screens around the world, where all the boozy demons and couch potatoes sat and watched. Breath and commercials lay suspended.

*

If they were going to kill her, that was okay. Death might be finality to one who did not believe in a kingdom of the -- well, the ones who were not dead. Sarah and Jacob, help me! As a dancer she had one foot in this death but the other foot in -- well, what was it in and where was it really? Where was this? What was this healing substance that one sank into? And where could the sound of that siren be coming from?

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