The History of Writing (VII.)

Sisyphus had stood up from the floor on his own as if he'd just aroused from a brief nap on a warm, sunlit city sidewalk and the light of the world rang from every angle of the captain as he went to Sisyphus to direct him towards his private quarters in the depths of that fishing vessel and the others went about their business as he'd told them and Sisyphus reconsumed the stupefying clamor and joy of existence, the boat and day about him in its threatening uncertainty. 

He walked with unfathomable confidence. 

"Do you know how you got here?' the captain asked him after he'd pushed the door almost-closed. 

"I came here," Sisyphus said. 

"From where?" 

"Purgatory. Where else?" 

"How do you mean that?" 

"How is there to mean it? The place after..." 

Sisyphus remembered that not all beings have multiple lifetimes. "You never died." 

"Well of course I haven't!" He said, "You mean... You died?" 

The question turned over an inner gyrus that hadn't moved in a very, very long time. To have died. To have seen that thick velvet darkness sewn to hold one completely without favoritism nor exception, no status nor achievement beyond its hungry endurance of will yet Sisyphus denied the insatiable whore its feast of him. Sisyphus had locked the door of his soul and kept it. 

Sisyphus smiled. "Not yet." 

The fisherman' looked at him. "Let me ask you another question." 

"Okay." 

"When were you born?" 

The fact was debatable. "It's always been hard. None said for sure. Our family had been there for a long time but precisely how many grandparents were buried before us was beyond guessing or imagining." That past of apophenia and pareidolia, horrifying & hypnotizing in its trite simplicity; indifferent canvas of a future unstoppable in its impossibility to exist. "The oldest deaths were heartattacks and cruel and necessary acts of violence. And disease." 

The captain absorbed this with kind fascination. He listened to Sisyphus in the way that you might listen to a child recount their first day of school, or inquire if someone was okay after a car accident. He thought to offer him dry clothes, and something to eat. It was near the middle of the day. There'd at least be some stew leftovers and some relatively edible bread in their excuse of a galley if any dipshit lamebrain got a feral termite in his ass about offering the ocean-drenched refugee any portion of the recently hauled-in fish. Indeed, the captain, namely: Christopher Daniel Richardson, liked this sonofabitch. Maybe he just had amnesia. He had to have come from somewhere real. "Let me get you a towel, then. Are you hungry?" 

His teeth & jaw moved. "Yes." 

****