The History of Writing (VIII.) (c) [last Part One]

He'd finished scrubbing the sea from his pores with an oily bar of soap and a handful or three of a strangely coarse talcum mixture and his feet became increasingly stable by the minute and the rest of his faculties slowly joined the changing, ephemeral total. Sisyphus letting the lukewarm water of the shower funnel through the hair on his scalp and finding the length of that hair to be inconsistent with that of any memory he'd refer to. It wasn't long, as he thought it was. He'd pulled a small tug between the back of his neck and his left ear. Less than an inch. The hair around it and towards his mastoid & forehead not much longer. He pressed his fingers about the base, the roots of it. The bone as hard as a boulder. Sounds hazarded from nothingness. The chorus and clamour of a hundred lives pleading & arguing against the din of their inevitable defeat to choice. Sisyphus took gratitude where it was, to how he was and let the last of the soap rinse away with whatever it had drawn and bled from his being, his cells, and he closed the knob for water and reached through the curtain to his towel that he stepped toward and out of the showerstall and dried himself and wrapped the towel around his waist, life-flicker of energy in the fingers, and he looked at his new reflection. 

Forestblack eyes displaced the capriciously instable aqua-toned marbles of the centuried lives before them. Brownish hues like the sunlit floor of a canyon with the smaller-than-termites beginnings of a facial shroud moving its way along his jaw, nasal, cheek, ear. Challenged, yet focused: He attempted to stare past his own perception. The muscle in his body clenched, then became poised. He brushed his teeth, a full set, standard reissues since the fall of Rome and the ascension of Northern Europe. (This had never been explained to him nor did he think to inquire about the matter. Some months after he departed the ship with Captain Richardson, and they'd secured him a steady job loading & unloading crates from shipping vessels, Sisyphus (under a different name) overheard a conversation at his table in the cafeteria wherein a pair of young men perhaps in their early-20s discussed a man named Charles Darwin who'd proposed something called Evolution to account for the various changes exhibited by humankind during the course of their virtually incalculable number of generations since prerecorded history. When he heard this, the hero of heroes simply assumed this evolution was how his dentures had been consistently replenished with each rebirth since approximately 1456 Anno Domini, Common Era to the rest of us.... As he brushed them in the bathroom sink on the captain's fishing vessel, of course, he'd simply thought how to form the question. 

He'd also form some other questions. Very few of them ever received serious or thoughtful responses. 

And approximately a year and a half following his hire, a month or so into the recently amended 60-hour requirement for the workweek (and if you didn't comply they could terminate you without any more compensation than directions to a soup-kitchen in a church somewhere) Sisyphus stood on the picket line with hundreds of other dock laborers who demanded better wages, fewer hours -- say, 40 a week for any able body, and that anyone alive be turned away until they were fifteen years in age and no one in a factory or on a dock until they were 18... Still pushing, shoving the boulder, the boulder persistently taking new forms. Which was around when the National Guard had gathered to the site of the protest, with ready arms: He'd no premonition of it; he'd be shot dead regardless. 

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