That Which Has Come Down

The point in time everyone sees me at is just after 10:30 in the morning of May 19th, 1998, but I am from the future, from later that day, around 3 in the afternoon. You can see it in my face, in every photo which ran the following day in the Tampa Bay Times. You can see that I know who will live and who will die. I already know what will happen. I know what happens next because I have lived it. I know that I am not going back to prison. I know that I will be delivered again unto a future no one here can conceive of.

But the past is for me somehow impossible to traverse. I simply become mired in it. Just before 10:30 in the morning of May 19th, 1998, Bernice’s seven-year-old son abruptly developed a hole in his head approximately the size of the projectile fired from a Norinco SKS. I would bring him to a fire station five minutes into the future to see if they could undo the hole in his head. Being from the future, I knew that they couldn’t. Being unable to navigate the past, I couldn’t quite explain how it happened to the firefighters. So they contacted people who can excavate the past and piece it back together, linear and sensible. Into a narrative. Broken shards unshattered into a vase. They called the police.

The police are always trapped in the present, like all types of archeologist—cops, journalists, betrayed lovers, abandoned children, junkie writers, struggling to make sense of the past, or at least outrun it, their eyes squinted in sharp concentration, poring over computer screens and papers and holes in the ground or holes in human bodies. You can see that in their faces in the newspaper photos tomorrow, too. The faces of the detectives, while they were still in one piece, the ruddy, not unhealthy skin of middle-aged Floridians not blistered from muzzle flash, not turned purple from internal hemorrhaging, the eyelids swollen to the size of softballs, blackened from pooled blood as their heads hang limp, tendrils of torn flesh being tugged slowly down out of ruptured skulls, lifeless bodies hunched over steering wheels and seatbacks. An admixture of skepticism and confusion in their seemingly still-living faces, though I understand that they are already counted among the dead, as they always have been. An admixture of skepticism and confusion: the thrill of finding the hidden truth, the kernel of the past that ordains its own future. It’s sometimes a wonder to come to know a forgotten or discarded thing, to realize that the starting point is its own end. They look backward through time to understand how it unfolds and cascades directly and only to this moment where no other is possible. Strangely, to me, they in general have no real concept of what lies beyond this moment, of the something or someone like me. What will happen. In fact, what has already happened.

Somehow, they were able to place a set of handcuffs on me, behind my back. They bind in space but not in time, and I nearly slipped them. They reattached them in the front. They called what I had done fooling around, having not ascertained the past yet and of course always unknowing the future. Stuck in the present. They used that phrase again when I broke away from them and entered the wrong wormhole and emerged just seconds later and mere feet removed from its counterpart in Brooksville, by the apartment where the boy’s head grew the small hole that started all this, aiming a rifle, not the SKS, at a uniformed patrolman. This didn’t make sense; that cop would survive into the future, I would see him by the other wormhole by the gas station on the interstate, so I surrendered the rifle. They told me again to stop fooling around. They left the cuffs in front. A grain to germinate into its own future.

The theories of me I heard them discuss: a grieving stepfather named Joseph Bennet who may’ve erred, a grossly negligent and abusive criminal named Joseph Bennet who may be returned to prison. This latter blends well with the theories of me held by other police agencies in Ohio and Georgia, where I am known by that name as well as others, including the name I was given at the moment of this particular birth. That name I hide, but the future will reveal it. In the morning paper alongside my knowing gaze and an itinerary of my other deeds, the things I have stolen and the women I have savaged. The past which mires me.

Am I many beings of different names in the same space? Am I one being of different names in many spaces? It’s difficult to say. Time is something I feel. Memory is sometimes forethought. I can only tell you what I am. I am Kali, an Asura of the Asuras, the one also known as Asura, the embodiment of Adharma and known by that name as well, but not the Kali also called Kalika; I am born of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, of its discarded poison, my purpose to steal the immortality of the immortals. To make death seem real. If they squint hard enough, they shall see me in the past. They should then know I will slip through this timestream to emerge in the next Kalpa, where they will die all over again, all of them, gaping, dripping tunnels drilled through their heads and faces gaged with strange measures like 9mm or 7.62 by 39. That is my fate, to know the future to elude the past.

I am the Son of Anger and His Wife-Sister Violence. My grandparents are Vanity and Illusion, and they are also siblings. I am from the future. I know what happens next. You will recognize this in my face in the photographs of me in the morning paper. My knowing glare.

Just after noon, the archeologists attempt to create a divergence in the timestream: the real future which produced me becomes visible alongside a theoretical possibility, where I am wearing dull inmate green, judged and sentenced by men. Perhaps they don’t really understand the past because it cannot lead there. I am from the future of 3PM and that is not it. It has a gas station off the interstate wrapped in roaring flame and black smoke.

The future is not a choice. 

I’m in the backseat of their vahana, still bound in front with the kundela they called cuffs, but they didn’t frisk me. I wear a mala around my neck. It tethers me to this timestream, the only one which could possibly be real. I can see my hands just seconds from now using the mala to destroy the kundela around my wrists. The detectives will then see the recent past of my hands like blurs, free of the kundela, committed to the future which has already come to pass, pull the vel they call a Glock from the driver’s holster, just under his left arm.

In the brief struggle which will ensue, which has already ensued, both detectives will be shot through the agya, to prevent them from ever learning to see into my future, to create another divergence. Their starched white shirts were always red and sopping. The car always reeked of cordite, and of iron from blood, thick enough to taste. The air was never still and quiet apart from the soft, dull drones of the air conditioner and idling engine. It was always ruptured by the sounds of exploding gunfire and trickling blood softly pounding hard plastic floormats. I meditate on the rhythm of that trickling beat, drop by clockwork drop, and idly consider the shapes and forms of those white shirts before they finally blossomed into the blood-soaked rags conjured by the future. They changed shape, from flat squares folded into dresser drawers, becoming animated bodies which slung shoulder holsters over themselves, hugged wives and children with long arms, sharp creases from wrist to shoulder. They carried scents of hotly ironed starch and those scents mingled with the scent of steaming morning coffee rising from plastic travel mugs, to later be drenched in sweat and Florida’s humidity, and finally in their own blood. The way it has always been.

As I exit the vahana, a friendly passerby asks me with a goofy, partially toothless grin whether I was just lighting fireworks off inside that car. Recognizing his truck from when I abandon it one hour from now, I threaten him with the Glock, then steal it. He will now begin the chain of lamentations that will liberate me from this present. He will call the police.

The police now know I am not a penitent stepfather named Joseph Bennet. They beg Bernice to tell them my true name. Strangely, considering what I’ve done to her, she does not, though it would never matter. Her son will never undie. The police would never capture me.

Receiving the lamentation of the truck driver, the police call out to each other on sushir. One by one they gather their vahana into a swarming mass to envelope me, but it will be too late. The first approaches brashly; I stop, merge the policeman driving it with the moment of his death, holes appear in his face as if by magic, then rush again toward the wormhole by the gas station just off the interstate. There they believe they will have me cornered.

The pregnant woman working at the gas station is now my hostage and she is terrified her son will never be born. I try to assuage her that he will, that I even know the name she’s chosen. Her teeth chatter and she shivers and weeps. I tell her I will write the name on a napkin from the coffee bar and fold it, that she may read it after I am gone to know I was always telling the truth because the future already is. Trembling, she will drop the napkin to the floor just a few moments from now, when I release her to join her future. I can already see her being escorted down the median of the interstate by policemen wearing camouflage, 20 minutes from now.

I use the gas station phone to call a talk radio host and explain all this, but the point eludes him. It’s too complicated for these people to understand. They are condemned utterly to the present. It’s impossible to explain. I keep tripping over the ridiculous phrase what had happened was. It’s the only thing that could’ve happened. They cannot grasp the distinction. To be fair, I cannot adequately clarify it. But I finally disclose the name I am usually called, which will appear in the morning paper. The police presence outside grows into a large encampment.

Ayudhapurusha are summoned to kill me. Behold! The great mass of their armors look like the segments of a giant insect hugging the exterior wall of the gas station. The humans will call it a SWAT team in the captions accompanying the photos of my knowing gaze in tomorrow’s paper. It is in fact a giant insect, one which vomits liquid, streaming fire. A creature of magic. Their weapons are magic, too, avatars of themselves, living, breathing lightning bolts and holy fires riding on the divine winds of death. News helicopters hover overhead. The policeman I aimed the rifle at can be seen through the window, now aiming his rifle at me. The stolen truck is still where it belongs. Everything is in its assigned place, exactly as I remember the future. It will now proceed.

They deploy Agneyastra and waves of great flame consume the gas station. I am released from my avatar and summoned forward into the future thousands of years through a column of black smoke which stretches from the ground into the sun. But it’s the blink of an eye. And it simply leads right back here eventually anyway, to just before 10:30 in the morning of May 19th, 1998. You can see it, ground connected to sun through the column of black smoke, or vice versa. I will kill all these people all over again, forever and ever. Darkness and evil are not sentiments, are not things which are done, are not relativities. They are fixed points, permanently attached to all time and to all space, as am I. As am I the anguish which burns hot and bright and forever. As am I your fate in the dark. As am I the great waste of tomorrow after the beautiful promise of today. As am I the thing which cannot be stopped. I will always simply be.

The sunrise and the sunset are the same thing.