Alchemisland

The canopy cooled him in temperature and temperament, he felt sullen beneath sagging boughs. Branches like curved umbrella handles, as if trees driven mad by heat sought to drive their own branches through their heads to stop the simmering solar voice. Inner measuredness came, or was foist, upon him, echoed in his equidistant steps. In mind he saw old images with newfound clarity, eked new feeling from his rarely-stoked memories; a poem is never the same twice. 

Suddenly, Byron felt gravely upset thinking his former friends now considered him a foe. He hailed from a land of empty pleasantries, where every other pint sipper was a friend in word if not in deed, and still the notion wounded him. Byron sought to reconcile his opposing principles. A man who is against every other man cannot dislike to be disliked, yet he had some incessant need in him for external validation. In his muddled mind, the kind word of a perfect stranger meant more than the long, spiderinked letters of lovers. So it would be until the end, when the chemical cocktails in his mind screened the film of his unknown purpose and highlighted those important things he had failed to hold close. 

Opposite logic dictates that only those who know you well may hurt you. Someone who knows your every in and out, and can recall your streaked laundry with photographic fidelity; nothing the Holy Cee despises more than lapsed Catholics. Presumably, Orphan Kid felt similarly in his stuffy Necromancer costume during Ring Con ‘96, when his purported best friend Evan Cleary said, in front of everyone, ‘it’s supposed to be Dol Goldur, not Dad Graveyard Yours.’ That day, Byron, dressed as Beorn because he was, even at puberty’s dawning, ursinely bearded, had stood watching with everyone else, sharply inhaling and oohing along to the drama; another few minutes and they would have shouted Barabbas. From that day forward, Byron hated the madness of crowds, the sheer Borg lunacy of stitched minds. He hated what Evan said to Orphan Kid, whose name shamefully he could not recall. What is said about written history when only the bully’s name made print. 

In English class, Evan Cleary mockingly pronounced analysis ‘anal-esis’ and took every opportunity to say it aloud, often going uncorrected. Our English teacher’s grandfather had survived trench gassing and never talked about it, she told her uncaring, unfeeling audience when they studied Wilfred Owen. Whenever anyone spoke out of turn in class, she quipped “Empty vessels make the most noise.” Evan teased the teachers who ate up his false innocence but never so openly as to exhaust plausible deniability. He always wore a tight conch necklace his flight attendant mother had brought back from the Maldives, and had blonde highlights in his gel-rigid hair that provoked the class spicers to ask “Who threw the eggs?” Byron supposed Evan no more spiteful than any other child, obsessed as adolescents are with violent play and proven mortality. Besides, Ev had a hard life himself though he never said it. His dad was not around, god knows whether he was dead or ditched them, and he lived with his mother and grandmother in a close where a ball games prohibited sign jutted up from the green like a joyless rectangular flower.

Birthday card sentiment painted schooldays as times fondly remembered by all in the evening of life. The best days of your life but Byron wouldn’t go back if they said he could redo it with foreknowledge, four million and four extra inches in every place that needed it. 

Byron’s Father before him attended a military boarding school famed for the Vulcan stringency of its Spartan regime. Saint Amalberga’s Institution For The Enironment Of Bold Young Men swore those who survived its iron gauntlet would emerge as strong and bold as Aristodemus, who was spared at Thermopylae to busy death at Plataea, but with healthier eyes. The cream of the crop, the goblins of the royal sack, went to Sandringham to be conditioned to violence and have all empathy excised through consistent brutality, but many eminent persons had gone to Saint Amalberga to receive their licks. That his Father would have been pinned and pummelbummed until his cruellest iteration could be manifested was not in doubt – if anything, his day was the crueller epoch – but he never spoke of it. Perhaps he looked back on those torture sessions as necessary character building exercises. Byron thought so. His enrollment therein otherwise made no sense. It wasn’t all bad though. His Father chaperoned he and his friends around the Lord of the Rings convention a long time before nerddom broke through. The night before the con, his Father spent the evening stitching together a Beorn costume from two highlighted passages of The Hobbit. He was a hard man but neither cruelty nor guile led his stitch as he adorned Byron’s cardboard breastplate with jagged lines reminiscent of runic glyphs. Byron thought of the odd glyphs he saw in his dreams, glowing like an atomic thing for all of time; glyphs which compelled him to accept the Cairo assignment in the first place.

Byron looked over his shoulder but there was no one there to be seen. He harboured no delusions regarding his present security; by now, his handlers would be plotting his destruction in terms of assets and feasibility. Before long, someone or something would let slip and the hounds would be on his trail. So far he had eluded them, so he felt when he woke to glorious daybreak gold as Jason’s objective, in whose light suspicions were legless paranoias. His demons came in the evening, as drinks. He didn’t know then just how much he would need that night’s drink. 

The thought of Orphan Kid being publicly betrayed at the Rings convention like a nerdy Caesar only served to heighten his anxiety to fever pitch. He recalled that when the convention was winding down and most of the stalls were packed away, he saw Orphan kid slumped against a poorly printed Gondor backdrop weeping into his knees. The poster showed Minas Tirith from behind, looking out toward Pelennor. Evidently, someone, likely a member of the organising committee’s tech-savvy niece, had taken a screenshot of a small image and upsized it beyond all recognition, so that only the dimmest smudges denoted the distant spine of Mordor’s hills. With the world’s best intentions Bryon had knelt to his haunches and had made to wrap a comforting arm around Orphan Kid’s shoulders, which were rising and falling with his sobs, but the attempt cost him his balance so that he shouldered the weeping child sideways onto the ground. Though none followed, one naturally anticipated blows after a shove. However, the grounded wretch was utterly defeated and did not raise a hand in defence. An overturned turtle would illustrate more agency; Orphan Kid wrapped his hands around his own head and curled into his chest, elbows tight to his ribs, cold to whatever came next. Byron struggled to lift Orphan Kid’s weight when he corpsed himself and could not immediately upright him to his former crestfallen posture. Byron kept pulling, tugging and putting into place and Orphan Kid kept letting himself slide back down until his back was flat to the ground. Variations on the theme of Sisyphus. 

‘You are not dead’ – Byron fought the adolescent cruelty urging him to add ‘that’s your parents’ and deaden his arm with a right straight – ‘stop pretending you are.’ Byron shook the Orphan’s black cloaked shoulders, violently cajoling sociability from him. He felt like an anguished husband in a Poe chiller desperately trying to shake his recently disinterred and now half-rotted wife out of what has proven not to be a catatonic state. The memory slipped his grasp.

Now the coffee shack was close by and a face he recognized sat there, waiting. They had found him. Here, in bronze age surrounds, where glory-peckish Schliemann vindicated Homer with dynamite. For the first time in thousands of years, those things the blind bard saw when sighted were restored to the place of venerated truths, they had sought and found him.