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The Great Unknown
There is not much rest for me. In the summertime, my days are packed full
with the tireless management of my land and its residents. I start early. I am outside at the first opportunity, standing
atop the threshold of a kingdom, my kingdom, surveying the night's damage and observing the beings that depend on me. I don't
know what they did before, without my guidance, and I can only rely on them to take care of themselves at night, for at night
I have other, domestic matters to attend to. Besides, even the ruler of a nation - a modest one, admittedly - needs his
leisure.
Unfortunately, my kingdom is a misguided one, one that seems all too willing to fall into anarchy.
And every day I repair. And I restore. I govern, I enforce, I protect, I punish, and I mourn. I have yet to learn to communicate
with the people of my land, as ours are languages that are mutually foreign. I have no idea how I am
perceived; I can
only hope that it is with ignorant, open, willing senses.
This morning, my empire is in ruins. The dead
lay all around me, their own stepping over them in a frantic, futile effort to return their small homes to the condition
in which their own backs and collective energies had made them. The land's vegetation has been razed, and every creature burns
in the sun, stripped of the rich, thick stalks that shaded them and moderated their climate. Craters lay gouged in the soil,
larger than several of their suburbs. Walking through the little towns and assessing the damage, I look up, suddenly mindful
of my location, and I am absorbed by a terror that freezes my reflexes and clouds the corners of my vision. I stand in a dangerous
and uncharted part of the world, a place into which I have seen people disappear forever. Breathing in quick gasps, I flee,
back to the more populated areas of my land, away from the outskirts. What is on the other side, past that point, I do not
know first-hand, but it can only be responsible for the wreckage I see before me. My heart pounds as I recall my travels into
this other, stranger land, always under protection of my domestic army. Alone, I have only seen it from here, at the edge
of my own kingdom. I have ventured close to those outskirts, wondering past what I can see, and have retreated in fear of
putting my wonders to rest. A white picket fence separates my kingdom from that unknown land.
So
my day is work. I repair, filling the craters and rebuilding the crude homes. I enforce, I punish, deterring the looting and
pillaging of the larger, neighboring mobs.
I mourn, burying the dead and cleaning the land of the symbols of destruction,
both activities aided by the tools of my rule: a broom, a dustpan, a trowel. My residents
go on, blindly working to evolve
their homes to the places they'd evolved to lifetimes ago. If their resolve has not been tested, if they can go on going on,
then so must I.
As dusk approaches I hurry to put the last things right, planting small trees and leaving
food to the more impoverished families of two or three hundred, food which
fits easily in the pocket of my overalls and
can be sneaked without incident from the pantry within the castle. I stare again at the picket fence, everything beyond it
draped in a menacing curtain of black night, daring me, promising me, darkening with the solidifying prospect of our little
world undone. My land will remain, I say to myself. My white picket fence is a sky-high stone wall with a crocodile moat.
I am the vat of boiling tar, I am the catapult, I am the flaming arrow for all who test this boundary.
Then, as always, the start of night is heralded by my kingdom's matriarch.
"Gerard, it's getting
dark out there. I think it's time for you to come inside now."
The smiling face distracts me and dispels
my fears. Ah, my domestic army.
"Besides," she continues, "you're going to be six years old
tomorrow! Better rest up for your party." My birthday? Tomorrow? Already? She musses my hair and pats me on the behind
as I tread into the house. As the screen door slams behind me, I look out again at my kingdom and its tiny inhabitants, worrying
the night and the great unknown on the other side of our white-picketed backyard fence. Begging my subjects to maintain, to
go on, until I have conquered it.
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