Chapter Five
He found what he had expected in such a museum. Uniforms, sabers, guns. Plaques decorated these objects to instruct visitors on the history and meanings of devices and colors, what years they belonged to, and the materials these things were made of.
Despite the black and white pictures and oil paintings, they presented war cleaned, sterile. Numbers of the dead and dying created the effect opposite to what one would expect: a sleepiness, a boredom rather than sadness and outrage at the loss of life. The shameful displays referencing the book burnings, camps and the common valleys appeared to have been temporarily moved, leaving behind only these tame passing mentions. It was left to other museums to fully display these horrors; here more conservative interests had been served.
To some other places were confined the image of the people who sought only to live, to become themselves, to love and grow. At the time, it seemed that the war museum was no place for mourning, or anything that could curb the fever of the next batch of human fodder.
Bard worked his way through recent centuries into distant eras. An open semi-circular area displayed the Teutonic relics of brass swords and wooden shields, crude spears and mantles of fur, and at the center of it all stood like a monolith, the statue to Wotan.
Runic symbols were carved on the brims of his starry mantle. In one hand he held a spear and in the other a horn from which water spouted into a fountain. Upon each horn of his heavy helmet sat a raven; his long hair and beard were as clouds in a storm. Bard touched his face to feel his five o’clock shadow. He had failed to grow anything more substantial but this much had been enough, until Angelo mocked him for it.
“You look like a teenager.”
Angelo played it off as a joke, but his eyes were ice shards that betrayed the warmth of his body. Bard wasn’t allowed to feel comfortable or relaxed, to lower his guard. There was something of the magician to the act, almost a hypnosis, the power of making Bard believe every sharp cut and piercing thorn was always his own fault, or his imagination.
Bard rubbed his wrists, haunted by the memory of Angelo’s hands holding them too tight, leaving marks he could feel even after they were gone.
“I know you like it; how about making me feel good for once?
“You’re always so greedy. Why is everything about you?”
There weren’t enough pages in the world to contain the poison poured on Bard’s ear, day and night, driving him mad.
“What good are you,” Bard wondered out loud, “your one good eye turned away from us? All we do is suffer and drag ourselves through the glass shards and the mud.
“I tried to push him away before and always let him back. I’m all alone now, dependent on the kindness of others more than ever before.” Bard held back from spitting at the foot of the statue. “Now you’re coming after me too? Didn’t I bleed enough? Didn’t I shed enough flesh?
Poured my soul into those pages until my veins were dry. What else do you want from me? Spewing your shit on my books isn’t enough? I gave it all.” Tears stung Bard’s eyes. “Now you’re trying to kill me. Why? Because I was weak? Because I wasn’t enough?”
Bard’s voice echoed in the empty hall. Lights flickered and muted thunder sounded outside, lightning flashing its blue hue through the glass. It was like a great hand crushing the poet’s lungs. Bard gagged and released the words from within, shouting:
“Talk to me!”
Thunder exploded with such force it was as if an earthquake had threatened to shake down the museum. Bard’s back arched and he gasped in pain and ecstasy, his mind carried away from his body. On another continent, and across six countries, twelve-year-old boys were armed and made to kill or die. Bard choked on dust and smoke, deafened by screams and blinded by flames. They lived and died, the young soldiers killing and raping like their adult counterparts. Tyrants touched bloody hands to sweat-drenched foreheads and entombed with fake pride:
“You are now a man. My son and pride.”
The tyrant repeated this litany, and behind him came another tyrant, and another in endless succession, rewarding with blood those who survived, and throwing the rotting corpses of the fallen into a ditch, limbs spewing from within the crevice like drowning men desperate not to sink under the waves.
Standing above them, Wotan watched. The one-eyed bastard looked different, his skin darker, his hair longer, his beard beaded. The smoke of his cigar blended with the ashen cloud of war. In his right hand he held a rifle like a long club, or a spear, leaning on it as he grimly monitored the endless slaughter.
“Why are you smiling, you bastard?”
Wotan pointed, and Bard followed the direction of the accusing finger of God to meet a march of unarmed people. They waved white flags, and above them glowed a symbol of two hands holding each other in a sign of brotherhood. One-eye smiled as the flags became red with blood. Without warning, the peace marchers were torn apart under hails of bullets, like gazelles in the mouths of crocodiles, body parts picked mid-air by birds of prey.
And as Bard looked the old man in the eye, the old man simply pointed away again. The world rushed by, red dust, rust, and blood taking to the air as they formed an oceanic tide that smelled of copper. Canon fire made for thunderstorms, war engines like beating hearts illuminated by explosions. From the war marched mechanical hounds, bright burning eyes, scouts for a thousand-thousand armies.
War had no end.
Each time the skies cleared, Bard was allowed sight of the broken world and piled up dead. Trapped amongst them were the dying, their parched throats wheezing cries for help that went ignored. Bard could not look away, his eyes protected only by the unsettled dust; curtains that would part now and again to reveal greater horrors. Atop a hill stood Wotan transformed anew, like a shadow with the burning light of his cigar reflected off his one eye, parting the seas of bloodshed, holding a staff—no, a harpoon— with which he stabbed the ground and shouted:
“From the heart of Hel, I stab at thee!”
Mortally wounded, Gaia screamed and wept blood, that vital substance surging like a geyser, forming a tidal wave that rose so high it threatened to drown all of humanity. Bard wiped the blood from his eyes and saw Wotan changed yet again, a pale corpse-like man, naked but for his mantel decorated with runes and stars, wearing a conic magician’s hat, holding the caduceus in one hand and a small metal globe in the other.
“Bodies are but corn,
One must harvest, scythe in hand.
Within me is the season of reaping.”
“Shut up,” Bard demanded, recognizing the words. He had many more such poems in his anti-war book. A book co-opted by those who exalted war and understood not the mockery, saluting the work, stealing it from its context, denying its author his identity.
“I am a maestro,
And this, my symphony of blood.”
“I was mocking you,” Bard shouted at the apparition. “Everything you represent; I never meant for any of this.”
Splashing in the blood, descending to Bard until they were at eye level, Wotan pushed the sphere through the air. This held itself suspended facing Bard. Not a globe, the world, but a demon core.
The following blast devoured sight and sound in a white flash. By the time Bard had recovered and he stood again, his sight and hearing recovered, he found himself back at the museum. The statue had been crushed to rubble, the glass ceiling had caved in, and the rain and wind threatened to drag him asunder. Wotan himself stood unarmed, wearing only his cloak, two dark figures circling the air.
“Enough, enough!” Bard spewed bile and spit. “I’m going to fucking kill you!”
Wotan keened madly and ran to Bard, in a room so briefly ago filled with weapons from wall to wall, Bard found himself lacking for weapons. He slipped and fell to the ground as the mad god threw himself on top of Bard, hands clawing at Bard’s neck and face.
Bard pushed Wotan from him but could not dislodge the god from atop him. They scrambled across the rain-sodden floor, and cutting himself on something sharp, Bard screamed and hit Wotan across the face with a bloodied hand. Wotan recoiled, more surprised than hurt, and in a flash of a moment, Bard realized what he had cut himself on. He drew it quickly to himself, unthinkingly. A great shard of glass, jagged, the point as sharp as a spear’s.
Bard stabbed upwards just as Wotan redoubled his attack, descending on him. That piece of glass as long as a grown man’s hand slid right under a rib, piercing a lung.
With the glass stuck in him, Wotan gasped—breathless—then clasped Bard’s hand in his. Bard hissed as the glass cut into his palm. Wotan on his knees, Bard half lying down, the god had the shard pulled out just enough that he could make Bard drag the impromptu blade to cut an upturned halfmoon-shaped wound under his breast. Before Bard could understand what was happening, Wotan guided Bard’s hand further. He plucked the glass out from his left breast to draw another such cut under his right. To Bard’s horror, with nothing but a small grunt, Wotan finished the grim task, releasing Bard’s hand to stand over him, his cloak gone. The old wretch swayed on his feet, blood pouring down his sides.
Wotan waited patiently like a statue and Bard, shaking and sweating, could only utter, “Why?” The old god worked his lips and his jaw, chewing for a long half minute. It was as if Wotan would speak for the first time in centuries, crunching pebbles long lodged between his teeth.
“In his body,” he recited, “holy, hides the knowledge. Heavenly alchemy, transmutation.
“Spirit made man. God in flesh.”
Bard was stunned and continued where Wotan had stopped: “Woman, man. Within my body, I’m simply becoming.
“I wrote that,” Bard said in disbelief. Of all the things God could have said to him, never had Bard dreamt of having his own words recited. He continued, “They think I was born another. One nearly wished it so. All-father, inhabit your son.”
Bard fitted the pieces. Terrible parallels were drawn, reflections that could never be dispelled once scried in the dark glass of the world’s suffering.
“Hold not your secrets,” Bard recalled out loud, “I bleed at the foot of the tree.” Bard turned the bloody shard on himself. “Half-blind.”
The pain was horrible beyond what he had imagined. The glass felt so cold it burned against the mush of Bard’s left eye, pale liquid and blood flowing out of his socket. Bard screamed as he dug with the glass and pulled out the mangled piece of himself. Before it hit the ground, a raven plucked the eye in its beak, mid-flight, and separated the thing from Bard completely.
Kindly, careful, Wotan took the glass from Bard’s hands, and caressed his wounded face. The bleed eased and the pain was numbed a bit. Man and God looked upon each other. Only time separated them as one became the other, one twilight closing its final chapter so the next could begin.
“I should have called her while I had the chance,” Bard said, tired and sad.
Wotan nodded, and held the back of Bard’s neck, and drew him nearer until their foreheads touched. The raven returned with a friend, and the pair flew in circles around the scene.
Once upon a time, Bard could have written a scene like this. He preferred poetry to prose, but his one dive into a novel had not been a complete failure. He had called it Your Body in Mine, and it had been full of dreams that blended with reality.
He wondered if he was dreaming then.
