[i]Mr. Nowhere[/i]
Every scar on my body is a roadmap of the past. Turn left at the navel and you’ll arrive at my birth; travel down the spiral of each fingerprint and you’ll find yourself there at the center. And there are other scars, other routes to the heart - all roads lead there. Fresh flesh for the marring, new paths to be blazed into the center of this divine Being.
I am Mr. Nowhere, and with the dawn of each day I start my journey anew down all the lanes of consciousness. Every perception flows into these senses as water within the ocean. From the rivers of Babylon to the great monoliths, built in the forgotten ages when the Earth was yet dark and hot, I have been everywhere and nowhere at all.
Occasionally on my travels I encounter other wanderers, other people from other places - we sometimes tarry together awhile before going our separate ways. My fellow-travelers in these wastes of the Self rarely stay for long; only one has gone with me from end-to-end of these forsaken deserts and blistered plains, from lowest Leng to the highest peaks. She is the water in the cracks, the lotus in the stone.
It was in this desolation that I found her: naked, starving, shuddering, encircled by all the carrion-birds of the wastes. I lifted her as she slept and, folding her within the reams of my cloak, carried her off to where the red Earth touches blue sky.
For days and weeks I nursed her back to health, watched the juicy colour of her cheeks return to life and glow in the evening light. I covered her wounds in gunpowder and fed her juniper berries and lily tea.
She came around by degrees; her fever had taken a toll on her body and at her first sight of me she asked if I were Death come for to carry her home. This I denied and, wrapping her up in my shawl, laid her back to sleep.
I had gone off to gather up limbs with which to prepare a fire for her and, when I returned, she was gone. In her delirium she had forgotten to erase her prints in the sand, which I followed - another path to another place - she was sleeping atop a white cliff overlooking the sea.
I approached her from behind. She was slumped over a boulder, my shawl hanging loosely from her shoulders as though they were wings.
She spoke without turning. “Who are you?”
I told her just who I am.
“And where is this place?”
I told her that also.
She turned back towards me then, her tears glinted redishly in the sun of this perpetual evening. “So I am dead. And you must be Death.”
“Not dead,” I told her. “For the first time, you are very much alive.”
She turned her back to me then, pushing herself up off the boulder. Approaching the edge of the cliff, her body moved as if to throw itself away, as though it preferred the ravages of the breakers far below to the solitude of this place.
“Go now. Leave me be. If I am dead, this will not hurt.”
I reached for her, taking her arm in my scabrous hand and pulling her back from the edge. “It will hurt more than you can possibly know. Come with me. Leave this place; leave your solitude - and relieve me of mine.”
Her hand in mine, we left the cliff by the ocean for the swirling deserts beyond.