What if you could change the world?
Here is the first part of the piece I hinted at in the previous post and in the last few livestreams. I didn’t livestream its creation as I was working only late at night. You will have to trust me that I, in fact, wrote it.
The installment is free for all. I think you’ll get the setup quite quickly, but I hope I can deliver some surprises with it.
Chapter 1 – The Golden Idol
Its surface was gold trending toward bronze, weathered by the open air and the soot from the myriad modern conveniences that swirled around it in colors of red and white, green and blue, and more aggressive shades clinging to letters three meters high and many more than that up in the sky. The metallic texture was neither polished nor rough, but ran smoother than frosted glass and yet had the same scattered reflections that glass has in refraction—a haze of images that are haphazardly guessed or unconsciously reassembled into what the mind thinks they might be or wishes them to be. That aural material ran in perfect lines and curves, each one intentional, each one containing within its small run a piece of mathematical precision, but those many angles and arches, beautiful in solitude, converged to make a singular image of stark wonder and even majesty.
The full image, of which each detail is usually lost, was a statue of a gracious woman standing amidst the air, surrounded by hedges run over with morning glory. It was not lit except incidentally, and truthfully, no spotlighting was needed, and may even have robbed the work of some of its subliminal power, for it was like a goddess forgotten amidst the whirl of artificial lights outshining the stars with a hundredfold magnitude while robbing the firmament of all its ancient beauty. And yet the goddess remained.
Yes, it was a goddess. She was perfect in so many ways, a form of the abstract perfection of the female form. Her hips drew into a narrow waist, which flowed into her ribs and her breasts, nude while gaining nothing of lewdness, were of a perfect proportion that was meant for admiring the sex without lusting for it. Her face, gentle, serene, looked down…
“Diedrich!”
He came back to himself and the faint echo of the name shouted above the noise, which, like the scene before him, became firm and present, familiar though he could not recall ever being aware of it.
“Diedrich!”
The name came again, louder, and somehow, the man who stared at the statue had an itch, a tingling, that someone might be using that name to call for him, but his name…
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden realization as he watched the thousand light crawl over the skin of the goddess.
He hated her.
Or rather, he hated it. For it was not human, and not a goddess. It was an object, and it disgusted him. Its stylized form was obscene, a humiliation of the female form by defying it. By idolizing woman, in mocked her. A thousand other thoughts hovered on the edge of his mind, ready to be plucked, but the watcher held onto his revulsion. One day, we will break the chains of such obsequious idealization of beauty, a form no woman could ever match.
He hated the statue in every way, for its color, its richness, its pride in existence, its beauty.
“Diedrich! I thought it was you.”
Slowly, the watcher turned his face to see a man in a dark green uniform. His shaven face was familiar only distantly, like the face of a man you have met twice with months between. His eyes were a fierce blue, and light hair blew in the breeze beneath a flat hat.
“What are you doing out here?” the man in the uniform said. He glanced up at the statue. “Admiring Freyja again?”
Words came slowly to the watcher’s lips. “Yes. Looking at it.”
“Diedrich, are you alright?”
What was his name? Diedrich sounded distantly familiar, but he didn’t feel like he belonged to that name. He remembered another…Ted? His head was swimming.
“Are you on some new meds?”
“New meds? Yes, maybe. I…I don’t remember.”
“Tomas! Who do you have there?” It was another man in a similar uniform. He came trotting over.
“A friend of mine. I think he has had too much to drink. Why don’t I take you home, Diedrich?”
“We still have an hour left to patrol,” said the other man. “Can’t he call a taxi? I don’t want to take him if he’s your friend.”
“He’s not so drunk as that, I think. I just thought I could…Well, you’re probably right. I’m sure he has the money for a taxi. Did you hear that, Diedrich? You need to call a taxi now. You can’t stay here.”
“Right,” said Diedrich (he supposed that was who he was, or ought to be for the moment). “Where is a phone?”
The two men laughed. “In your pocket?”
Diedrich nodded, reached into his pocket, and withdrew the little glass-surfaced rectangle that was his phone. It sprang to life as it scanned his face. A dozen small icons popped up, but none of them seemed familiar. “I…I need a taxi,” he said.
A woman’s voice answered him. “Paging a Johannetaxi to your location. Is that what you wanted?”
“Yes.”
The two men in uniforms laughed.
“I’ll stay with him till it gets here,” said Tomas. “Go on ahead. I’ll catch up.” The other man nodded and walked away down a path between two lawns that looked black and pink in the towering city lights.
“I think I’ll be okay,” said Diedrich. He stared at his phone. “I can stand for five or ten minutes by myself.”
Tomas smiled and put his hand on his shoulder. “Alright, I’ll check on you tomorrow. And you should call your doctor. Whatever medicine he is giving you is not going well.”
“I will, thank you.”
Tomas forced a smile and then trotted down the path.
Diedrich looked up at the statue again, his wonderment overcoming his disgust for a few awkward moments. Feeling sick, he tore his face away and walked in the opposite direction from Tomas, toward an avenue that was teeming with people and lit by many colorful signs. He spared one glance back at the statue, so perfect in its loneliness in the tiny park.
The city streets closed around him, concrete and glass groping toward an empty, black sky. The lights on the sidewalk were clean and bright, but soothing in their familiarity. The orange sodium glow was like a candle, but these old bulbs were swiftly drowned by the luminescence of hundreds of signs and advertisements as Diedrich turned and entered a mall. The orange was replaced by unnatural white, which served only to draw the bright signage into shades of pastel on the pale cement of the walkway, damp from a recent rain. The loneliness of the little park was replaced with a cacophony of human speech. Men and women were crossing everywhere, some with small, eager children happy to be out in the evening. A guitar player under a nearby tree was busking nonsense through a small amplifier, and a few children were cheering him.
“Who am I? Who am I? Am I Diedrich? I thought I was…” The name escaped him. If only he could find a little peace and dark, he could remember. Was it the meds, like Tomas (his friend, he supposed) said? What meds had he taken?
Prozac came to mind, but that was wrong. Xanax? Zoloft? He recalled a smearing of ads from his life, but they were divorced from time and place. Taking a breath, Diedrich turned from the madding crowd and toward a shop. The doors parted and then closed behind him, shutting him into a small, calm cocoon.
He took a breath and saw surrounding him rows of media of every type. Beyond and above these was a wall of televisions, all displaying the same familiar face.
“Can I help you?”
It was a pretty blonde girl. Diedrich forced a sickly smile back, feeling angry once again at the beauty which he could not tear his eyes from.
“Sir?”
“I just wanted to look around.”
“Christmas gift? It’s never too early to think about it.”
“Yeah, maybe.” His eyes slipped from the young face and back to the TVs. He had stepped away from the girl and toward the row of images without realizing it.
The face. The face on the screens was so familiar, more familiar than his own name.
“Hitler,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Well, yes.”
“Why are you playing a video of Hitler, and why is he in color?”
“I just put the TVs on the same channel. It’s not up to me. Aren’t they all going to broadcast his address?”
Diedrich felt his hands curl into fists. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m going to get the manager.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
Diedrich watched in fascination as the man on the screen talked with increasing passion about the homeland and its beauty, and he realized with a nauseating surge that he felt something from the lines and their delivery.
More than that, he realized that the Adolf Hitler on the TV was speaking German.
Of course, that would be completely accurate, but why did he understand it so well? He had never taken German in high school or college. His name came to him. He meant to say “Ted” aloud, but Deed came out instead.
“Is there a problem, sir?”
Diedrich turned and saw a man approaching middle age, with slick hair and a modest suit. He was smiling slightly at him.
“Sir?”
Diedrich shook his head. “You have Adolf Hitler on all your TVs.” He was speaking German, too. He was sure he spoke English, not German, but here he was speaking it and understanding it as if he were German.
“He is the chancellor. I understand not everyone loves him, but his speeches are of our common interest, aren’t they?” The manager was speaking German, too.
Diedrich frowned.
“Diedrich!” It was Tomas again, coming in from the bustling mall courtyard with his hat in his hand. “Somehow, my heart told me I need to check on you again. Didn’t you call a cab?”
“I… I just had in my mind to do some shopping while waiting for the car. Don’t they text you…Or whatever?”
“Yes, but maybe you were distracted by the Chancellor’s speech? I admit I usually have to stop and listen. Always something interesting. Anyway, there is a cab outside. Maybe it’s yours.”
Diedrich nodded. His eyes slid down Tomas’s uniform and stopped on the small patch emblazoned with an eagle and swastika, which he had not noticed before. He glanced at the cap Tomas held in one hand and saw the same symbol. He then bowed slightly to the manager and the girl and stepped out with Tomas.
“Do me a favor and call me when you get home, alright? I’ve been worried about you lately,” Tomas said.
“Alright.”
Tomas gestured to a small curve of road that entered the central hub of the outdoor mall. In it sat a sleek grey sedan with no driver.
“Where’s the cabby?”
“What?” said Tomas. “It’s a Johannaxi. It’s automated.”
“Ah, right.” Diedrich nodded to Tomas and opened the back door. The young man in the uniform waved at him and stepped away briskly. Diedrich slipped inside, settling down onto a smooth leather seat.
“Welcome,” came a soft voice from all around the cab. “What is your destination?”
Diedrich (or was he Ted? His mind remembered a longer English name, too) realized he had no idea where to go.
In a panic, he searched his trousers and found a folded wallet inside was an ID card with an address. His eyes blurred and swam as he tried to read the small piece of plastic with its small words – all in German – spiraling around an NFC chip.
“Berlin?” he said, squinting.
“That’s where we are,” came the soothing voice. “Home?”
“Yes?”
The car started moving out of the little traffic loop and accelerated into a wide thoroughfare packed with similar vehicles.
“Have I ridden this before?”
“You have an account,” said the taxi. “Have there been any changes?”
“I don’t know.”
The voice clicked. “We should arrive in four minutes.”
I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.
