You’re a Ghost in a Meatball on a Rock in a Vast and Empty Universe. Just Fucking Go For It Already.

excerpt

matt bender

3rd Place Winner of the Beautiful Pause Prize for Fiction, 2024

Author’s Note

The Neolithic Revolution/Great Civilization hypothesis (Sumer, Babylon, etc.) I used to structure this book has been smartly and, I think, rightly disputed by many historians, one of my favorites being Graeber and Wengrow’s 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. History is complex and nuanced, and our understanding of it is incomplete. Students of history should be mindful of this while reading. However, the Neolithic Revolution/Great Civilization hypothesis worked particularly well to structure this particular novel which is (almost) entirely a work of fiction. 

PART 1: THE MEATBALLS

I. Pre-history and Sumeria

OUR PREHISTORY is our longest history. However, this will be the shortest introduction, because all that’s left of our prehistory are artifacts. Shards and sherds of pottery. Cave art, not because we all lived in caves but because that’s the only kind of art that had a chance of surviving the elements for 200,000+ years. Also, the tools of everyday use. Also, lots of bones. While we’re lucky us modern meatballs can deduct from the smallest joint of a finger bone quite a lot about the genetic makeup of our ancestors, what’s lost is the oral tradition, the art of storytelling, a rich and interactive event. Storytellers who could capture an audience were revered members of the group, however, like every good story, every good joke, every amazing performance that isn’t recorded, those stories, jokes, and songs live on as imperfect memories in the minds of the listeners. Hundreds of thousands of years later, those listeners are long gone. Those stories and songs served their purpose for their time. They weren’t meant to be recorded, because to record a thing is to rob it of life, of its ability to change to fit whatever occasion or audience is listening. Less than 10,000 years ago, some groups of people started recording things in cuneiform on clay tablets and preserving them. This is where prehistory ends.

One of the oldest recorded stories is an account of the apocalypse from Sumeria, in their appropriately named capital city of Sumer, which describes a congress of gods and goddesses collectively referred to as the Anunnaki, and specifically a god named Enlil, who wants to flood the earth because he’s “ill-disposed” towards humans. The sky breaks open and a storm rages for seven days and seven nights. The sky is “broken like a pot,” but a disobedient god named Enki had already warned a small, specific group of humans how to build an ark. The ark shouldn’t be described as a boat, though. Its measurements are recorded as being of equal length (120 cubits) on all sides. Supporting this claim is the Egyptian word for the ark, which is teba: box or cube. Please take a second to re-imagine this story, plagiarized by the Old Testament, except instead of a boat-shaped boat carrying, as it’s later called in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the “seed of all living creatures,” the boat is instead not a boat-shaped boat, but a giant box/cube.

Humans survive thanks to Enki and the box/cube. By carbon dating the clay tablet this myth was written on along with geological research from Colombia University, clever humans figured out a catastrophic flood did in fact take place in the Black Sea around 7,600 years ago, destroying much of the world as ancient people knew it at the time. No other creation myths have led to tangible evidence of real-world events, so this one is as real as it gets.

As mentioned, this story was borrowed by the Jews of the Old Testament, which was amended when a guy named Jesus said he was the son of God and created a New Testament. That testament was amended again when a guy named Muhammad said Jesus died before he was able to deliver God’s full message, so he created a New New Testament. If this is difficult to grasp, you can just think of the Jews as Yoda, Jesus as ObiWan Kenobi, and Mohammad as Luke Skywalker. Much like the original Star Wars trilogy, the story of the Abrahamic religions is told in sequels.

II. Babylonia, etc.

BABYLON, HOME TO HAMMURABI’S CODE and the hanging gardens, and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world built by King Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife, Amytis. Babylonia’s creation story is called The Enūma Eliš and is a more complete version of what was first recorded on the now-crumbling clay tablets of Sumer. It is a story of jealous, petty, lazy gods and is told in seven tablets. On the tablet in which humans are created is a story called “Marduk Creates the World from the Spoils of War.” In it, a pair of gods named Apsu and Tiamat gave birth to a host of unruly smaller gods in a world that was neither land nor sea nor mist nor much of anything, really. Marduk, a four-eared, four-eyed giant, god of rain and storms, was born from one of these lesser gods. Born a badass, he took on an army of monsters created by his mother, Tiamat.

The conflict ends by him shooting an arrow down her throat, splitting her heart in two.

In the world of creation myths, variations on how land and sea and celestial bodies and, of course, humans, were created trend into three major camps. For the purposes of this story let’s assume they’re all equally plausible. Let’s also assume that if we found a human society who’d never had contact with any other human society, they would also be worshipping some kind of God, gods, or goddesses, and their creation tale would take one of the following three forms.

1.

Humans were born from something. Usually something watery. Usually quite sexual, as in the creation of Japan by the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami. In it, the male god Izanagi dips his “spear” into a “pool” and the “drips” that come off the spear create the island of Japan. A more accurate explanation would be one of Izanagi dipping his [spear = penis] into Izanami’s [pool = vagina] and the [drips = sperm] that come off the spear create the [island = child] of Japan. The Greeks have Gaia giving watery birth to all the lands and the waters and the gods, and the indigenous people of Australia were born from watering holes. Watering holes would have been incredibly important in the heat of an ancient Australia, so it’s not hard to imagine how revered and godlike they must have seemed back in the day.

2.

Humans lost something. A fall from heaven or a fall from grace. Big sky countries like Congo and Arizona have gods who fall from the sky, sometimes by accident. They get to Earth and make animals and people because even the gods have to keep themselves occupied.

The Garden of Eden of the Old Testament is a classic fall from grace story, one in which this good Earth we inhabit is a punishment, not a reward.

3.

Humans are made of the blood and guts and brains and eyeballs of dead gods. This is the story of how Marduk created the world. After splitting his mother’s heart in two with an arrow, he then split her body in two, “like a clam shell.” Half of her was put in the sky to make the heavens and her other half was spread out like a rug and became the lands and the waters. Her eyes were plucked from her skull and became, specifically, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Humans were fashioned from clay and blood and spit and put on Earth to make sure the new planet was well-maintained.

The blood and guts and brains and eyeballs of dead gods origin is more common than one might think. The landmass now called China recorded its creation in a literary anthology compiled in the first century B.C.E. called The Classics of Mountains and Seas, although the tales being collected at that time had most likely been passed down for 2,000+ years before then. In its creation story, a giant named Pan Gu slept in an egg for 18,000 years before being born. After his birth, he held heaven and Earth—like the Grecian titan, Atlas—apart until his death, at which point his arms and legs became the mountains and the four cardinal directions: North, South, East, and West. His blood became rivers. His sweat became rain and dew. His breath became wind, and his voice became thunder. His hair became grass. His skin became soil, and his teeth became the rocks in the soil. His eyes became, respectively, the sun and the moon.

In the Norse version, another giant—named Ymir—died, and so much blood flowed from him that it flooded the earth. His blood became the ocean, his bones the mountains, his hair the trees, etc. His brains were thrown into the sky and became the clouds. In the Inuit version, a giant woman’s fingers were sliced off, and those fingers became the many creatures of the air, land, and sea. That fingerless giant is still alive. Trapped beneath the ice.

You get the idea. Ancient human stories are similar.

The world we inhabit is either a wondrous place we were born into, a hellish place we were banished to, or a gory mix of blood and guts and brains and eyeballs.

Naturally, there are local variations based on geography. Watery regions had people crawling out of the water.

Hot, sandy regions had people made from sand and heat. Cold, icy regions had people made from ice and snow.

For all the similarities, you’d think there was a mother myth, a larger, older truth: We live in a world in which gods and giants do exist, life does come from water, heaven and earth are held separate by titans, and we humans, as storytelling animals, are aware of these white-hot truths, explaining them through our art and our literature for millennia.

We may call things by different names, but we’ve been observing and explaining the world with eyes and ears and minds that have been evolutionarily the same for the 200,000+ years we’ve been around. Because of this shared experience, it’s as natural for our stories to be similar as it is to have fingers and toes and blood and guts and brains and eyeballs. It would be the reason why if we found a human society tomorrow who’d never had contact with any other human society, they would also be worshipping some kind of God, gods, or goddesses, and their creation tale would have one of three recognizable forms.

For all the similarities, a sensitive, observant human wouldn’t be wrong to think this. However, these similarities might not be a sign of our shared humanity. They might also be a sign of our weakness as storytelling animals: To see connections where connections don’t exist. Our ancestors drew imaginary lines between faraway stars and projected false gods onto them like little kids seeing shapes in the clouds. Connection-making is a useful skill for us problem-solving animals but is also the kind of thinking that can lead one into rabbit holes of conspiracy theories. In this sense, religion is the greatest conspiracy theory ever told, a theory that explains an otherwise unexplainable universe.

At least, that’s how it worked for most of human history.

If you ask anyone today, in this more enlightened world, they will of course tell you the myth we now know not to be a myth. They will tell you the creation story that’s correct.

Lord Marduk, four-eared, four-eyed giant, god of rain and storms, created the world from the spoils of war.

III. DTF

THERE’S A PIECE OF GRAFFITI ON THE WALL of the men’s bathroom in a dive bar called Rye Bar that reads Rilo Cose is DTF, “Down To Fuck,” and she doesn’t disagree.

She’s always liked bodies, the ways they fit together.

Fuck is a vague word, though. It’s like describing a single component of the larger, more complex engine. It might as well say Rilo Cose is down with the crankshaft without mentioning she’s also down with the pistons and the oil pans, the valves and spark plugs. Bodies are capable of sensations, which lead to feelings, which lead to relationships, which lead to different models of relationships. She can peg a boy, sit on his face, and tell him she loves him so much she wants to bite his nipples until they turn blue.

Fuck doesn’t embody the things that are genuinely attractive about a person, the cocktail of smells, the timing and content of what is said, as well as the timbre of the voice that’s saying it, the nuances of consent, and the understanding the other person(s) involved will know and respect those nuances. The pegging, the chewing of nipples, all parlayed via a congress of fingers and tongues, an Ah! that means Yes! or a breath that says Too much! or Too fast! It’s all so much fun.

Bodies, bodies, bodies.

Get ’em while they’re hot. Take ’em out to play.

IV. Fear of Death

BEING DTF, reproducing, or at least going through the motions of reproduction, means being in a state of mind in which an animal feels most alive, when an animal is so healthy and feels so good it wants to make more of itself. Animals tend to do this in the prime of their life, beneficial because prime-of-your-life energy is required to go through the motions—not just of sex, but courtship—and make sure you have the energy to take care of any offspring that might result from your play.

The contrast to being DTF is frailty, fear of death.

I woke up late late late one night shortly before my own death—in the middle of a much longer sleep—and spent around an hour meditating on my impending doom. Meditating is a nice way of saying it. A better word would be one that embodies both sadness and fear, the

1) Sadness that I worked so hard to become the awesome version of myself I was on the day of my death, and yet despite being awesome I was still doomed to die, and the

2) Fear that in the billions of years of the universe’s existence I only got one small window of time in which to exist. Wrong decisions—like Enlil’s decision to flood the earth—are fine when you’re immortal because nothing can touch you. And your life is long enough so that you can correct your mistakes, or that, over time, your mistakes will be forgotten.

But mortals have to live with the decisions they make. One wrong turn—like dropping out of high school, a decision American teenagers can make long before their frontal lobes, the organ necessary for long-term decision-making, are fully-formed—might set your life path careening in a bad and irreversible direction.

It’s a little scary. Being mortal. Making decisions.

I used to act all devil-may-care when the subject came up but, honestly, I feared what my reaction would be when it was really my turn to die.

I’m going to cite a Japanese idiom that does a good job of summing it up.

Mono no aware: “the pathos of things,” also translated as “an empathy toward things” or “a sensitivity to ephemera,” a sensitivity to the impermanence of impermanent things like cigarettes, paper cups, photographs, etc. It’s the awareness of impermanence and a transient, gentle sadness about their passing, as well as a longer, deeper sadness about this being the reality of life.

Things come and go, including us. We have only this moment together before the world moves on. I feel I may speak openly on death, as I’d never planned to die myself. I’d entertained the idea, of course, but thought about it in the same way as thinking about retirement, or about getting into gardening someday.

It was an abstract thought.

Then one day it happened, and I was like, Oh shit. Okay. This is happening.

I was lucky, however, as my fear of death was quelled at the moment of my passing.

And apologies, you may be wondering who “I” am. I’m the dragon Mušhuššu, humble and faithful servant of Lord Marduk, four-eared, four-eyed giant, god of rain and storms. I know my name, Mušhuššu, looks difficult, but let me help you, human. Muš is the Sumerian word for serpent. huš can mean red or fierce, but the best way to translate them altogether is “Splendid Serpent,” or “Fabulously Fierce.” You may call me either. The moment my human eyes closed for the last time I was born again into this ruby body, unafraid as I approached Lord Marduk, four-eared, four-eyed giant, god of rain and storms, who explained to me energy can never be created or destroyed. The energy that gives life flows like water through all the living things of the universe.

My human self was one manifestation of it.

My dragon self is yet another.

Energy is indifferent to the body it enlivens. Some people like to call this energy a ghost. Some like to call it a soul.

You may call it either.

Of course, my next question to Lord Marduk—four-eared, four-eyed giant, god of rain and storms, god who created the world from the spoils of war—was, naturally,

Am “I” the ghost/soul/energy or am “I” the meatball it inhabits? To which Marduk replied, Shush, child. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

V. Rilo Goes to Night School

WHEN I WAS ASSIGNED TO RILO, she was still in the halcyon DTF days of her life. She’d missed a lot of high school, but still managed to graduate. Through a friend she got a job at the dive bar called Rye Bar, the bar where her legacy had been recorded on the men’s room wall. Rye Bar’s original intent was to be a classy place that sold high-end whiskey, but slow sales caused the owner to think he’d made a bad decision in buying the place. The fear he might have set his life path careening in a bad and irreversible direction caused him to buy a PA system and begin catering to the local music scene.

The fancy bottles of whiskey high up on the shelves gathered dust.

The coolers filled with cheap beer.

The nightly music lineup was a hodgepodge of the best and worst the city had to offer.

Monday was open mic night, the night when nobody drank alcohol and nobody tipped. Rilo served seltzer water and got smiles and small talk in return. Open mic night was the worst.

Tuesday was country music night, the night she’d sell out of the tall cans of Bud Light before midnight. She wasn’t a country music fan per se, but the people who came in on Tuesday were salt-of-the-earth-types who clearly spent their daytime hours outside working in the sun and yet were also happy to put some of that hard-earned money in her tip jar. A few of them brought their own sneaky bottles of cheap whiskey—tucked in a coat pocket or in the back of their jeans—but as long as they kept it discreet, kept tipping, and kept buying Bud Light to wash their sneaky whiskey down with, Rilo didn’t say anything.

Wednesday was hip hop night, and almost always the same cool crew of college kids. Rilo’s boss was M.I.A. so she generally just charged those kids for the first few drinks and then started giving them out, also making a few free drinks for herself.

Thursday/Friday/Saturday were a mixed bag of events, but Rilo learned you could pin the types of drinks being ordered to the music being played. Jazz nights were all cocktails. Metal shows were shots of whiskey and big cheap cans of beer, not dissimilar to country music night although the metalheads tended to prefer Pabst Blue Ribbon Ale as their cheap beer of choice. Blue-collar patrons tended to be quiet, kind, and good tippers. The Thursday/Friday/Saturday college kids drank too much too fast, were shitty tippers, and occasionally went to the bathroom in small groups so they could lock the door, snort cocaine, and fuck each other.

Sunday the boss showed up to complain about low sales and collect the week’s money.

On some nights she imagined the rest of her life as one wherein she worked at Rye Bar. Her body would grow old this way. Some decision she’d made had set her life path careening in a bad and irreversible direction. She didn’t know I—the Splendid Serpent, the Fabulously Fierce—had been assigned to her, that she had a greater purpose beyond Rye Bar. I spoke to her on those nights, quiet quiet, slipping into the cracks, between the calliope of thoughts that occupy a sleepless night. Eventually, I convinced her to sign up at the nearby community college and give night school a try.

VI. In the Skin

IT ONLY TOOK A FEW WEEKS for Rilo to balance her new work/sleep schedule to allow for night school. She now attends classes from 4 – 7 p.m., opens Rye Bar at 8 p.m., tends bar until closing time at 2 a.m., sweeps, mops, counts the day’s money, and can usually be home and in bed around 3:30 a.m. Then she’ll sleep until 10:30 – 11 the next day and complete her classwork plus any important life stuff that needs attention in the five hours she has before class at 4 p.m. To complicate this schedule, she meets a boy named Marc in her ENG 101 class. A drink turns into a meal, turns into a score, turns into them talking almost every day.

His name is Marc. Yes, “Marc” with a “c.”

She doesn’t have time for Marc, but she likes his kindness, his humor, his warmth.

After a year of dating, they decide to try living together. Boring, I know. But don’t worry. It won’t last long.

Rilo and Marc are a couple who might be described as “mismatched” by people meeting them for the first time. She is a bartender with a sleeve of tattoos on her left arm, scattered tats on her right arm and leg, and what looks like a tattoo of the tip of a rose petal peeking out from her neckline when she wears a T-shirt. Her workday at the bar starts at 8 p.m. and birds are often singing their morning songs when she heads home. When she gets back to the apartment she tries to be as quiet as possible because his alarm goes off at 6 a.m. He tries to be quiet in the morning, too, manually working the toaster so it doesn’t ding and pop when the toast is done, using his foot to control the heavy door so it doesn’t slam shut when he walks out. He gets home around 2 p.m. on workdays and their few hours together before her first class at night school are spent catching up on the day along with a quick meal. He has weekends off, but the Friday and Saturday night shifts are where she makes bank, so sex and intimacy are reserved for Sundays, the occasional early afternoon, and the very occasional late late night on a weekend.

Their first year of living together goes by in this way.

To commemorate their two-year anniversary, he suggests they get matching tattoos.

“The thing about tattoos,” she tells him, “is that you’re going to overthink your first one.”

This is not a fault. You should overthink your first tattoo. Questions like How much will it hurt? and Will I still like it 10 years from now? may only be answered by going out, getting the damn thing, then re-assessing whether you like it or not 10 years after that. The answer to the first question, however, is Yes. It will hurt.

The best way to describe the wound created by a tattoo needle is slow-motion road rash. How much it hurts depends mostly on placement. Ribs, armpits, and tender areas, of course, hurt the most. Biceps and forearms aren’t too bad. One other factor you should inquire about is whether an artist has a “light touch” or a “heavy hand” when tattooing. While nothing gets past the fact a needle is puncturing your skin at the speed of several thousand stabs a minute, an artist with a light touch considers you, the human being tattooed, while working.

An artist with a light touch will ask how you’re doing and will ask if you need a break every once in a while. An artist with a light touch will have a cooler with free water and soda available. No beer, sadly, because alcohol thins the blood. A drunk person being tattooed will bleed out all over the table.

If you ever find yourself in a tattoo studio while drunk, about to make what might be a bad decision that could set your life path careening in a bad and irreversible direction, and the artist agrees with your possibly terrible decision, the next thing you should do is walk out and never walk into that tattoo studio again. Even an artist with a light touch won’t be able to stop your thin, drunk blood from bleeding out.

A heavy-handed artist cares more about the design itself. You are merely their human canvas. A heavy-handed artist won’t offer you a bottle of water or a can of soda or suggest a short break. S/he will wipe the blood off the fresh wound with a dry paper towel, human canvas be damned.

If you get one tattoo and you don’t like it, you’ll most likely never get another.

If you get one tattoo and you do like it, you’ll start thinking about the next one.

After overthinking the first and the second and the third, you start thinking about your body less as a full thing that is hosting a few small designs and more like an empty thing with blank space that needs to be filled with more and more and more designs. Twenty years of this kind of thinking leads to you being a heavily tattooed person.

Rilo knows these things because she’d started slipping down that slippery slope the day she came of legal age to get a tattoo, at the age of 18, when she’d gone with a friend to a hole-in-the-wall tattoo shop where a biker with a heavy hand and flames tattooed over his eyebrows inked mystical symbols on them, her an Om and a Celtic tree of life for her friend for 20 bucks each. Everything about the experience would have been a red flag—a red flag parade!—but she didn’t know what the flags looked like back then.

Marc had not yet set foot on the slippery slope, the slope that leads to thinking of his skin as an empty canvas that needs more and more and more designs, an empty canvas that even heavily tattooed people may still think of as unfinished.

Marc was at the first stage: The stage where he was overthinking it, this first tattoo.

It was cute.

Marc announced on Sunday morning—perhaps after a sleepless Saturday night—that the design should be a sigil representing both of their names. Rilo, in her heavily tattooed opinion, had a thing against words and symbols and sigils. Sure, she had an Om from her youth, but that was a representation of youth. Getting an Om tattoo any later in life than, say, 25, is corny. Anything too sincere is corny. That being said, Rilo also has a sigil tattoo on her left ass cheek, a ram’s head design she’d gotten while drunk and young at a house party from some young punk with a stick n’ poke tattoo kit who’d been sterilizing the needle with a cigarette lighter and was giving out free tattoos. He’d had a little book with designs in it. Something about the ram’s head had “spoken to her,” as it’s said in English.

This quaint expression doesn’t quite capture what was happening at the time she saw the design, however. While it’s true that a meatball can feel the reverberations of its past and future lives, what’s really happening is a glimpse of the ghost/soul/energy within you. When something “speaks” to you, human, you must go with it. A similar expression in English is “trust your gut.” It’s funny, as guts are where poop comes from, but the attempt to describe something beyond human understanding is admirable. Perhaps a better way to say it in English is this:

When the universe pushes you in a new direction, you should go with it.

Rilo, going with it, got the ram’s head tattoo on her left ass cheek, then fell asleep on one of the party couches. While what transpired that evening may have looked like a drunk girl making a bad decision and falling asleep on a dirty couch, the gods who know the larger designs of the universe saw the sanctity of the event, the covenant being made between Rilo and the true rulers of heaven. Rilo, by accepting the ram’s head sigil, thereby accepted her destiny.

The design for a matching couple’s tattoo became an obsession for Marc. Searches for “cute couple tattoos” resulted in heart-shaped locks and keys, suns and moons, Mickey and Minnie mouse, words like eternal, loyalty, and faith. All corny shit. He sent her a screenshot of two swans, their necks entwined. The next day, two trees entwined. She texted back No no no no no!!! and they compromised on the sigil idea. Instead of a standalone sigil, they instead blended the design into one of a badass steampunk octopus she’d been thinking about. Their initials, R&M, were tucked up under some of the octopus’s suckers. Marc complained you couldn’t see it unless you knew where to look and what to look for, and Rilo responded, “Like our love. Even if you can’t see it, you know it’s there.” She got hers on her left calf. He got his on his right bicep.

“Do you think it looks different today?” he asked her, after it healed. “I feel like it shifted or faded or melted or something.”

Marc had bought three muscle shirts in preparation for showing it off, a throwback to Grease or some other mythologized white boy with slicked-back hair and white shirts tucked into tight pants with a prominent tattoo on his right bicep. But greaser bad boys didn’t complain as much as Marc, and not just about daily re-assessments of his new tattoo. He soon had other idiosyncratic complaints not related to his tattoo’s imagined shift/fade/melt.

Marc started to get headaches at house parties and would get pissy if she didn’t go home along with him. He mentioned going back to the tattoo shop to complain. But what’s the statute of limitations when filing a complaint for a bad tattoo? And what would be the recompense—a cover-up, refund, apology?

It’s wrong to assume tattooed people attract each other. Rilo had a boyfriend once who had the word trouble inked across his stomach. Whenever she saw him shirtless, she’d read it and—being reminded—think less of him. A tattooed body tells the story of its passage through the world, and some part of the young man who goes through the pain and money and trouble to get the word trouble inked across his stomach is still present in the older man. Trouble doesn’t go away. It’s a thing to consider with long-term partners if you’ll really be okay looking at a word like trouble, eternal, loyalty, faith, or some fucking poem, every day for the rest of your long-term partnered life.

“I hate it today. Do you think the lines are starting to look blurry?”

He’d woken her up at 6:30 a.m. to ask her this, pushing his right bicep towards her.

“Honestly, what do you think?”

“I think we need to talk.”

Within every couple are rules and boundaries, unspoken codes the world outside of the couple will never know. An entire culture exists between two people. Likewise unspoken rules are that you should tip your tattoo artists: $20 for tattoo sessions taking less than a few hours, and $40 for a session longer than three hours. Also, tip your bartenders: $1-2 for beers or cocktails a la carte, or a solid 20% at the end of the night if you start a tab.

Don’t wake your night shift-working girlfriend up at 6:30 a.m. with stupid questions.

And sometimes the most romantic thing you can do is just shut up and listen.

Marc didn’t bluster or storm out. He took a deep breath, then apologized for waking her. He said he would put some thought into what was really on his mind, and they could talk later in the afternoon. Things will either work out or they won’t, but they could at least be civil about it.

In reality, what had been keeping Marc up at night, what had been causing his headaches, was his ghost/soul/energy sensing the true gods who had been plotting his meatball’s demise. Rilo had a higher purpose than simply sharing an apartment with this boy, this Marc.

The civil conversation planned for that afternoon must not happen, lest they rekindle the romance and Rilo waste any more of her formative years on him.

This “Marc” with a “c,” spat Enlil. Enlil, the god who once flooded the earth because he was “ill-disposed” towards humans, his plan thwarted by his fellow gods who told the humans to make a box/cube.

The council of gods, The Anunnaki, agreed that Something must be done about this Marc.

The week that followed was one of uncanny global tragedy. Killer rocks from space—some the size of bowling balls, some the size of minivans—rocketed down upon the Earth, specifically whichever small section of Earth Marc was on at the time.

The terror ended when Marc was finally hit, smeared across the sidewalk like the stepped-on blat of a ketchup packet. The gods laughed at Enlil for his week of terrible aim.

Marc’s ghost/soul/energy did what ghost/soul/energies do and inhabited the next meatball that came along. That meatball was a kitten in a large litter of kittens, born in the alley behind a Carl’s Jr. hamburger restaurant in Jakarta, Indonesia. This new version of Marc would outlive his littermates to the ripe old street cat age of six years. And while he’d never have a proper home in this life, the neighborhood kids would regularly feed him rice and dried fish and affectionately name him Duma. Rilo won’t meet Marc, Duma, or any variation of that ghost/soul/energy again in this life cycle.

VII. Rilo Goes Deep

THE KILLER ROCKS FROM SPACE INCIDENT faded out of the news cycle a few weeks after Marc was hit. Considering how crazy the early universe was with things flying around in space and exploding, said the scientists, we should really feel lucky the Milky Way has at least calmed down enough to allow us to get comfortable and think of Earth as our home.

We should feel lucky, said the nightly news, that killer rocks from space aren’t a more common occurrence.

Missing Marc, Rilo threw herself headfirst into night school. Turn tragedy into art. Otherwise, it’s just tragedy, a thing with no meaning. Now, when Rilo earns an A+ in the music history class they were taking together she thinks, We did it, Marc. She takes out a loan, cuts her schedule down to 20 hours/week at Rye Bar, and signs up for more classes. Her life now feels to be on a path that—though still uncertain—Marc’s death had opened up for her, a path bound to lead to a career with a more promising, self-fulfilling future than slinging drinks at Rye Bar for the rest of her life.

It’s in night school, in a World Literature class, where Rilo first learns about the ancient kingdom of Sumer: Prayers, chants, and a fragmented tale about a goddess named Inanna who descended to the underworld to visit her sister, the Queen of the Dead. The goddess Inanna arrives naked and powerless. She is “turned into a corpse” and “hung on a [meat] hook.” When she escapes, she returns to the heavens to find her husband has been dressing up, going out, and generally not mourning her absence, so she casts him down to the underworld as punishment. The husband’s sister makes a plea deal and it’s agreed among the gods her husband (Dumuzi) and his sister (Geshtinanna) would take turns spending six months each out of every year in the underworld. The changing of their positions, from the underworld back up into heaven, would manifest as seasons changing down here on the humble planet Earth.

Nobody was surprised when ancient Greece glommed onto this story and changed the names to be more Greek sounding. It’s the same story but starring their goddesses: Persephone and Demeter.

For Rilo, the story that genuinely resonated with her was the one that’s the origin for all later remixes of the Hero’s Quest, from Jesus, to Muhammad, to Luke Skywalker. The story is The Epic of Gilgamesh (a.k.a. He Who Saw the Deep)—first drafted in cuneiform on clay tablets around 2,000 B.C.E.—and is the oldest complete story on written record.

In the introduction to Rilo’s Penguin Classics edition, the Assyriologist Andrew George says of The Epic of Gilgamesh,

In the human longing for life eternal, it tells the story of one man’s heroic struggle against death—first for immortal renown through glorious deeds, then for eternal life itself; of his despair when confronted with inevitable failure, and of his eventual realization that the only immortality he may expect is the enduring name afforded by leaving behind some lasting achievement (George xiii).

It’s worth mentioning again that writing had existed for a long time before The Epic of Gilgamesh was written. Pretty much all previous writing was for recordkeeping. Bills, contracts, etc. Practical matters. Stories and poems and songs were a part of the now-lost oral traditions of our prehistoric ancestors and were meant to be alive, to be performed, to be interpreted however the performer saw fit. Writing down stories and poems and songs was thought to lock them in place, robbing them of life, so the fact that the first epic, the Hero’s Quest—the first example of the monomyth, the only story ever told—was written down at this time is itself extraordinary.

Interlude: The Epic of Gilgamesh

THE GODS OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA built the cities, created the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and tilled the land. But the work was too much for them. The gods grew tired, so Enki—the god who would later warn humans of Enlil’s plan to flood the Earth and advise them to build a box/cube—devised a way to make humans out of clay and inhabit them with ghost/soul/energy. Humanity had one purpose: Serve the gods by keeping up the temples and statues, tending the fields, preparing food to offer as sacraments, etc. so the gods could rest.

The theme of human servility is also present in the Abrahamic religions. The God of the Old Testament—tired from all his world-making efforts—rests on the seventh day, then “formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nos-trils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7) and “put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2:15). The working man must also not forget to “shew forth my praise” (Isaiah 43:21). The Qur’an is just as direct, over 2,500 years later in Sura 51, saying, “I have not created…men for any other end than that they should serve me.” The journey of Gilgamesh takes place long before the Old Testament or the Qur’an, although—as mentioned in the first interlude—the Abrahamic religions pilfered more than just their work protocols from it.

When we first meet Gilgamesh it’s through the literary trick of indirect characterization. The gods have, for some reason, created a wild man named Enkidu, naked and hairy, who eats grass and suckles the teats of other animals. Tablet I of the epic describes Enkidu as

[Knowing] not a people, nor even a country.
Coated in hair like the god of the animals,
with the gazelles he grazes on grasses.

Enkidu is discovered by a hunter who kindly sends a temple prostitute to “tame” him, as people of the ancient world believed frequent sexual intercourse could temper the spirits of hot-blooded men. During this taming process, she tells Enkidu about the tyrannical King Gilgamesh who rules the Babylonian city of Uruk.

Gilgamesh is 2/3 god and 1/3 man. He uses his godly power to exploit and terrorize the people of the city. Enkidu, enraged at her words, goes to Uruk and finds Gilgamesh just as he is about to force his way into a bride’s wedding chamber so he can rape her. An epic battle ensues, at the end of which they’re friends who go on adventures together, sharing homoerotic moments like cud-dling together for warmth, as well as descriptions of Enkidu’s “lush head hair like a woman” (Tablet I, line 98).

The boys’ adventures go too far, however, and they end up angering the gods, for which Enkidu is made deathly ill. After Enkidu’s death, a heartbroken Gilgamesh goes off to find a way in which he can have eternal life. For this, he goes to a mortal man who’d been gifted immortality after his role in an episode called the Deluge. If you were speaking Sumerian, this guy’s name would be Ziusudra. If you were speaking Akkadian (the language of Babylon), his name would be Uta-napishti. If you were speaking a western Semitic language, it would be Noah.

Ziusudra/Uta-napishti/Noah tells Gilgamesh the tale of Enlil, the powerful god who was “ill-disposed” towards humans. The reason given for Enlil’s ill disposition is that humans of the ancient world were immortal. They also reproduced easily, so the human population was huge. This huge, immortal population created so much noise it irritated Enlil, keeping him awake even at his place up in the heavens at the council of The Annunaki. To reduce the noise, Enlil tried every few thousand years or so to decrease the human population: First by plague, then by drought, then by famine. Ancient humans were immortal in the sense that they wouldn’t die of old age but could still be stomped, crushed, plagued, dehydrated, and famined to death. Every time Enlil attempted to deplete the human population, one of the other gods would step in to deliver a warning so our human ancestors could prepare for it. This attempt by Enlil was the Deluge, the great flood that would drown the world, solving the noise problem once and for all.

Luckily for humans, the Babylonian pantheon borrowed the goddess Inanna from Sumer, who laments on Tablet XI of The Epic of Gilgamesh, “How could I command havoc for the destruction of my people when I myself gave birth to people?” She works with Enki—the god who made humans out of clay and gave them ghost/soul/energy—to deliver a message to the king of the nearby city of Shuruppak, a guy named Ziusudra/Uta-napishti/Noah.

You know the rest. Ziusudra/Uta-napishti/Noah builds an “Ark” that should really be described as a box/cube. He loads the box/cube with two of every animal, but not before he loads his treasure, saying, again on Tablet XI,

Whatever I had of silver I loaded aboard.
Whatever I had of gold I loaded aboard.
Whatever I had of seed of all living creatures I loaded aboard.
I caused all my family and kinfolk to go aboard.
The beasts of the field.
The wild creatures of the plain.
All the workmen.

The Deluge did its job and killed everyone who wasn’t aboard the box/cube. The family, kinfolk, and seed of all living creatures survived. There was an unexpected catch in Enlil’s plan: The gods, too lazy to take care of themselves, were now going hungry with no humans left to prepare food and go to their temples to offer it to them as sacraments. The gods convene and decide they’ll make some more humans to take care of them, but the human lifespan should have an end to it. Also, to defend against the human population getting too noisy, some women should be unable to give birth. If women do give birth, it should hurt. Also, not all these babies being born should live, so let’s create stillbirth and infant mortality to kill some of them before they get a chance to grow up and be noisy. And let’s make some new religious laws about chastity because no sex equals no babies.

The gods shook on it. Everyone clocked out for the day.

“Great story, bro,” said Gilgamesh, “but my friend, Enkidu, I was questing around with just died and it got me thinking about how I’m going to die, too. So, I was wondering how you became, you know, immortal.”

“Right,” said Ziusudra/Uta-napishti/Noah, “that whole thing. It’s at the end of Tablet XI.”

There is a plant.
Its thorn is like the buckthorn.
Its thorns will prick your hands, as does the rose.
If that plant should come into your hands.
[Eat it, and] you will find new life.

Luckily for Gilgamesh, Ziusudra/Uta-napishti/Noah has a water pipe in his house directly above where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. If Gilgamesh ties heavy stones to his legs and sinks to the bottom of the two rivers he’ll find the plant, a thorny plant conveniently named the How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Be-comes-a-Young-Man plant. Gilgamesh does it, of course, but then gets distracted. A weird little snake slides up, smells the delicious plant, and eats it when Gil isn’t looking, then sheds its old skin and slithers away as a virile young snake.

Gilgamesh weeps.

That’s almost the end, but our Hero hasn’t learned anything yet, and the true goal of any quest is self-knowledge.

In the final section of tablet XI, Gilgamesh returns to Uruk as an upset mortal man and he contemplates the city: Its walls, its temples, its orchards. He realizes Uruk isn’t such a bad place, and while he might not be able to live forever himself, he can be a good king and help to create a civilization people will still be talking about thousands of years later.

And that’s sort of like immortality.

It’s this last insight that grabs Rilo, thousands of years later, her chin resting on her hand, sitting at a desk, in a classroom, in a school, in a town, in a country, on the same planet that once had a city called Uruk, inhabited by humans just like her, wondering what her legacy would be.

VIII. Rilo’s Legacy (Part One)

RILO DIDN’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, but I—the Splendid Serpent, the Fabulously Fierce—was there to be the architect of her legacy. Marduk and I had her picked out long ago. Like a healthy kid born into a wealthy family, she is allowed these fleeting young moments of existential crisis, but really she has nothing to worry about. Her life path is set. She’ll be fine.

Her immediate problem was of a more primal nature. She needed to get laid.

One aspect of the Hero’s Quest storyline is the hero doesn’t get the “Call to Adventure” until she is in her late 20s/early 30s, and Rilo is no different. Holding true to the old religion, she begins a journey of sexual exploration that finds itself one Saturday night at a Shibari event. Rilo strikes up a conversation with a couple she meets there and ends up going home with them. They’d had a few drinks at the show, and the stated intention of going to the couples’ place was for a nightcap. Of course, when they were standing around in the kitchen, making small talk, leaning against the kitchen counter, the female partner leans in for a kiss and Rilo isn’t surprised. It isn’t gruff like men she’d kissed. No hint of stubble. No leathery tongue trying to rush things. It’s a kiss that lingers on lips that are soft like hers, slightly cooler than room temperature.

The women lingered there in that kiss, in that kitchen, Rilo thinking, Okay let’s see where this goes, and where it went was to a bedroom where the air conditioner had already been turned on and the sheets pulled back. That sneaky man—so that’s what he was doing while we kissed, and that’s when she felt the warmth of the man’s hand on her lower back. Not rushed. Not rough. Practiced.

The night was early.

No plans tomorrow.

He could take his time. And he did. And she did. They all did. And they did and they did and they did and they did and they did and they did and they did and they did.

The next morning, the man surprises her by identifying the ram’s head sigil she’d gotten tattooed on her left ass cheek years ago by the drunk punk at the house party.

“Biblically speaking,” the man said, “the Medo-Persian empire used a ram’s head with sharp, pointed horns to represent their guardian spirit. Not much is known about Medes—they left no written records—except they occupied a part of Mesopotamia a map today would identify as a mountainous region in northwestern Iran. Because they didn’t leave any writing, we rely on other sources, the most complete being from the Greek historian Herodotus, who described Medes as a powerful state separated into six tribes. The most powerful of those tribes is one you’ve probably heard of called the Magi, who may or may not be contemporaries of the three pilgrims of legend who came to mark the birth of Jesus Christ. I’m just spitballing here. Nobody knows for sure, but nobody was surprised when the Greeks later recommissioned the ram’s head to represent their own state. As Daniel 8:21 of the New Testament tells us, ‘The shaggy goat is the king of Greece, and the large horn between its eyes is the first king.’

“After the death of Alexander the Great, the fall of Greece, and the foundation of the Roman Empire, Romans borrowed many features of their gods from the Grecian gods, who themselves had borrowed from older Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian gods.

“The Roman Empire existed for over 1,000 years and one of its last emperors was a humble dude named Mr. Constantine the Great who did a very unusual thing. One day, before he was a big and powerful emperor of Rome, he’d been commanding a military campaign stationed in Gaul along the Rhine frontier in northern Europe. He was commanding a group of soldiers, in conflict with another Roman emperor, one humbly named Maxentius. There are two accounts of what happened next, one from a scholar named Lactantius, who was a tutor to Constantine’s son, and one from the Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a Roman historian. They both state that it was in Gaul that Constantine and his army all saw the clouds form a giant cross in the sky.

“Underneath the cross was written, in Greek, En toutoi nike: In this sign, conquer.

“According to a 2022 article in The Old Farmer’s Almanac by Heidi Stonehill, ‘The term for this [seeing shapes in clouds]…is nephelococcygia, which is a word that comes from the Greek nephelo, meaning clouds, and kokkyx, meaning cuckoo. The word was first used in the play The Birds, written in 414 B.C. by Greek comic poet Aristophanes. Nephelo-Coccygia was a utopian town in the clouds built by birds—in essence, ‘cloud cuckoo land.’

“The most common cloud shapes you’d see on any given day are clouds that come in layered bands stretching across the sky or bulbous things, white, light grey, or dark grey, portending shade, rain, or worse. The crosswinds required to blow out two perfectly straight arms attached to a vertical base, highly unlikely, so for hundreds of men to see a cloud in the shape of the Christian cross was, if not a miracle, a highly unlikely event.

“The celestial artistry required to write, in Greek, en toutoi nike (in this sign, conquer) underneath that already highly unlikely cross in the clouds, that’d be pretty fucking impressive.

“Constantine-not-quite-yet-the-Great fought that battle and won, and in 312 C.E., Constantine—now ‘the Great’—publicly snubbed the Roman gods that’d been borrowed from the Grecian gods that’d been borrowed from the Sumerain, Babylonian, and Egyptian gods and converted to Christianity, citing the highly unlikely cross and the pretty fucking impressive en toutoi nike (in this sign, conquer) seen in the sky before that battle as his reason.

“Though Christian sources may tell you Christianity was practiced by a third of the Roman population at the time, that assertion is debatable. Christianity had been an underground religion since its foundation, and members still met in caves to worship during most of the reign of Constantine the Great. It was only near the end of his reign that he converted to Christianity, which historically looks like more of a PR stunt as he’s said to have—even after having seen the highly unlikely cross and the pretty fucking impressive en toutoi nike (in this sign, conquer) in the sky at the battle of Gaul—privately continued to worship the wine-drinking, orgy-loving Roman gods he’d grown up with.

“After Constantine’s conversion, Christianity became the dominant religion in Rome, a shift in popular belief that would have been laughable had you suggested it one generation earlier. What happened next was that Christians—now empowered—set about destroying the ancient world because it was pagan, non-Christian, thereby deserving of destruction. In doing so, they perverted the ram’s head from being a guardian spirit to a symbol representing Satan, most notably with the image of the goat-headed demon Baphomet. Long story short: The early Christians destroyed the ancient world. Do not forget this unforgivable thing.

“For example, how many ancient Greek epics can you name? The Odyssey and The Iliad? Maybe Plato. Or Lysistrata. Whatever. It’s not often discussed, but all the art, literature, architecture, etc. we have from ancient Greece today represents less than 5% of what existed. The rest was burned, knocked down, or shredded by avenging Christians who used their newfound power to cleanse the world of all things pagan.

“All that ‘turn the other cheek’ crap they preached was tossed out the window.”

Rilo considered her tattoo in the mirror. She considered the man.

“Fascinating,” she said. “Now shut up and eat my pussy.”

Trysts with couples are great because you can observe how they interact—do they talk over each other? Are they comfortable touching?—ahead of time as a test for how they interact romantically, and how you might fit into and around and on top of them. Rilo followed the Call to Adventure and, like origami, folded herself into as many relationships as would open to her. She especially looked for established couples, as they already had their own thing going, meaning Rilo could enter and leave at will without disturbing the balance of their lives. It’s couples in their early to mid-20s who tend to see dating as a zero-sum game with winners and losers. Younger couples will fall in love too quickly, too easily, and get hurt more easily if Rilo disappears into her studies for too long. With older couples, you can be a guest star for a night and be gone after breakfast the next day.

While all couples have rules and requirements about who they’ll let into bed, overall, if you’re

Cool: CHECK.

Young: CHECK.

Hot: CHECK.

They’ll find a way to fit you in.

Unicorn is what they called her. A rare breed. Hard to find. In this way she learned the old religion, leaving a trail of happy couples in her wake.

It’s on one of these dates, after the perhaps-too-long explanation from the man about the ram’s head sigil tattooed on her left ass cheek, a morning score and a long, lazy lunch, when the woman takes Rilo’s hand and traces the lines on her palm with a ticklish fingernail. In the heat of a threesome, it’s easy to lose track of whose hand is where, but Rilo remembered this light touch.

“You were sick as an infant,” the woman says, reading Rilo’s palm, “and nearly died.”

“This is true. I had scarlet fever. I nearly died.”

“You are on a good path in life now. You should continue on it, wherever it takes you.”

“Where will it take me?”

“I can’t tell you that. But it has already begun.”

“And when I return home, I’ll have attained mastery and self-knowledge, right?”

The woman squints, reading more closely. “Yes,” she says, “but first you will get a cat.”

END (for now…)