On The Road To Nebraska: Pt. 2 The Fire At The Center Of The Earth

The flame rushed over his skin. The flame was his skin. The flame tasted of tangerines and lemon and cinnamon and saffron. The flame smelled of lilies of the valley and blood and hot iron. The world was gone. The road was gone. The truck was gone. Everything was gone except for the flame and the voice. The voice that spoke in a million voices at once. The voice that spoke as the wind speaks, it blows and rushes down from high mountain peaks. The voice spoke to Sal and Sal heard. He heard by God. He heard God. He heard religion.

He felt the pain of Jesus on the cross. He felt the grief of Abraham with the knife. He walked with Buddha down flower lined paths in grace. He was in that cave with Mohammed. He was the lightning. He was the rain. For a minute he was a cloud, a cloud formation rushing over the plains and he was a herd of buffalo below himself galloping and then he was the rain pouring down onto them and then he was the rain falling onto soldiers on the battlefield and he was the rain and the blood from the soldiers and he was the rain and the blood and mud. He was the mud that a seed sprouted in. That a vine grew from. Then he was the vine. Then he was the fruit of the vine and so on until at last he drifted down into the center of things and saw a bush burning with fire and heard a voice speak to him again.

It was dark and light dancing. The voice was the edges where the two met. The voice was the whole of it all. Sal heard. Sal listened. Sal shivered with the energy of it.

Comprehension, pure comprehension rushed into him then. Sal saw what it was to be a wave. What it was to be a particle. Saw the sum of all the knowledge that will ever be. Saw the sum of all the knowledge that could ever be. He understood for a moment the actual history of eye color in humans, he knew all the people with blue eyes that had ever existed. He watched history unfold from the first eye mutation. Blue, and brown and green and black and yellow and purple and red and sea gray and white. All the human eye colors that ever existed. Sal saw the lives of every single one of them, and then he saw the lives of every single person with those eyes and he could not hold on.

He was a pipe through which this flowed. It was a rope that ran through his hands. He couldn't squeeze onto it or it would burn. Burn his soul, burn his mind. He knew then that wisdom was to ride this wave to let himself be carried on its surface. To let what needed to be shown to him shown to him.

He saw the impact that created the moon. He saw the neurons fire in the first person to think that the moon was created by an impact, it was a woman in the distant past and she knew about asteroids and impacts before the knowledge meant anything to anybody. She was a priestess of the moon and marked its changes and faces and passage through the sky. She knew the earth was a sphere. She knew the earth orbited the sun. She also knew that her lover was sleeping with a man. She knew many secrets and did not tell.

Sal saw the purpose of his life; and wept for it was at once too much and too little. He was not the savior of humanity. He was not the soul of us. He knew that he would die emptied and hollowed out by the world. He would be chained. He saw that he would pour ashes in his hair. He saw that no one would know his grave. It would be a meadow just off a high mountain pass in Wyoming and he would walk there and die in only fifteen years. He would lay down in the melting snow and the sun would warm his body and the animals would feast on his flesh and flowers would grow around him and only God would know how he died.

This all flowed past him. He felt drawn towards the bush that burns. He felt the voice wash over him. The knowledge that he gained with each step towards it was more and more important and made the knowledge from the previous step less and less important.

When he got to the bush he sank down to his knees. It was a collapse. It was appropriate. It was orgasmic. It was like the fall of Rome. It was like giving into a knife being thrust in your heart, that last gasp you give before you fall dead. It was like the last push through before you and your lover cum together. It was the very last bit of resistance. He sank down to his knees on soft white sand, like a lover yielding, dying, giving in, giving up. It was appropriate and good.