Exegesis-104

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Item #:2013 SCP-XXXX1, The Golden God

Object Class: Safe

Special Containment Procedures:

Special Containment for SCP-XXXX1 requires no more extra effort on the part of the foundation than containing a normal humanoid or D class subject. Though the entity possesses superhuman strength and is by all accounts impervious to death, he is willingly imprisoned and came to Site-17 with the Foundation on his own account. SCP-XXXX1 to date has never made any attempts at escape.

Description:
Scp-XXXX1 is a humanoid biped caucasian male who appears to be middle aged. The entity has the physique of a body-builder and has displayed a strength that is ten times that of what you would expect a man of it's physical capabilities would have. The entities skin is a gold hue and golden sparkles of an unknown material surround it at all times.

The following information is pieced together from Journals allegedly retrieved from the said incident site as well as interviews with SCP-XXXXc through SCP-XXXXu.

Item #7001 is a handwritten journal that was given to the Foundation by SCP-XXXX1 who was discovered, trapped in a hole at the site where an anomalous event was discovered by the Foundation, 100 miles north of El Naranjo, Guatemala.

According to Item #7001, The entities name was Jim Vining. It claims that it was originally from Sparks Nevada and was flying to Guatemala from Nevada on October 12th 2013 when his plane was brought down by a storm. Of the sixty-five passengers aboard the flight, The entity was the only survivor of the crash, though he did lose most of his left arm and his entire right eye upon impact and must not have been immortal at the time of the crash. The entity claims to have vague memories of two natives, amputating his right arm and cauterizing the wound.

According to the entities account in Item #7001, after the crash, two native men took care of its basic and medical needs. They fed him, they poured hot liquids down his throat, they bandaged and cauterized his wounds, and even disposed of his feces and urine with a wooden bedpan. They continued nursing Jim until he was able to walk again.

On December 14th 2013, the entity says that it was told to climb inside of a hole that the natives had been digging within the clay ground of the Jungle floor where they lived. They had made shovels with Mahogany branches that were tied to pieces of metal that were retrieved from the nearby plane wreckage. The entity purports that the natives had been digging the hole for nearly a month.

SCP-XXXX1 obliged the natives and climbed into the hole that they had dug. They then entered a bowing state of prayer in front of the hole and began to chant in a Yucatec Maya.

SCP-XXXX1 explains in his Journal that according to Shooshi, the eldest of the two native man, December 15th 2013 is the day that their calendar ended. Shooshi predicted that the world was ending in the next twenty-four hours. The pair went on to explain that SCP-XXXX1 was to start a new world. They referred to the new world as the “real world”

#7001 explains that after the entities started to pray around the hole, the entities body began to glow and bright white light poured out of it in every direction. SCP-XXXX1 opened its mouth to scream but only released a laser beam into the sky that could be seen by the SCP foundation immediately.

According to an interview with Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████
the next events are as follows:

Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████, lead a small team of thirty-eight Foundation personnel to the area in Guatemala they had seen the laser coming from.

Two native men were discovered in praying position around a hole that had a diameter of approximately .65 square meters. The men were immediately apprehended and placed in the custody of the Foundation. The area around the hole was tented by Foundation personnel.

The team attempted to enter the hole with no luck. Those who tried to climb in, were ejected by an unknown force and were sling-shotted upwards at a speed of twenty kilometers an hour. This caused several Foundation personnel injuries, but there were no casualties as a result of attempting to enter the hole.

Takumat, as he called himself, was the only one of the pair of natives who would speak to the Foundation team initially and all he would say was:

“Jim left the old world to start the new one. This world has finished teaching its lesson. Jim is mankind, ready to become God.”

The entity also went on to explain that “the old world” as it calls it, was ending in twelve hours and that the only way to save it would be to stop Jim from beginning the new world.

"You must convince Jim that he is not God." was the last thing either native man said before they no longer spoke to the task force at all.

Because of the anomalous activities allegedly witnessed by the Foundation, I.E the laser beam that went into the universe from a hole in the jungle, the team decided to take the end of the world threat seriously enough and began planning different attempts at reaching SCP-XXXX1 who was presumably in the hole or elsewhere, via the hole.

A megaphone was used to try to reach the entity with no results.

At last one of the Foundation personnel reported that he heard a faint “Hello” coming from the hole. The personnel gave their full attention to the hole and waited in silence for it to speak again. One of the Foundation personnel shouted “Hello” back to the entity in the hole.

“Is that you God?” the entity replied.

A short debate about what to answer with was held and it was decided that they should take the advice of the Natives and try to fool the entity. SCP-XXXX1 may not have been of a sound mind in its state, whatever it may be, and thus they chose to attempt to placate it and confirmed that the voice it heard was in fact God communicating with him.

“Yes, Jim. This is God. Won’t you let me in my son?” A foundation Personnel answered.

Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ took it upon himself to remove his gloves and roll up his sleeve and then reached into the hole.

He reported feeling the fingertips of a human hand touching his. He tried to grab but the fingers retreated.

There was a silence followed by another debate on what to do next.

The attempt at deceiving Jim was also a result of information provided by Takumat about Jim. They told the Foundation to appeal to his humanity and to temp him to return to the world he left behind. They proclaimed that this was the only way to succeed in breaching the hole and saving the world.

There was no chaplain on the task force but they did have a bible amongst them. Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ had a tremendously deep voice and decided to read out loud, all of the parts of the bible where God or Jesus is speaking, as if it was God or Jesus speaking through the hole to the entity.

Within ten minutes of the reading taking place, a hand reached out from the hole and paused, balled up in a fist. The hand glittered with gold sparkles of an unknown material surrounding it.
Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ grabbed the hand, but it slipped out of his grip and disappeared back into the hole.

According to the natives there were only two hours remaining until the world would be destroyed at this point.

They attempted reading more scriptures but there was nothing but silence from the hole.

Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ reached into the hole once more and left his arm in there for over an hour. With only twenty-eight minutes remaining until December 25th 2013, Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ felt a hand grab his from the other side. Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ yelled for the others to come. He began disappearing into the hole and just barely was able to grab the wrist of one of the nearby Foundation personnel. The team daisy-chained with one another, linking arms desperately to try to pull the entity out of the hole.

At last a muscular, golden humanoid figure appeared from the depths of the hole and was ejected at twenty kilometers an hour upward towards the team.

The entity explained to the team that once you've lived in “paradise” as he called it, you can't die and you turn golden and sparkly. It claimed that its' arm had grown back, and both of his its' eyes were intact once more.

The entity then asked which member of the task force was God. Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ stepped forward and proclaimed that it was him.

"My Lord!" The entity cried as he groveled at Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████'s feet.

"Forgive me, my lord. I was naive and to think that I could be God. I was given a paradise where I was perfection itself and still I was unsatisfied. The animals looked to me to take care of them and it was such a great burden. Please my lord, I have been so misguided. I repent! I repent, my lord!"

Lance Corporal ████████ ██████████ continued the charade all the way back to Site-17 where SCP-XXXX1 was put into confinement. Since SCP-XXXX1's incarceration at Site-17, it has proven to be a very helpful entity when it comes to researching other SCP's. SCP-XXXX1 is impervious to all known affects caused by all known SCPs to date. SCP-035 regained host priveledges when SCP-XXXX1 arrived as it's powers are rendered ineffective when SCP-XXXX1 wears the mask, however when SCP-XXXX1 wears SCP-035, it appears that whatever entity that posses the mask itself, hides away and does not attempt to communicate with SCP personnel.

Item#7001 a Journal confiscated from SCP-XXXX1

It seems whoever it was who taught me English spent too much time showing me what doesn’t work when writing: bad prose, sentence structure, and, most importantly, what not to say and how to not say it. I sit here at the end of time trying to remember what is correct but seem to have what is wrong permanently ingrained in my subconscious. The only thing that pops into my mind is what not to do, so I do what I think is the opposite of that, and it looks even worse. The religion that may start after finding this book can be a bunch of illiterate morons, I really don’t care. I would kill for a thesaurus.
I used to wonder why I was doomed with the hapless ability to see through all of what seemed to be the deliberate nonsense of a deceptive world around me, if I had not been somewhat important in the grand scheme of things. For the most part, I had decided that I wasn’t very important but still went about things like I was. I felt that my keen sense of all that was wrong and unjust in the world was just a cruel joke on poor old me, a joke that became ever crueler the more I came to believe that it came from nothing and nobody at all.
“One foot in front of the next, my man.” Or “You know there are drugs for that?” Sometimes “I don’t believe in politics.” Why did I try to talk to these people? A paranoid “fringe,” some said. I didn’t disagree with them. I admit I’ve been caught reading the labels on food and I talked about Monsanto a bit more than the average hipster.
Conditions were horrible for most people in those days on as global scale. I had it good. My nation had it good. Although the middle class I belonged to was inches from annihilation, our greedy overgrown imperialist nation was still basking in the warmth of the final rays to arrive on this confused blue rock from a star long destroyed - so to speak. That’s not how it happened though; that’s ridiculous. I’m not certain exactly how the world ended, I missed it.
It all happened when I was in the hole.
I remember a time when the once-proud nation I lived in was stretching too far, claiming to protect us from an enemy that was only growing with each inch we lengthened our greedy reach. Profit and progress had come at an easy price to pay if you could stomach (or ignore, as most did) the looting, pillaging, plundering, using, stealing, usurping, censoring and controlling of art. The torturing of citizens, the starving of children who died of dysentery by the thousands due to bad policies, and the brutally obvious lies that would slither from the mouths of our republic’s reptilian, “democratically elected,” megalomaniac political royalty. They were only made real to the common man on paper-thin televisions that haunted almost every room in almost every civilized household. (It was western tradition to have a television in any room your family had to meet for dinner, and it was considered good luck at the time to hang one near where you would crap.)
To briefly describe the problems of the old world, one could say that it all stemmed from man’s stupidity and vanity. I would have to agree but will not further elaborate, for I believe history has only repeated itself because we have had history to remember and to read about. Now there is no one to remember and nothing to read about (except me and my book). History cannot repeat. I will not doom an already-doomed future to repeat a doomed history.
I’m in a fallout shelter somewhere in South America. I’m not sure of the date but it doesn’t really matter anymore. The story I am about to tell you is my account of the events leading up to the nuking of the planet and the end of the world. I found a pen and a few stacks of paper in a desk here and I feel compelled to document the end of humanity
Before I came to the Jungle, I lived a pretty average life in a pretty average western city. I spent most of my free time at a Library that served beer and had silent films and yeast to put in your popcorn. They hosted a left-winged movement of people who camped in front of their local federal buildings for a reason that escapes me now.
I had become inspired by this happening, it seemed like a genuine grass-roots movement against all of the corruption in our country that I until recently thought I had been alone in seeing. I connected with my local sect of the movement.
We would wear sashes that symbolized solidarity. We would eat pretzels, drink, speak, and write clever letters that we would blast the city council with. We felt drunk and high like the founding fathers of our great nation must have.
“It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that all of what the heroes of our country have fought for over the last couple of centuries, the liberties, rights, and dignities, are being perverted behind the backs of a duped and pacified general public that have fallen asleep at the wheel of democracy.
Though in our slumber, some of mankind has remained awake and took lady liberty behind the bushes and out of her copper green twat, came the corporation, the bastard child of freedom. “Corporate Person-hood” means that corporations are humans like you and I, and that their money is equal to the same freedoms of speech I have to write you now.
Now it seems that some of man is waking up, and he has started a movement, I’m sure you’ve seen some of us sleeping in the doorway to your work in protest and I hope it has got you thinking.
As a man now waking up to what I myself have squandered in my apathy I am asking you, my elected officials, to do your duty as moral people, to uphold and protect what so many have given so much for and to at least recognize in your hearts that it was not for this.”
The mayor responded with a handwritten note

“Get a job.”
–The Mayor

I was not a complete misanthrope.
I sustained a failed relationship with my high school sweetheart for years.
Things had come to a point where it was either going to fall apart or we were gonna get married. It had been decided by the both of us, in order to save our relationship, we would move in together. She wanted me there for her in all the ways one can be there for another that are not just physical, but still, I was checked out. I had retreated on all fronts. We both became more and more sloppy with our cheating on each-other. The end wearily crept at our heels.
Later, my mother and my fiancé had discovered that I was developing plans to leave town forever. I’d take my guitar and my obscure songs that I spent all my time writing, pack my belongings in a gig bag and I’d be off to wherever music would allow me to go. I was bombarded with accusations that I was throwing away the life my mother had given me; the life that my girlfriend insisted on completing. Both women cried in each other’s arms and declared that counseling was the only answer for all three of us.
For a while, my brothers and I stood together in solidarity, and I think it worked as well as it did initially for the sole reason that people would drink enough to tolerate each other’s foolishness. Only after a few cold beers was it enjoyable to talk to my comrades all night long about marches and permits for marches and coordinating with the local police and taking turns guessing how many people we could fit in a three-foot by eight-foot “free speech zone” ‘(Twenty-four, we found out).’
Within a few weeks, it was becoming apparent that the revolutionaries were tired and though they were very skilled at pointing out all of the problems of the world and who to blame for them, they seemed to be too beat to put forth the effort that it would take to carry out their carefully discussed and meticulously plotted plans of action. My brothers and sisters that were not poor and hungry were set on working with the city, most of the lot were terrified of stepping out of line, some even threatened to condemn me if I misrepresented their movement to the city. I was too radical for supposed radicals.
It was football season and everyone at work was wearing their favorite football jersey at the grocery store.
I had earned a nickname I grew to resent. I was christened this moniker during a conversation my bosses and I were having about cell phones and their nefarious implications.
“I’ve got a new name for you! Jungle Jim!”
I chuckled politely for too long.
“You don’t want a cellphone Jim, go live in the Jungle, please.” Said a co-worker.
I couldn’t save money at all. I was immoderate and munificent with every pay check I slaved away for. Gambling had become therapeutic and the prospect of winning my way out soothed me.
The movement was adamantly against corporations, then the movement became a corporation. It happened pretty much like that.
This meeting was held in a bar, instead of the library, I remember. One of the revolutionaries that was on his way to play a game of pool happened to bump into me. The guy briefly told me about the changing of (more rightly the becoming of) a business. As I passed through the back door to the brightly lit pool room, the art that was displayed on the lime-green walls made me involuntarily scoff; it was a gallery of unframed, wrinkly, grainy photos of homeless people that someone printed out and had stapled to the library walls.
I wedged my way through the crowd to take a seat in the main room where the general assembly was being conducted. It was the last weekly meeting I would attend.
I found everyone holding hands in a circle with their heads down. I was very concerned to see that no one was drinking beer. The group had apparently passed some new charter about drinking at the meetings. I voted in favor of it, but don’t remember doing it as I was very drunk.
As I was taking a seat, The head facilitator began chanting in a low emotionless voice: “We do not feel angry feelings toward anything” and in unison the rest of the cult of revolutionaries regurgitated the same insane statement without even thinking of what it meant to them. They seemed to forget they were all gathered together in the first place because they were angry.
For the first time since I had joined the movement, I used one of the silly hand signals my comrades would demand used.
I walked to the middle of the room, I raised my hands above my head and I formed a cross with my arms. The chanting continued. Some of the lower people on the totem pole. would steal a one-eyed peeak during the chant, not at me but at the leaders to see if they were looking at me. After about ten minutes of me standing with my arms crossed above my head, the meeting started. No one paid any attention to me., A short and spotty, box-shaped college student facilitator who appeared to be a neither gender, cleared their throat and started the meeting by explaining the rules about hand signals. The facilitator stressed that you only ever make an X with your arms if you’re willing to walk away forever from the group and that if a member makes this signal, all others must stop immediately and address the issue at hand.

I left the Library and I took the road by the Truckee River on foot. I tore my solidarity rag off as I arrived at the river and intended on casting the thing in the raging winter waters, but rather just balled it up and slipped it into my pocket. I gripped it hard and in a malevolent stupor met the year’s first storm with my head bowed and my neck in throbbing pain.
There was this dream that I had that had been reoccurring for years.
I am running through a bustling Metropolis and it’s eerily silent and everything is sepia-toned.
I can’t find anyone for miles and there are abandoned cars everywhere. Finally, I come upon two men pulled over near a cafe.
They’re idling in a cherried-out old Buick. I go to ask for their help but before I can talk, both of their mouths drop and they begin to scream and they start pointing at me.
The two men exit the car and start coming at me pointing and screaming. Soon others come out of the buildings and join them in pointing and screaming and they chase me to a dark tree-line.
For some reason I am wearing in-line roller skates and I keep hurtling myself faster and faster into the forest. The screams at my back lesson but the darkness around me grows.
I get to the same idling Buick in the forest. It’s under a half-moon-blue streetlight, parked near a chain that says “Private Property, Beware of Mountain Lions and Me!”
I open the door to the car and sitting with hands on the wheel, is a skinned man, only itsit’s the opposite. He is just his skin and everything inside of its body had been sucked out of his face. The skin-man chokes on his banshee-like scream and begins to wiggle himself out of his seatbelt then shimmies towards me with rapid seizure-like convulsions, like the morbid offspring of a night crawler might have.
I dressed in my blue cotton robe and ventured down the hallway of my new three-bedroom rental, following the awful sounds to my guitar-player/roommates door. On the other side, I could hear him having sex with my girlfriend. They were both panting heavily and could clearly hear Baby’s all-too-familiar shrieking and moaning.
He was fucking her ass for sure.
I poured a glass of water, ate peanut butter from the jar with a spoon, and went back to bed. It’s a shame the band ended because I found solace in the cathartic effort of composing songs that were imbued with my thoughts. It became an addictive passion, alas it was no anchor in the failing world.
The band broke up shortly after my roommate and my girlfriend hooked up and my dreams of running away from society went from a fantasy to a possibility that night. I got dressed, and went for a walk and found my way into a casino.
The casino was full of lifelessness; everything that wasn’t the living dead in the lightless trap could be considered the plain dead, and since the bubble busted a few years back, the casinos had been almost completely emptied. Fewer people could afford to travel, and most would sure as hell find a better use for their money than pissing it all away in a gloomy casino. The majority of the people I saw in the golden-walled, red-carpeted palace were old and haggard, seemingly taped-together cocktail waitresses whose bodies failed to form to the black, skintight, coat-tailed, showgirl work uniforms. The girls exuded the same sterility from their hollow eyes that could be heard in the form of robotic beeping and electric buzzing of the slots at every corner. While I was playing a slot called “King-tuts something” I thought, “What now?”
There was a girl that I had worked with at the grocery store for years who I was absolutely in love with. I was already codependent on her but she had a boyfriend.
I had to tell her that I love her. That was all that was left for me in society.
I would write a letter, or a speech, or maybe I would see if I had any talent at writing love songs. I thought of many different ways and ideas to tell her how I love her in the past but I was not a strong writer and I was too shy. How would I find the words to tell her I loved her? The more I planned and contrived the moment in my head, the more strained my feelings toward telling her became. Fear had begun to turn on the desire to express my love to her. As quickly as the idea had entered my mind, it left.

“RRRRIIIIINNNNGGG BING BING BING BOOOUUP BOOOOUUP”

I was so deep in thought when it hit that I had no idea how much I had bet or what I had actually won. I was confused and bedazzled by the machine as it flashed and chimed. For half an hour, it yelped and beeped and danced with colors and lights.
The whole ordeal of getting my winnings took a little under a year. They only gave me ten grand on my way out of the casino, and I was told that I was to receive the rest of the winnings over the next year.
Even though I had wizened up enough to keep my mouth shut about my far-left agenda and my contempt for society, the name Jungle Jim never went away at my job. It was an on-going joke that one day I was gonna get so fed up that I was gonna end up living in a jungle somewhere as a savage. It was irony or destiny or it was something but that’s just what I did.
I went and I lived in the jungle.
I would find a quiet spot where my money would go far, where there would be no more movements and no more disappointing relationships. No more crushed dreams and apathetic eyes. No more processed foods and boxed-in ways of thinking. There’s was just one thing left to do.
All life’s choices can be distilled down to either a brave choice or a cowardly choice.
On my way out of my last shift at the grocery store, I exited by detouring through Sophia’s checkout line. I handed her a letter and dashed away in a hurry, and I never saw her again.
Did she open the letter? I hope not, but probably so, if she did it would have read:
“I finally found the words to tell you I love you, good-bye.”
Struck by lightning, that’s how I felt when I had earned my precious fortune at the casino the previous year. The captain’s voice blurted over the intercom and tried to reassure the passengers and myself our guaranteed safety. He told us that the left engine that had erupted into a cauldron of shrieking white fury had less of a chance of exploding than the plane had of being struck by lightning, which happened immediately after he spoke. The captain retracted his previous statement to clarify what he had meant. The captain said, “We are all going to die!”
Maybe part of my subconscious had realized I was destined for greater things and that I was to survive the ordeal because I was completely dispassionate and calm as the plane violently roared towards the dense jungle below.
The cabin rocked noisily and jerked back and forth. My calmness did not last long though. Fear set in but I had also become excited, sexually.
“This is life!” I thought. I had never felt as alive as I did that day, in retrospect.
I quickly climbed over piles of scattered luggage and splattered food trays, and slipped on a greasy cheese thing. I was determined to go down with a bang. I headed toward first class searching for some company, and people with money were usually hotter than those without. I pulled back the blue fruit punch-stained curtains, I remember thinking of clever last words but being at a complete loss.
There she was, a breathtaking golden-haired angel, clad in a snow-white sundress. She was sitting with her back to the window and her arms round her legs rocking back and forth and crying. I had seen enough. I climbed with all of my might toward her while the plane was leveling out at a forty-degree angle. When I finally made it to her, she paid no attention to my arrival, her face was pale and her eyes stared through me. I found the perfect last words just then, an answer for everything. I noticed the smell of feces as I neared the damsel. Looking down, I saw a little brown stain on her white sundress and realized the smell was because she had emptied her faulties. “Gross!”
She didn’t hear me.
I couldn’t have found better last words if I had an entire lifetime to decide. It is very unfortunate that those weren’t my last.
I missed my arm and eye immediately; I felt that I was now a horrible disfigured monster that could no longer compete genetically with the rest of the free world. My idea of being a one-man force of nature that could combat and harness the powers of every element at my disposal had died “Me? Me of all people!?” I sobbed, “This could not happen to me!” I would have screamed out-loud if I could, “Something is wrong!” I wanted proof of God so that I might take my grievance to the bastard and rub his nose in it. I wanted to demand from him that there must have been some mistake and that he was obligated to correct it.
Near to and looking over the grim and gaping display of twisted metal and the charred andn bent cadavers of folks of every sort sat our tepee. It could not have been any closer to the quicksand that the plane rested on as it was treacherous.
I learned that the solid soil in that part of the jungle was rare. I also learned that I was surrounded by the same quicksand the plane had impaled. For miles and miles, there were thick mahogany woods, horned bushes, and many creeks and rivers, all of which were founded in or surrounded by brown and gray quicksand. I was on a mound of blush-brick bare clay earth that bore what was left of me from the quicksand. The mound was approximately one-half acre in diameter and almost perfectly oval, nothing grew in the brumal clay, though vivacious green roots scanned its sides. No matter how hot and muggy the jungle made the day, you could always burry your feet in the cool chilled earth for some relief if you felt up to the digging, I miss that. The tepee was disappointing and lacked any aesthetic appeal to me in the sense that it looked exactly like—down to the colorful hand paintings of horses and the animal skin it was made of—what I would have expected a tepee to look like, and it even had a dream catcher in it.
The first few days in the jungle was only a formless memory because of the intense pain the cauterization of my wounds entailed. I vaguely remember the burning in my throat from the steaming hot liquids that were routinely being forced down it. It’s funny how I am barely able to recall the memory of the pleasing sounds that were produced by the birds of paradise that surrounded me during those arduous first few days. I have no memory of the gamboling birds that crooned ardently to one another for a chance to procreate and the mating dances they would instinctively perform, which I would later grow to love and even fancy, at lolling times of delight that the birds existed purely and only for my own personal entertainment. I was aloof to the gorgeous scenery of lush nodding trees that swayed passively in the confused gold and green wilderness. I paid no mind to the trickle of the tropical breeze that caressed the leaves of the trees that surrounded and protected our mound; trees that bore a dozen different tropical fruits that would soon become a staple in my diet. The crimson velvet passion flowers danced waiting for my caretakers and me to make tea with, and the emerald suede pineapple guava berries hung heavily, but not with despair, and all to my complete ignorance. The only memory I can now recall vividly from those early days of disaffiliation with the ending world, save for the constant stone-smell of rain was the malady I endured from my infected wounds. Even in my subconscious, I focused entirely on the prominence of pain and not the subtleties of beauty; it is in my nature to make these terminal mistakes
“Feubr auury – Ferary – Februauuruuy – Fregrehairy.” I coughed. My caretakers had been away for too long. I was beginning to worry about everything. It was a cool jungle night. I lay in the tepee helplessly, and my mouth was like fly paper that only ever knew moisture in the form of vinegar carelessly spilt on it longer ago that anyone remembered. I figured it was the month of February and was near my birthday. I also guessed that I had been lying in that tepee for a month or so since I had ridden in the airplane mid-January.
For no reason in particular, I chose a tongue-twisting word to start learning how to speak again. I chose a word that I had never had very much luck pronouncing properly even at my physical and mental peak as my very first word to conquer the road to being able to explain to the real people of the real world that they are in fact disfigured and should be so lucky to experience such a unique way of existing.

A plan began to hatch in my mind for what I would do if ever I made it home. I obsessed on the thought and plotted out every possible scenario. I was terribly worried about the money I had won from the casino. My heart sank when I realized my pants and luggage with all my wordly belongings were missing and that I had been clad in a rag that resembled a loin cloth. I could not truly rest until I knew what had become of the money. If I still had money (if it was no more, I would be no more, it was decided), I would make it home anyway possible and do whatever I could to fit into society and to make more money (happiness) and to live a normal life. I was no longer picky and reserved about selling out artistically, professionally or culturally. I was ready to drop any moral that may prevent me from having a normal, maybe even moderately successful life in a heartbeat to anyone who would give me (a cripple like me) a chance at fitting in. I thought half in a coma of agony, “I’ll settle with not being noticed. I’ll play covers in a cover band. I’ll work forever, I’ll marry someone safe and with money.
It had been since the previous morning that I had seen my caretakers, and it was now late in the afternoon of the next day. It was hot and damp. The gnats had made their presence permanent in my life and were getting the very best of me in my weakened state. I could no longer ignore the weak signal of the urgent and violent spasms of pain that my shrinking stomach was sending to my unreceptive brain.
“Where were they?” I thought. “What were they going to do next?” I had no idea what those two mysterous men were capable of and didn’t want to find out. I had begun to think they were nursing me back to life in order to sell me as a one-armed one-eyed gimp slave. I settled in my mind with the conclusion that they were planning to ransom me for money using bits of my remaining body as leverage for their sick scheme until their shallow demands were met. I had been wearing very nice clothes when I first arrived, I could have been thought to have been rich or important by the Indians who stole me from my grave. Most of my tan suede jacket had melted to the remnants of my right arm, and my shoes, which were squared at the front, had disappeared into the murky jasmine green jungle or perhaps into the quicksand. The only article of clothing that remained from my old life, though burnt and tattered, was my 99% solidarity rag from the social justice movement that betrayed me. It seemed that my caretakers had rescued it with me and had wrapped it around my head as an eye patch.
The flap of the tepee had been left open. I peered out past the curtain of fruit trees that shrouded our mound of clay. I could see the husk of the plane and noticed that it was actually sinking. The left wing of the plane that recently extended; from my stationary view, the height of the bottom branches of the tree line it rested in front of had clearly sunk to be level with the tallest horned bushes it was near. It didn’t take long for the plane to disappear altogether, which was nice. The air smelled better, and the scenery was much more pleasant to witness, though little parts of debris remained scattered here and there, along with broken gnarled trees and blackened boulders, it was definitely quite an improvement. As the plane disappeared, I could see there was a cabin nearby that had been claimed by the vines from the trees and the jungle floor. Without any more thought to what the Idians might do to me if or when they might return, I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Waking and seeing what the Indians were doing I yelled out, “You FOOLS!” . “ Don’t you know what that is? ” “Don’t you know what you’re doing, that’s a Federal crime!” I stood up for the first time since the crash and made an attempt at a mad dash but failed when my legs gave way. I fell at the Indians two nfeet begging. The final nail through the coffin was struck, life was over. I yelled, pouted, pleaded, I cried for mercy and begged for compassion. I promised the hunters more money than the amount of the remaining cash they had not used as fuel to entice the dwindling campfire to stop. Ninety thousand dollars really made that fire dance.
The Indians had apparently returned sometime during the day from a journey to the hunting grounds. It was the engaging smell of roasted jungle opossum the hunters were preparing that begged me awake. My caretakers would later explain to me that they knew a way through the mud and where to hunt and that they would climb down the reaching arms of the jungle that bore us the fruit for our feast. Then they would lead each other down to a hidden, treacherous path of solid clay and mud, where they had set up a sort of a balancing zip line of tree vines that hovered over the path; they would use this to steady their delicate footing on the unsafe road to the hunting grounds.
There was nothing to continue; no life or love to look forward to. Anything that enticed one of my bodily senses to function was a curse. “Kill me,” I thought. My body was in ruins, my fortune disintegrated, and my ego in tatters. Even a monotonous, prescription drug —induced slavery sounded like the Promised Land to me at that point.
Not even blind and raging blame could comfort me anymore (though it certainly works for me now). I could no longer lock myself away in a fragile shell of confusion. Distaste did nothing to promote any comfort in my mind. I was a tree, the grass, the breeze, the gnats surrounding my face, a spectator with no flesh or bounds of selfish goals and with nothing to be selfish for. I had no presumptions about what life needed to be or what I rightfully deserved.
I lay still at the feet of those two awesome, dark, strangers, with their eyes smiling and imploring mine to see the love they were trying to share. They reached out a long steady arm each and with their firm rugged hands sat me on a log. The older looking one, Shooshi, while laughing, reached out one of his massive hands to shake. I would have returned the gesture if I had a hand to give. He had deliberately gone for my missing arm. When he saw that I was unable to shake, he pulled away quickly and pointed at me with his tree-branch finger, shot a contagious smile at me that grew steadily across his churlish old face, and said “Gotcha!” followed by the disruptive laughter of both men.
Takumat gave me a red clay plate with many tender cuts of jungle opossum; they gave me the butt piece and the legs. The dish was garnished with passionflowers and scattered pineapple guava berries. Takumat poured for me in a clay goblet what I began to fondly call “jungle juice.”
He handed it to me and said, “Do not keep too sober a state of mind Jim, you risk finding God.”
The liquid Takumat gave me was surely a wine made of the bounty of the collected fruits that rained daily onto our mound from the encompassing arms of our tree protectors. The smell of fermenting fruits was never absent from the heavy air, and there were always flies buzzing about but was worth the inconveniences because the wine actually tasted great and was exactly what I needed to cope with whatever hell life is or is trying to be.
I began to speak with my rescuers for the very first time—which I called that night and now my guardian angels—over my first solid meal in over a month as all three of us tossed the jug about and heartily drank to each other’s health. What luck to drink with company. It made no sense to me, and still doesn’t - to discover that both men spoke a great deal more than just broken bits and pieces of English like I had first thought.
Though there was an exceptional language barrier between my friends and I at times, both men were highly intellectual beings and seemed to understand everything I said. Sometimes they would speak to one another in a foreign tongue that I could not understand, and other times they would operate in what I called “grunt mode,” acting like cavemen in speech and body language.
Sometimes my caretakers would speak like an immigrant who had just learned English, but what I found that makes no sense at all is that whenever Shooshi or Takumat would express their philosophies or speak broader concepts with more than just a few words, both of their accents changed from being deep tribal grumbles to having a familiar and soft western accent. I never asked for an explanation for why they spoke my language even better than I did at times. I was done questioning every little thing that made no sense, which was the greatest relief I have ever known. I did wonder what was in that cabin though…
Within two or three generous swigs of jungle juice, my caretakers and I were laughing hysterically and giving cheers. I told them both how much I truly loved them and begged for their forgiveness. I called them saints for having mended a poor old wretch like me back to such a standard of health; they only laughed at me and begged of me to sing. They had shown interest in what they called my “craft” after hearing my explanation of wanting to be a singer in my old life. I told them that if I ever made it back, I would try my hardest at it and would do whatever it may take to make it as a singer. It took a great deal of begging and pleading and jungle juice for them to get me to sing my song. I told them it was called Shed A Tear.

Beg your pardon,
I wasn’t listening.
All the horror
Of the things I’ve seen
I think I know what to fear
It’s the end shed a tear

I was surprised to hear the lightness of my voice in all of its strength. My voice had never sounded so rich to me before. It must have been the lack of smoking and the passionflower tea or the building confidence and security I was beginning to find in the presence of my new friends. I could see in the eyes of my guardians that my song was captivating to them. They seemed eager to hear each word. I could hear every part in my head, the lamenting cello, a bellowing but careful bass, and the weeping of a viola. I could hear an entire symphony building through each phrase, and I am sure that they heard it to. I cleared my throat and continued.

I’m a monster and so are you
We’ve done more than
We could ever undo
I think I know what to fear
It’s the end
Shed a tear
I loved the hunt
Now I’m on the run
They’ll have my head for
The things I’ve done
I think I know what to fear
It’s the end shed a tear.

I held the last note and let it fade with my slowing vibrato into infinity to become some other, never-resting form of energy. A tear swelled from my eye. I tried to blink it away, but I began to cry uncontrollably. My friends held me with open and loving arms. I felt as though I had released all of my negative energy and harmful thoughts to the world. No longer was there a bitter taste to life; it had been replaced with a pallet for all of the flavors the world had in store for me.
A new boundless respect and appreciation for life and my ability to still be a part of it, whatever I looked like, was born that day through the grace and respect of two absolute strangers. It is incredibly embarrassing to revisit this memory now, but that night I drunkenly cried and begged for Shooshi to share the answer of being content and happy with me for he seemed to have all the answers that I, as an exploited-from-birth westerner, was without.
The old man told me, “A truly cursed life is a life that believes that being content is being happy, Jim.”
I replied by saying that at least I was happier alive than I would have been dead. Without a word, I could tell that Shooshi disagreed. He put his hand over the shoulder of my good arm and looked out into the jungle at the last debris of wreckage and knocked over trees that the quicksand hadn’t swallowed.
He could see I was concerned with the sight. Shooshi smiled and said tenderly to me, “Death is true satisfaction, for you are no longer fruitlessly looking to be satisfied, Jim.”
Every time the man opened his mouth, he seemed to have some ancient wisdom for me that would provide days of philosophical reflection for my restless but occupied mind.
Shooshi continued by saying, “I do believe you will be happier here than you could remember being in the short amount of time we have together Jim, for man is at his best when he is surviving and at his worst when he is thriving.”
Tears came rushing back and choked me at that moment. I felt a heavy lump in my throat that could have been my heart trying to leap out of my mouth. I swallowed hard and forced the advancing ball to retreat. I nodded my head as I wept to show Shooshi that I had understood his meaning, again my friends embraced me.
I loved my new companions. I loved our jungle. I felt baptized in holy water and washed clean of the scornful mind that had been nothing but a curse and a weight against my soul. I was reborn.

Shooshi and Takumat were father and son. Takumat was a tall brown-skinned man who appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He wore a decorative auburn loincloth, as did I, and a necklace of what looked like assorted animal teeth. His hair was black and straight like his father’s. Takumat’s carved and painted face paid homage to his father’s stern and postured but warm and caring features that brilliantly spoke silent compassion and patience toward man, plant, animal, and earth while fearlessly abstaining from embracing any of these things. Shooshi’s brow was carved with lines of kindness and ridges of honesty and deep thought.
His hair was the white of a cloud, but his skin still glowed with a radiance like that of an adolescent boy even though he was an ancient and gaseous old man and had to have been at least three times my age. Both men were tyrannically strong looking and magnificent to behold to someone who came from a world inhabited mostly by lumpy misshapen dumpling people. Both men were also permanently cross-eyed. (Just before I stopped watching television, I saw a special on the geography channel about how certain indigenous native Indian jungle tribes were cross-eyed.
They said it was because of how close the Indians were to the trees their whole lives, which never gave their eyes a horizon to straighten out on. I think those were the decedents of the ones who prophesized that the world would end that year.) Shooshi and Takumat both had enormous white stone lip piercings that elongated their pronounced lips passed their chins. They were my only friends in the world. I was utterly dependent on them for everything, from food and shelter to moral support. Also, the jungle juice was a great perk.
It wasn’t about me anymore. I felt so indebted for everything my companions had been doing for me and was pitiful over the fact that I could do slightly more than nothing to help add to our little community. I was a missing an arm, half blind, and incredibly out of my element in everything I did.
My friends never seemed to mind me or ever tried to make me feel guilty for eating too much anteater stew or drinking too much jungle juice. They simply laughed and drank and ate with me merrily. They humbled my soul more in a few days than society had ever galvanized it during my whole life. I asked Takumat why it was that he and his father decided to save me, but each time he would answer with what I thought to be mystic nonsense,
“You save man, Jim.” His dad would always agree with a nod and with a piercing look in his crossed eyes, “Man start real world, Jim. Man must lose his treasure to gain his fortune.”
Shooshi left early in the morning to collect all of the necessary herbs and fruits needed to make more jungle juice, and I felt awful that the journey was only necessary because I alone had drained our entire one-liter red clay jug the night before of all of its juice, though I had no regrets of dancing and singing all night long with my friends. When I awoke that morning, I was feeling exhausted and belligerently hungover. My head throbbed and my bones creaked with weariness. I felt the need to hydrate and to try again. Maybe my headache would be cured if I crawled into the water, or, I thought, maybe a better cure would be crawling into the quicksand head first. I stooped to the flap of the tepee and opened it. I was blasted with concrete pain to my head, which was caused by the ebullient light that poured from the absence of the flap of animal hide. There was no shaking the morning malaise.

I woke up late in the night to the sound of metal striking the earth. I could hear old Shooshi grunting and his heavy breaths after each strike on the hard cold clay. I climbed out of the tepee to investigate what my brothers were doing in the night, maybe I could help I thought.
Just beyond the fire pit near the monkey puzzle tree, I beheld Shooshi and Takumat digging with metal makeshift spades that were crumpled and shaped wrong for the job. They were fastened to a couple of broken mahogany branches, which must have been retrieved from the remains of the wreckage, a very brave feat.
I overheard the pair speaking in their native tongues, it was beautiful.
“Ha-se-shoosh-acha-hopa-meena-mow!” said Shooshi. It was the most serious look I had ever seen the man give. He stared into what looked like to me forever and eternity. What he was seeing despite of the murky dark jungle before his dreaming eyes, I still do not know.
“Uh-huh-buh-bub-uba-ticky-monaheliapah?” Takumat had a nervous sounding tone to his voice that I had never heard before. He was always such a picture of courage, I thought.
Shooshi laid an earnest glance unto Takumat, chuckled affectionately, and gently rubbed the hair on his son’s head and said,
“Put! Puhna-poka-peka-leef.” What had seemed like tension to me smoothed into a loving and encouraged laugh that belted from deep within the bellies of both of men. I pretended like I understood what they were talking about and approached my friends laughing.
I asked Shooshi what they were doing, digging a hole with rather lousy tools in the dead of night and with the sun threatening to rise so soon. They did not answer. I asked if I could help them dig, they laughed and told me to sit and to drink the dew from the flowers hanging above and to eat their fruit and that I could sing for them if I wanted to help. I decided to just watch. After a while, I asked again what the purpose of all of this was. Shooshi answered me,
“It time to start real world, Jim.”
“Who’s starting the real world?”
“You, Jim.”
“And you too?”
“We here for you.”
“What’s happening to this world?”
“It served purpose, it finish teach lesson, Jim. This world prepares man for real world, all this world build to one perfection. We need to keep digging Uhhg-Ook! Not very much time now, come Takumat, taareepa-noko-knokokomaulohow! Dig fast”
With that, he turned his back on me and continued digging, making painstakingly slow amounts of progress for the hardened clay was unyielding. I had a week to think about what Shooshi’s real meaning was and to reflect on my visit to the jungle that felt like a lifetime but, (it was probably only a few months at the very most).
“Me? Starting the real world? Yes of course…” I thought. These men must be prophets and me the messiah. The world could really be ending as I had already concluded before my ascension to my brand-new healing state of mine. “Those guys know something that I don’t, I am certain of it,” I thought. And I also started to think that I was right to turn my back on mankind, to seek my higher destiny, to find a better life for myself, and to find a perfect world as I so often dreamed of and knew was possible. Something big was about to happen, and I had inside information on it. I would escape the fate of running around idiotically in terror for my life as the end of times swallowed everyone whole.

When the week was up, we shared what I now call in my memory “The Last Supper.” The boys had claimed a family of monkeys hunting that day. We roasted them from the early afternoon till the late evening. I had a vicious appetite that had been tormented all day long by the intoxicating aroma of the roasting monkeys. I ate the baby monkey, which had the greatest flavor of any piece of meat I had ever enjoyed. They laughed and called me cruel for not eating the older monkeys. I joked back that I enjoyed eating baby meat because it was as though I could taste the stolen life that at least their tender little muscles were acutely aware of wanting to live. Takumat accused me of being insensitive and called me a disgrace to our family unit and told me that he and his father should have left me in the plane to die. Shooshi added by saying:
“And we would have been glad to; you were covered from head to toe in your own shit Jim.”
They both exploded into laughter, I felt my face turn red and I came back with:
“It was quicksand!”
We laughed for hours over anything; the night seemed unstoppable. They had such great senses of humor.
After much drinking, eating, dancing, and laughing, the mood suddenly became quite sober despite my spinning head. Shooshi cleared his throat, wiped the monkey fat from his chin, burped melodically, smiled, and said,
“It time to start real world, Jim.”
I agreed enthusiastically and then asked if I could help clean up the mess our feasting had left.
Shooshi continued.
“You left for jungle to find better world. You are ready to start better world, you have learned, you are man, ready to be perfect.”
To add to the drama of whatever the hell he was talking about, Shooshi clasped his fist in the air and pulled an arm back rapidly that had been rising open handed the entire duration of those near final words he spoke; the animated dangling skin from under his still strong bicep flapped to and fro as he returned to his normal slightly bowed posture. I agreed with Shooshi that I had felt ready to start a new world for myself but told him that my plans had changed.
“No plans, Jim. Please, get in the hole.”
With a slow wave of his wrinkled hand, he pointed toward the hole that he and Takumat had been slaving away at for over a week.
“You want me to get in the hole?”
“Yes, Jim.”
“To start the new world?”
“Yes.”
“You are crazy, Shooshi.” but I climbed in the hole. I would have done anything for those guys; it’s not like they would have buried me alive (I thought), and even if they did choose to it bury me, it would have been their right. My life was always in their hands.
It was cold, but the night was warm, so the clay hole felt icy in contrast to the humid night heat. Goose pimples pricked my skin as I finished climbing in, and I began to shiver. I looked up at the night sky; there was not a single cloud, just countless stars twinkling for my delight. I was in the ground up to just past my elbow. My friends looked down on me smiling and laughed warmly. A mosquito bit me on the chin.
It was then that I felt the hole shift and start to constrict around me. It pinned my arm and legs and rendered them useless. I became stuck. Takumat told me to look at myself during my panic and to be amazed. I was nothing short of amazed when I looked down at the portion of my body that had not been gripped and swallowed by the clammy earth. I noticed that I was self-illuminated; my whole body was glowing with bright golden light. The light started by creeping out of my torso and then exploding out of my face. I tried to scream but only let out light. It was like a visual noise that was to be heard by everyone within the hemisphere. A noise that came from only me, shining like a spotlight from the swallowing hole in the earth, all the way out of the jungle, into the outer space, without ever dwindling or loosing radiance.
Fear struck me as hard as the clay that tightened around my chest and pulled me further into it. My heart was racing, I continued trying to call for help, nothing left my lips but more blinding light. My companions were bowed on the ground praying and paying no attention to me. “What did they do to me?” I thought as tears formed, and as if Shooshi heard my thoughts, he spoke his last words to me. “Do not be too important to lose yourself, Jim.”
Slowly I sunk into the ground; it seemed like an eternity of uncertainty and frightfulness. My head was the only thing above ground at the point when I looked up and gazed straight into the sky. It was then that my eye caught what looked to be parachutes floating above. I heard an airplane race overhead and doubtfully thought “I’m saved.” I sank a little more; my mouth was silenced by the clay. It was the last time I would see my caretakers as I remembered them, my friends who dug my grave then kissed the top my head that was still clear of debris and sealed my fate with a crown of mud.
I remembered days in the old world where I would wake, sometimes even in my own bed, totally confused with no recollection to where I came from, who I was, or where I was. Sometimes in those very brief confused moments, I would even forget that I was a person and what people were. I was having that feeling again when I awoke, and I was not in a tomb; however, it didn’t fade away in an instance by a reassuring glimpse of a familiar desk or messy pile of laundry. I was unable to spy anything that might give me a hint as to where I might have ended up.
I was shocked and ecstatic to behold with two eyes that I had both my arms again. My skin glittered gold, and I was surrounded in an atmosphere of light that followed me as my aura throughout my entire stay in the new world I had arrived in. I felt no pain either - one of the very first things I noticed, and the constant heartburn that was a festering and burning inflammation in my chest that was a result of my poor diet and chosen vices was gone altogether. I tested my new eyesight by observing the thick and massive jungle I had somehow found my way to.
There were trees. Awesome trees that stretched from the rich earth upward as far as my new sharpened eyes could see. Each tree bore what seemed to be unlimited amounts of fruit of all different hues, shapes, and sizes, making each boundlessly colorful and was an immense pleasure to witness. Any plant I could tug out of the earth would be attached to a vegetable, some vegetables would be thick and meaty unlike anything I had ever seen, some of those new sorts of veggies would even taste like poultry or roast lamb, and no two pieces of fruit or veggies ever tasted the same as the last. Food could not taste bad, though I later discovered that I didn’t need to eat.
There were animals everywhere of every specie and genus, including many new animals I had never seen before. I called them dinosaurs, but you wouldn’t have guessed by how docile they were. I met a tyrannosaurus that day.
I was helping myself from the warm sunbathed earth and examining the hole that birthed me to a brand-new utopia when the ground began to shake violently. I rose and braced for whatever the catch had to be to live in such beauty in one golden piece. My heart was filled with terror to find that the pounding was coming from a fifty-foot tall, twenty-foot wide, big blue stupid dinosaur..
The monster had its tongue hanging out one side of his mouth and was galloping over thick masses of peaceful animals. Even though the beast seemed clumsy and terrible, he failed to make chunky animal pulp on the jungle floor as he stormed toward me. In fact, Billy seemed to be going at a slightly slower pace as he neared the massive group of animals that were beginning to assemble around me and as the crowd thickened, Billy practically tiptoed over the other creatures.
The brute knocked down a younger tree as he exploded into my proximity. “This is it,” I thought. “I have been sent back to the Stone Age, and now I am going to be eaten by a dinosaur.” At least I had yet to stare a potentially uninteresting death in the face. I could be grateful for that.
To my relief, Billy did not eat me, and instead, with the massive purple tongue that had been dangling out of his mouth, Billy gave me a hot slobbery dinosaur-sized welcoming lick, which started from my feet and ended at my head. It was so powerful that I ended up doing a backflip as a result and landed on my face.
Again, I bounced back onto my feet. I looked out at the masses of varied critters and insects that had surrounded me. The birds blackened the trees with their masses. There were ferrets, fish, dogs, sheep, deer, mammoths, marmots, raptors, boars, and turtles. There were alligators, stegosauruses, spiders, slugs, bugs, and bees, all unalike one another but peaceably assembled nonetheless, for there was no need to fight in a world where no one had to worry about hunger.
I felt like they may have wanted me to say something. I cleared my throat and spoke sheepishly.
“Hi, hello, creatures of paradise.”
None seemed to understand, I continued.
“I am man.”
“I will do you no harm.”
Still there was no reaction from the mass. I kept on with even more strength in my voice and thought that I needed to try harder. I felt that my presence grew with each word.
“I am your friend, animals and nature. Though mankind can be nasty sometimes, have no fear, I am mankind now, I am humanity, and I am good, I am a moral man, I am incorruptible.”
Again, no animal seemed to understand, and the crowd had begun to thin out, they had come to see what all the fuss was about, as I’m sure my entrance had been as dramatic as my exit from the old world.
Billy, however, hung around as my shadow for a while. He seemed to be the most curious of all the animals, or at least the friendliest. Billy quickly became my companion and means of exploring the new world. I would ride on his back for days scouring the earth for adventure and trying to take in all of its beauty.
There were more than just jungles in paradise, and everything I saw was of extreme proportions. When the jungle opened up into a salmon dessert, I saw the sky for the first time. In the hanging sky, there were massive rolling silver and golden clouds that were touched lightly with puerile shades of tangerine shadows. In the dessert, I found decrial florescent cacti that scraped the sky and observed some of those cacti being trampled by gargantuan, clear-haired dessert mammoths. In the marshlands, I saw electric gators that dwarfed the highways of the old world. Billy was terrified of the creatures.
Billy and I found bluewood forests that spanned the size of the entire planet I had left behind. I used to lay in the forest and watch the sun dust speckles sparkle and fall into the tall grassy metropolis while I listened in wonder to the closest thing I had to real music, which was the song of the carrot snakes and the ant lion moles. I named the creatures “carrot snakes” because they were orange in color and had swollen big heads that progressively thinned out to a pencil lead tail. The creatures would sit at the forest floor and vomit their neon-green insides out that I thought resembled the greens atop a carrot and wait for insects to stick to their trap; the insects were attracted to the snake’s florescent green guts and their beautiful, sad, wailing alto tones that seemed a bigger sound than what the tiny creatures could produce. The lamenting cry reminded me of thea sound an Indian flute would create. The carrot snakes would sing in harmony with the deep voices of the ant lion moles that sounded to me like an incredibly deep trumpet, like a sad laugh.
Sometimes I would leave Billy behind and try to climb the tallest mountains I could find (which were always endlessly larger than even the largest mountains of old) but would lose interest after a day’s hike. The oceans were the only thing that had not seemed to be any larger or greater, for even in the old world, they seemed immeasurable and incessantly deep.
“I will always return to the jungle.” I told myself in my mind that it was because that’s where Billy was most comfortable, but I knew inside why I made the jungle my home. I never wanted to be too far away from or to be gone too long from the hole. Besides, I am Jungle Jim.
“Where is God?” I began to wonder. Incredible prophecies being fulfilled planted a seed in my restless mind that grew to think that there might actually be a God and that I was to meet him if this was in fact paradise.
During my scouring of the new earth, I had kept an eye out for anything that might have resembled marijuana or tobacco with no luck. I began to look for plants that could produce drugs I didn’t even prefer and was formerly against. The goal was to get high, whatever that meant. None of the colossal fungi that I encountered on one of my increasingly boring adventures had any psychoactive properties at all or would even make me sick for eating. I tried to make alcohol in many failed attempts. I should have learned more about that while I was still bound to the fate of the old world. I reflected on this for a lifetime.
It had been what felt like over a year and I had not been sick at all. My health was never changing. I never felt energetic or fatigued; pain and pleasure were both distant memories for me. I had an idea of perfection feeling like a great orgasm that never left or weakened in intensity and was disappointed to feel nothing. I could hardly even get a hard-on most of the time. I at least thought that my body would have become mighty and muscular, but my muscles were just a little stronger than they had been in the old world, nowhere near as sturdy as I had hoped. I began to become bored. It took me a year to admit my boredom in my own mind.
“What is my purpose in this new world? What is the purpose of this world at all?” I thought as I was strolling through the jungle and entranced in deep brooding thought. It was then that suddenly a baby bird that had prematurely attempted to leave the security of its mother's nest fell in front of my feet. “That’s it!” I had an epiphany. “I should live my life,” I thought, “for the animals, for nature. I guess that I am God, and it is my duty to make this world even better, to see what man could have done if he were completely selfless.” I lifted the otherwise doomed mortal baby bird from the jungle floor and returned it to its home for a second chance at life.
Billy and I took off into the wilderness to go see what animals we could help. The first animal in distress we came across was a red and black zebra that we found during our flight through the fluorescent, cinnamon-magenta grasslands. The poor beast was suffering from a broken leg after a tumultuous fall off a hill it was mindlessly grazing on.
I jumped off Billy’s big blue back to the rescue. I reached into my social services sack and retrieved some rope I had gathered and a few bits of wood to make a splint for the injured quadruped. The thing did not seem to care that it had been saved from its luckless fate or to even notice the pain it must have suffered. The ungrateful animal continued to graze without a thought in the world of its new fortune. After being a little disheartened by the experience, I decided to go home and thought “Maybe I’ll just focus on all of the animals that live near home, just the animals by the hole.
On our way back from the grasslands, I came across a community of coal-black beavers who had been struggling to complete a dam that they had been building seemingly out of their means and capabilities. It wasn’t hard to see that the project was only moments away from failing. Once again, I left Billy in his tracks and came charging to the rescue of my little furry friends.
It was a permanent day that time of year. The only change in the sky was in its color; it was dark green that day and was hard to the tell time, though I believe that I worked for two days straight on the dam, chopping down trees, hacking, sawing, and lugging huge heavy logs around. The more I did to contribute to completing the dam, the less the beavers helped. On top of my methods of building being too sophisticated for a beaver, it was also unnecessary that they lend a hand simply because it was being taken care of for them nor did I want them to help; my labor was my gift to them.
As I packed up to leave after completing the best dam the new world had ever seen, I looked for some appreciation from the beavers and once again found no gratitude. Immediately after I finished blocking the great river, the beavers had seemed to forget that I was even there and carried on with their busy beaver ways without a pause.
When I was new to paradise, I made it a point to keep the hole at least out of sight from my tepee and deliberately built the thing a few hundred feet away and facing toward the east. The day I returned from building the dam, I turned it to the west. (My friends Shooshi and Takumat had taught me how to build my very own tepee in preparation for the real world. If I had known what the hell they were talking about, I would have asked about the jungle juice.)
Soon my visits to the hole would become more and more frequent, and my tepee slowly migrated to be within sight of it. After returning from another disappointing day of social services, I went back home to ponder happiness and why, now that I lived in paradise, it had constantly eluded me. I had begun to feel, (if it could be called feeling) that I was growing increasingly unhappy, and the bitterness that I had thought that I shed during my rebirth had slowly progressed from being just a cameo in the freak show that is my life to becoming a type-casted character in the act. Upon nearing my tepee, I passed the hole on my path. I got about two steps past the chasm when I heard music and what I thought to be human voices in harmony and what I hoped to be God so that I could demand an answer for all of this nonsense.
I turned around slowly, kneeled to the earth, pressed my chest against the cool mossy jungle floor, and slowly crawled up to the hole. I was closer to it than I had ever allowed myself to be. My head hung over the darkness and I asked into the void, “Is that you, God?” I listened desperately for an answer. I had decided that I had heard nothing and that I was probably starting to go insane, but the moment I returned to my feet, I heard music for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
“Do-do-do-do” the guitar went “do-do-do-do.” How pretty it sounded, what keen notes to play together in succession at such a tempo, I thought. The song seemed to remind my brain which failed to relay to my soul of a beautiful emotion I had long forgot. My head wanted to cry but my heart could not. I didn’t remember ever hearing the tune before, from what I could hear, it went like this:

Too far along to educate
And I’ll smile when
They dig my grave
And I’m happy
The world ain’t so bad
Lament, repent
There’s always a consequence
And I’m sad
The world don’t make no sense
I’ve been doing what
I’ve been told
And it’s been a long time
Since I’ve told you so
But I’m scared
I think we should turn back

I collapsed to my knees and lay on my back next to the hole, feeling an urgency to cry the tears that had begun to sting. My tunnel vision let out into the starry purple sky. I dangled my head over the hole once again.

Though I think I know what I mean
The world remains a mystery
It is not at all nonsense
That I cannot seem to climb a fence
I’m sorry I live too fast
I’m sorry nothing lasts.

The music broke. The guitar riff from the beginning of the tune repeated as blamelessly as it had before and lead into the second chorus that roared with a longing despondency that besieged my mind and attacked it ruthlessly, pleading for me to let fall the tears that my eyes had failed to create, into the dark endless hole my head had been dangling over.

Too far along to educate
And I will live to see the day
That I pay for everything I take
Lament, repent
I cannot face the consequence
I can change, yeah
Oh lord, I’ll change
I’ve been doing what
I’ve been told
And these chains I wear
Make me cold
I can’t fake it
Fake a smile today
Though I think I know what I mean
The world remains a mystery
It is not at all nonsense
That I cannot seem to climb a fence
I’m sorry I live too fast
I’m sorry nothing lasts.

The hole had reminded me of what I was truly passionate for in life, and that passion was for music and art and expression, of all of the things I longed for, a guitar, a collection of records, and a pen and paper trumped all. More than the love of a woman, more than the comfort of a bottle, and even more than a lungful of smoke, my heart longed for music.
I wanted to feel what the person that the unknown voice belonged to felt. I wanted to live in a world where nothing could last. I reminisced over the times I was able to feel what he must have felt when those words found his sore heart; I longed to revisit the sensation of what it is like to cry with despair. I tried to think of Sophia, to try to inspire emotion into my neither tender nor callused heart, but not even that helped. I could feel but was unable to retain the intense emotion that the song invoked; I could only analytically render it brilliant. I was mankind, not humanity. Not god, not human.
I yelled into the hole at the voices that I was sure I had heard. My only answer was the echo of a voice that had become unfamiliar to me.
I wondered what I had heard, where the music had come from, and most of all, once again, if I was losing my mind. I expected to at any moment. After an hour of trying to make a connection with the people (or God ) in the hole, I gave up and retired to write in my tepee.
I never wanted to see another animal again in my life. All of my good intentions to help the animal kingdom had gone unnoticed and unrewarded. The only difference my actions had made in the animal's behavior was a kingdom-wide dependency on me to perform every service I could provide for them. I gave purely cosmetic services such as grooming, gathering massive amounts of food, and allowing critters to use me as transportation as a man does a horse. I maintained the bridges and dams and sick animals that I had helped to build, to secure, or to nurture.
Everywhere I turned, there were sheep bleating for a brushing, dogs barking for a game of fetch, bears awaiting massages. When I would choose to ignore the animals, they would protest the lack of social services by surrounding me crying for more. I became a recluse and eventually retired my social services sack and contemplated throwing it into the hole, instead, I threw it in the thorn-less bushes.
I had heard music, I would not forget. The hole inspired me to start writing songs again; however, it was almost impossible to find anything that might inspire me to write something that could even compare to the emotion I heard in the unknown song. There was nothing and no one to be mad at. There was no violence to disapprove of. There were no great love affairs to be had that might have spared for me a small glimmer of the enthusiasm I would need to create beauty or ugliness or something. I racked my mind for dirty secrets and contentious things (I hardly remembered any at that point) that might remind me of the ugliness of the old world that used to inspire art in my music for the brief time I made it.
My first attempt at writing a song was barbaric and frantic. I chose to write a song about the fabled murder of my grandfather at my grandmother’s hand. I remembered the day when my mother finally told me the whole story. I was seven. Until then, I had only known one small shred of information about my grandpa, and that was Grandma shot Grandpa. It was a dirty secret, and I was forbidden from speaking about it with the other kids at school. I remembered my mother explaining the details to me when I was a child as a child would have remembered it, for she was just a small child when it happened. The story goes:
My grandpa came home to his tiny tin trailer that housed his family of five, drunk again, and greeted my aunts with a smack to their tiny faces as an entrance. He found a pint of scotch he had drunkenly forgotten a few days before on the checkered counter of their five-foot by seven-foot kitchen and drained the bottle in a few greedy swigs, then he continued his toddler’s tantrum.
Things started to get out of hand when my Grandpa threatened my Grandma by saying that he would sell my aunts and “Kat” (my mother) as slaves to a third-world country. The two twirled in combat in the kitchen while my aunts and mother escaped to the neighbor’s yard to wait for the fight to blow over; however, the skirmish ended up climaxing to Grandma grabbing Grandpa’s old Mossberg 500 that lay under Grandpa’s side of their tiny twin-sized bed. Without another shout or scream, my Grandma, being made of distilled Irish-gypsy blood, squeezed the trigger her finger had been shivering against and peppered Grandpa, point-blank, in the chest with a volley of dark pellets. Within a few moments, my Grandpa drowned in his own blood and laid forever still on the yellow and white, blood-soaked linoleum.
The tragedy was not at its awful conclusion yet.
After Grandma shot Grandpa, she ran out of the trailer to find mom in the neighbor’s yard crying in confusion. During the breakdown, she was on repeat like a broken record saying,
“Here kitty, kitty. Here kitty, kitty. I did it, I did it, kitty, kitty,” - chasing my mom through the yard.
The words that came to mind went:

Grandma shot Grandpa
And what she said
And what she said was
What she said
What she said was
“Here kitty, kitty. Here kitty, kitty.”
She said,
“Here kitty, kitty. Here kitty, kitty.”
“I did it kitty, kitty. I did it kitty, kitty.”
She said,
“Here kitty, kitty. Here kitty, kitty.”
That’s what she said
Grandma shot Grandpa

Though I was happy with the lyrics, the song just wouldn’t be the same without the guitar line I had prepared for it in my head. Writing had begun to seem impossible for me in paradise, or at least not as easy as it had been when I was longing for paradise. It had become very frustrating to even entertain the idea of attempting my hand at a poem or song. I started to blame God (and still do), though I still didn’t buy that he existed. I went to sleep sadly, alone in my tepee, and dreamed of the hole and, like always, I dreamed of her, Sophia from the grocery store.
The next day, Billy and I left the jungle for the blue mountains of the north. Billy was never far from my side and would respond to a perfected whistle (like everything I did, I was perfection). He would come running from whatever part of the jungle he was at to come to bear me to whatever destination I saw fit.
I reflected on my friendship with Billy as he bore me to my destination. I had noticed throughout my travels that of all of the creatures I had met in paradise that Billy was the only tyrannosaurus and was the most humanlike animal in the whole utopia. He was a one of a kind. He seemed to feel more than the other animals did, sometimes more than I felt. I could call him a true friend.
Much to Billy’s disliking and worry, I was to spend what felt like a year, though was most likely much longer looking back on it, climbing the largest mountain I had found during my adventures.
Billy and I had finally reached the base of the great mountain. Before I set off to climb the vast blue wonder, I summoned Billy to lower his head so that I could give him a kiss good-bye, for I did not intend to return from this last voyage. I told Billy that I planned on killing myself and thanked him for being such a good companion. He wagged his tail in excitement and gave me a big dinosaur kiss that again ended with a face plant in the mud. I was fairly certain that I could not die, but I thought I’d give it my best shot. I could tell by Billy’s excited reaction that he didn’t understand my meaning; he simply continued to wag his big blue and yellow spotted tail lovingly and seemed to smile with unconstrained affection.
All the way up the mountain, I could see a tiny blue blob at the base of where it stood, the little blue blip never moved during my entire climb.
At first there was a lot of hiking. Though it was a steep trek, the path I spent the first few months on was never entirely vertical. I never lost stamina or became sore; there was food everywhere, though I still needed no sustenance to live (you couldn’t find a square mile in paradise that wasn’t without food whatever the elevation). Something good that came from the climb was a song I wrote that reinvigorated my hopes to continue to be a songwriter. The song popped into my head from nowhere; it became an obsession to make every word perfect. I must have rewritten it as I hiked over a thousand times. Looking back, the lyrics were mediocre and angst driven.
Toward the last month of the climb, it had finally become a climb. The walls were jagged and completely vertical. It was still warm, however; or if it was cold, I was unable to feel it. My untiring, unchanging muscles weren’t phased by the rock wall; it was just a matter of finding a place to lie down on occasion that was difficult. I didn’t feel a whole lot of anything physically. If I needed to rest, it was only ever mentally. Sleep was almost impossible, which only came to me once a year or so only after exhausting myself for days on end.
Finally, I reached the highest peak of the tallest mountain in the world. I looked out over creation and lamented over such beauty. I searched for any signs of ugliness in all of the blue-green, red, and gold beauty; but there was nothing but the misery of absolute delight to behold. The whole of everything I could see was positively perfect in every way. I wondered if the real world was round.

It was time to relive the excitement of the crash that landed me in the jungle. I wanted to feel fear—the fear of losing things, the fear that makes you think you are real, the fear that makes one feel truly alive. I was starved for my heart to race. The last excitement I knew was the terror that sweet old Billy had inspired in me when I thought he was going to make me his dinner. I think that was the last time I laughed as well. I was terribly afraid of heights in the old world and thought maybe falling off a mountain would do the trick. I looked down and could not even see the base of the mountain past the clouds. I lost track of Billy ages before.
I jumped, and I fell for two days. The first ten minutes of the fall were invigorating, though my heart remained pumping at the same, unaltered tempo. I tried to simulate a fear for my life and couldn’t wait to see if I would be spared the perfection and invulnerability, I was positive I had been cursed with. The wind soared through my long shaggy hair and tickled my beard. I was mesmerized by the flat and spinning planet that I was racing to be reintroduced to.
Boredom set in after twenty minutes or so. “How long can I possibly keep falling.” I thought and also “I hope I die” as a sort of half a wish in my mind, I actually was too chicken to die but I think I’m almost ready go now - soon as I finish this book, I’m done.
My yearly sleep found me after a day’s fall.
I awoke to realize that I had not died and to Billy’s big purple tongue drenching me in messy mucus. I had landed safely on the ground, I was immortal, I was perfect, I was miserable. I could not even cry for that fact that I could not cry.

I returned from my fall and immediately moved my tepee directly next to the hole and made a bed right by it. This time, there was no music; there was something even better. I could hear the voices of women…Women! How I miss those beautiful creatures, it is sheer pain to think of them now. I could hear men too in what sounded like an orgy. I heard the screams and moans of three or four different woman crying out for more. More what? I could only imagine. I could hear bodies sparring in heat. I heard what sounded like two women making love. I could bear no more.
“Who are you?” I shouted into the hole. “Where are you? Is that you, God?”
The orgy sounds had come to a stop, I waited eagerly.
“Yes,” said a deep ominous sounding voice
“This is God, won’t you let me in my son? You could not possibly be happy without me.” The voice seemed to echo forever.
It was true, I was unhappy, but I was also very cautious about this voice. I felt a warning looming within my guts, and I distrusted the voice inside my heart of hearts. Still, I was very curious. Curiosity for an old imperfect world I had left behind became my only happiness in paradise, that’s funny. I thought of Shooshi and Takumat. What would their advice be?
“You made this world God, you let yourself in,” I proclaimed
“My son…Let me in my son.”
With that, an arm that glowed gold like mine blindly reached out of “the hole” searching. It belonged to a woman who could have been a hand model. My guts were on fire with warnings about this so-called God and his women. I burned with lust for the hand’s touch. (Success! I even had a hard-on!) I peeled myself from the hole and made for my tepee to begin to write the song I had come up with during my climb to the heavens, and I tried to masturbate.
I had been drying some clay tablets that I had been making for a week and collected a couple of sharp rocks to use as chisels. I wrote the song that came to mind when I was climbing the mountain and called it “Victory Song” I also wrote down the words for “Grandma shot Grandpa” and I wrote a song about Sophia and called it “Her.” I also wrote down other songs that I had written in the old world and arranged them in my teepee.
I had been sleeping next to the hole every night for a week, listening to all of the noises it made. The sound of women was a blissful lullaby to such a deprived man as I was. The hands were always reaching from the hole, waiting for me to break. I would not let God in like he asked with ever so much patience and care, but I would take comfort in holding the hands of the people I longed to meet as I slept at night.
I could hear, starting from early in the morning and lasting deep into the night, every day, orgies that never seemed to lose passion and, at times, even seemed to even gain in momentum. The orgies sounded ever more tempting and distracted me more and more as each day passed. I gave “the hole” my undivided attention and hardly ever left its side. It was a sheer force of will that I was able to finish my writings. Whenever the sex would stop for a few minutes, I would hear the voice of God begging me to let him in. I no longer tried to ignore the voice, whether it was God or not, the voice comforted me like the idea of it possibly, actually, belonging to God. The only time I was able to focus on my work was when I would scare the voice away by asking it too many questions. These moments were very brief, however. The silence was always replaced by the sound of sex. Why didn’t I just let him in? I just get the strangest feeling that Shooshi and Takumat wouldn’t approve. They said it was time for me to start the real world. They didn’t mention anything else.
While lying in a ditch with spiders crawling all over me that covered almost every inch of my body, I decided to start building a stage for the animals to enjoy my music and art and maybe some plays that I could come up with or potentially steal from the old world. The project took no time at all for me to complete. Time had a different meaning to me altogether.
I had become quite a carpenter living in the woods and helping shelter the animals; as a result, the stage was coming along very nicely. The building of a theatre and the labor involved to do so helped to steer my mind away from my discontent with paradise and away from the hole, though nothing could redirect my mind from the prospect of there being women.
The day had finally arrived that I decided to gather all of the animals together in front of the stage so that they might take heed to my performance and so that I could culture them. The stage was still under development, and there were still various piles of lumber scattered across the stage. I could not wait to finish building it, and I badly wanted to try my hardest to present the art that I had made in paradise to all of my creatures. Billy helped to round all the animals on the continent up. Billy was a good shepherd, and all the animals listened to his commands.
Once I was satisfied with the untold number of animals that had gathered, I began to read, for I could not seem to muster the enthusiasm to sing.

Man’s made of love
With his eye on the prize
Man won’t give up
And man has God on his side
Man’s all grown up
And he’s doing it right
For man all he wants
Is peace on earth and of mind

Just then, a feral but friendly yellow dog in the audience keeled over and produced a litter of a dozen or so varicolored young pups. The animals in the proximity were deeply distracted over the sudden birth, some wandered to the scene and licked the new babes, and some gave a sniff. It was incredibly frustrating. Even when it seemed that I had caught the animal’s attention, they were actually deeply unmoved and easily distracted; no animal cheered, not even Billy, and no animal booed me. They were simply unaffected. I continued.

Man’s on his way
Man has been saved
Man’s never bored
And laughs when he is afraid

I was about to start the chorus and might have even sung it when a tiny pink and orange pot-belly pig bumped into my shin. It had apparently idiotically wandered onto the stage all by itself during my song. There was a time when I would have found the thing to be endearing, I thought as I stared back at its doting eyes. The pig’s little pink and black spotted tongue extended from its tiny mouth. The pig started to lick my leg. I turned the idiot around and kicked the thing in the ass and yelled “Git!” “Shoo!” The pig wandered back to the crowd, falling in once again with the other animals, only facing the opposite way of the performance, like so many of them. I rolled my eyes, sighed, and continued just barely finding the will to do so.

We’re so free
Victory
Everybody’s happy now
We made it!

A fly had begun to buzz noisily around my head; I ignored it and continued to the next verse.

Man’s not ashamed
Man’s proud and brave
And the animals know
It’s man who takes care of this place
Man’s goanna change
For better not worse
The future is his
Whatever he chooses will work
Man’s full of skills
And compassion is one
Man would feel guilt
If ever man could do wrong

One fly had turned into several, all seemingly dedicated to derailing the rest of my song and sabotaging my final performance. I grew to be angry and then livid by the ignorance of the flies. “They know exactly what they are doing and how important this is,” I thought. I convinced myself it was malice not stupidity that motivated them with all of my might, and with sheer livid anger in my voice, I read on.

We’re so free
Victory
Everybody’s happy now
We made it!

As the last words of my unimportant poem passed through my lips, a fly landed on them and began to rub his hands, then crapped. Afterward, the culprit continued to buzz around my face obnoxiously with its accomplices.
“That’s it!” I screamed.
I was to the brim. I rationalized in my raging mind that one of the insurgents should pay for what their foolishness had ruined. I raised the clay tablet above my head and in a flash of malevolence struck the fly that had made my mouth a toilet and smote it for its insolence.
“You stupid goddamned animals, don’t you know genius when you hear it?” I cried, throwing the tablet to the wooden floor as I watched it explode. I would have been bright red if possible. I began chucking pieces of the unfinished stage aimlessly at the careless animals.
“I am Jungle Jim! This is my world! You all belong to ME! You are all a bunch of wasteful idiots; I hate all of you and I hope you all die!” The only animals that seemed to be affected by my tantrum were the ones that got hit with bits of the wood that I was throwing and Billy, who let out a whimper when I accidentally struck him at the base of his mighty shin. Billy ran into the woods and left me for a while.
With blood boiling in my veins, I hobbled home ready to do the unthinkable. I approached the hole. There was a meaty hand with silver hair on the knuckles groping for a mate that stemmed from the dark void. Without another thought, I grabbed the hand and I allowed it to pull me through the hole.