Phase one usually doesn’t harm a soul. It’s the thinking phase, the inceptive hovering over the face of black waters. Nothing is spoken, and no promises are made—there is no law and no one to break it, no light and thus no understanding of darkness. Nothing is right, and nothing is wrong.
A voice says, “light be.” Suddenly a veil splits from top to bottom, and it is this perpetual tearing of the immaterial that carves its way toward the farthest reach of eternity. This is phase two, the vocalizing of the concept that causes a new world to envelop the old. If this stage is initiated, the one in charge is responsible for making sure that the original idea is sound and, most importantly, something that produces life.
If humans engender a concept to produce life, they rarely do it purposefully. One can speculate whether they would be capable of perpetuating themselves were it not for the pleasure-seeking impulse that guides them instinctively toward sex. In and of themselves, humans rarely approach phase one with the kind of purity attributable to One; let us call him the “First.”
Phase three orders the “produce” of phase two so as to create a life-perpetuating cycle. With the First, it was probably an age-long process of assigning which organisms would become fish, land crawlers, flyers, beasts of prey, and burrowing creatures. To achieve his end, he placed them in a context that we would call “time” and then set them to work. By all accounts, he saw that this was good.
Then the First creates men and women, gives them a piece of himself, and stands by as they excommunicate him from the order of things. In this new order, human beings take it upon themselves to carry out the three-phase process of thought, speech, and action. This is how all things move toward death.
I am hidden in a crowd of Israelites and Canaanites. That is, until they bow to a statue with the head of a bull, its jewel-encrusted arms outstretched and sloping back toward a hollow, bulging abdomen from which tongues of flame curl like whiplashes and lick the dry night air. Reluctant to bow, I retreat behind a nearby boulder and, keeping close to its shadow, peer out at the ranks of worshipers. The chalky feel of the rock reminds me that I am both here and now and that the fire churning in the statue’s belly is hardly the stuff of dreams.
Drums boom and trumpets sound as a robed, priestly man ascends three stone steps toward a great plinth set before the towering bull. The priest or king carries what looks like a naked baby—I see something like plump feet kicking out at nothing while stubby-fingered hands grope for the softness of a mother’s skin only to clench at a thistly beard or a piece of linen covering a flat, foreign chest.
A woman kneels at the steps and buries her face in her arms, and I watch her shoulders heave and her body quiver. The drums thunder to drown out the baby’s deafening screams; the people begin to make a sound of wind among treetops. The robed man holds the baby aloft before the bull’s flat nose. Above the nose rests a pair of impassive eyes, and I remember with a tinge of irony that some artisan slave with a liberal ingenuity must have carved them that way. At first, I wonder if the man holding the baby is Solomon or Ahaz, but that question slips from me just as the baby slips from the bull’s upraised palms and rolls down the bronze arms toward the belly of fire.
The flames spit, crackle, and glow. The bull smiles in the play of light and shadow. In spite of trumpets and drums and whirring voices, I hear the child’s scream as if it were echoing the suppressed cry of rage that splits my heart.
And then I see it: this is phase three of human initiative, ordered and set by the precedence of thought and speech. “Oh God in heaven,” I cry within myself, “how did it come to this?” But I already know the answer. It’s because phase one did not hurt anybody, and phase two was just freedom of speech in all its explorative beauty. And after much critical thinking and a series of discussions, someone decided that it would be in the people’s best interest to burn babies alive, while the command “Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek” was labeled as an antiquated piece of advice—take it or leave it.
I turn away as the priest lifts another child toward the glowing altar.
When I wake from it, I’m still in the car. Driving, of all things. The last thing I remember is pulling out of Jake’s driveway, and then something started talking to me about phases. We’re almost at my place now. He’s in the passenger seat, carrying on a serious discussion as if I’ve been listening the whole time. “The problem,” he says, “is that we can’t really determine when life begins. And if we try to, we may as well be playing god. Know what I mean?”
I realize that he has come to the end of his point and that it’s time for me to respond.
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
I can still see the brazen bull, but his lifeless eyes don’t see me.
“You don’t?” He folds his eyebrows at me. “But I’ve just explained it.”
“Why are we talking about this?” I ask.
“Because you brought it up,” he says.
“Did I?” I turn onto the road that dead-ends at my place.
“Yeah. You said it was a simple matter of right and wrong, life and death. So I was explaining how it’s much more complicated than that. Were you even listening?”
I pull into my driveway and turn off the ignition. We sit for I don’t know how long, both of us waiting for me to say something. This is phase two, I realize. We’re making ourselves feel better by talking about it and talking about it until we renounce anything resembling a concrete resolution.
Sitting in the quietude of his impatient stare, I don’t have to try very hard to hear the thundering drums and the blasting trumpets. And to see the bright, blazing stomach with its tongues of flame coiling around a naked baby feels like really seeing, for a change. Then, it comes to me as if from somewhere else—I believe the First has given it to me.
I see Eve as she rationalizes eating the fruit and Adam as he rationalizes sharing it.
I see Cain as he justifies his anger toward his brother.
I see human history as the complicating of simple matters, and I know with whom it began: a garden snake speaks of wisdom and the way to know both good and evil.
“Well,” he says, “were you listening or not?”
I speak without looking at him. “Yes,” I say. “I heard every word.”
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I really enjoyed this. Short stories are a difficult medium but you make your point well. Your ending is strong too; it doesn’t feel rushed or cut short.
I was initially confused as I saw you tagged this as an “essay,” but once I realized it was a story it came together nicely. Five stars.
Hey, thanks very much. I tagged it as an essay because I actually wrote it for an essay class, believe it or not. But since you point that out, I’ll tag it as a story too. I really appreciate the feedback.