An Unpublished Obituary

In his Bustaan, Sa’di saith:

‘It is a crime to give sugar to the sick one,’

‘For whom, the bitter medicine is fit.’

— H. Wilberforce Clarke

An Unpublished Obituary

“His moniker meant ‘Defender of Men.’ A lampoonist might contend that he defended those men he declined to slaughter.”

His Life in Monomers

Amiable to hostages.

Generous with stolen wealth.

Temperate, relative to the average amount he drank.

Compassionate towards the widows of his enemies.

The Intended Phenotype Or Our Boy Golem

Cleitus: Last of the old guard. Straight-shooter. Alexander preserves and promotes him as propitiation to his father’s ghost. Murdered by way of premeditated rage for reminding his master’s son that “with this hand, I saved you at the River Granicus.” Alexander grieves and erects a shrine to his newly suspected divinity.

For months Alexander had wondered how best to reward so dangerous a servant. Had Alexander really been a Zoroastrian — the way he pretended to please his Persian sycophants — he might have resided a few millennia in the Aevum, that karmic penalty-box, for the cyclical recurrence of his future ancestor Jacob Burckhardt, to find inspiration in Burckhardt’s tale of the condottiere who saved the Italian city-state of Siena from invasion. Seeing no way to safely reward him, the city-men said. “Let us kill him and make him our patron saint.”

Hephaestion: Nursery-friend. Adjutant. Patroclus to Alexander’s Achilles. Like Patroclus, mistaken for Achilles, this time to his benefit. Lame leg, but it is Harpalus who plays the supernal smith. Writes letters to Aristotle, an encrypted history of infamy in contrast to the vedas and veneratiae he shows to his lover. Decryption involves the repeated amputation and prosthesis of letters and blank spaces. The number of transformations required is equal to the months elapsed since the show-trial and execution of Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes multiplied by the thickness, in centidactyls, of the papyrus.

Plautus, in his vulgar way, states that “in their shared tent, Alexander shed his deity to acquire a human penis.”

Ptolemy the Vulture: First of the Macedonian elite to accept Alexander as a solar deity, reasoning that the moons, Alexander’s subordinates, remain invisible without the sun. Displays a feigned or superstitious reverence for Alexander’s corpse. Kidnaps the funeral box on its way to Aegae. Keeps Alexander’s liver in a jar. It is said that, afterwards, he never lost a battle until the liver spoiled. We may dismiss as malicious gossip the tale that Ptolemy ate liver slices dipped in honey — like the Cannibal of Uhud, Hind Bint Utbah, with the Prophet’s uncle — to absorb Alexander’s latent genius.

His motto, which he steals from Calanus, is that the man who believes in everything must occasionally believe the truth.

Perdiccas: Likes to send a second messenger to confirm that the first has not tampered with his orders. Sometimes he sends contradictory orders to his commanders, to judge which are too literal-minded and which instinctively submit to his unspoken will.

Calanus: Ptolemy’s Rasputin.

Olympias: Alexander’s mother. The Spider Queen. As Richard the Lion-Heart said of his mother “You are Medea to the teeth, only this is one son you won’t use for vengeance against your husband…”

Phillip: His father. Assassinated after producing a rival heir.

Eurydice: See Phillip.

The Traitor Bessus: Tied and torn apart by recoiling trees.

A Vigorous Standing Still

He was what Rumi described. He saw the emptiness within and filled it with scorpions. He flooded the lovely gardens around the rim with bleach. After he gutted the world, the cavity called to him as a craftsmen. He built an empire to emphasize the surplus spaces and rebuilt his friends to suit his empire. The shahid Aït Yadashr accuses him of forcing his companions to wear the faces of his Persian victims; Alexander later commands his new Persian allies to do the same with troublesome Greeks, starting with the free mercenary companies who opposed him at the River Pinarus.

Unable to conquer the planets, he built glass domes around his cities to fill the sky with reflected conquests.

An Ottoman recension of the Alexander Romance, a collage of anonymous elaborations, tell us that one day Alexander envied the sun. His slaves, out of love, set their master on fire; at the moment of ignition, he projected no shadows. Our composite author (collaborating across centuries and cultures) continues. “His flesh smelled like perfume. The body left no ashes to bury.”

The Constitution of Athens

Tradition attributes one hundred fifty-eight constitutions to Aristotle. Of those, thirty-eight survived the Macedonian conquest of the Greek city-states. No more than three survived the civil wars which followed Alexander’s death. Only one, that of Athens, has come down to us in a doubtful manuscript whose true author may have despised Aristotle.

The Spider Queen

“The fungus directs the ant to climb. When the mate arrives to fuck the corpse, the fungus spreads until the mushroom-pickers start the cycle fresh again.”

Olympias teaches her son writing, riding, the rhetoric of mass hysteria as counterweight to the ‘Rhetoric’ of his tutor Aristotle.

Alexander’s father Phillip suspected her of being a sorceress. They rarely shared a bed, but when the moon disrobed, there he peered through the keyhole to her room. He never told what he saw, but his prudent silence suggested ghastly rituals. Orgies, aphrodisiacs made from the human sigmoid colon, chaplets of plague-ridden bronze, babbling spider-gods imported from Ifriqiya. The household slaves said her orb-weaver could spin delphic webs. Her bindi priestesses would gather up the silk and weave cheerful destinies, giggling girls who liked to contravene the doom decreed by the three morbid crones, the Fates — Clothos, Lachesis, Atropos.

Afterwards, the spiders would ravish the priestesses.

One chamber-slave claimed she had seen the Queen’s favorite, a sand-spider, nine inches broad, caress the cheek of its human bride, as the girl fingered its pedicel.

Aristobolus testifies to Olympias’ sense of humor; he says that she liked to wear false legs and crawl over the chests of petrified serfs.

The most alarming rumor was that every night the royal baboon-spider murdered her, and she was revived or resurrected by the brown widow’s bite.

This domestic malice had an unexpected effect on the boy Alexander. Ever after he had a fondness for all kinds of invertebrates though otherwise, as Burckhardt says, “it seemed that he too, ‘through inborn pride, could no longer regard the low and crawling things of life’.”

As for Phillip, he squashed his fear. During the early years of his reign, these spiders were Phillip’s prime assassins. Rebels or stubborn ambassadors learned to stockpile costly antivenom. Only when Phillip started taking other wives, wombs for rival heirs, do spiders crawl into his dreams.

Wolf Cub Shahada Or The Conscious Beast

In the creation of heaven and earth, of tongues and colors, there are signs for those who know.

Of the False Animals. Deceivers, Disclaimers, Declaimers.

The Dagar’s feathers spell out the Meccan suras of the Quran. A mangy bird who eats the flesh of men. Its call to salvation is a holy sham.

The rosettes of the leopard of Kerkur, a graceful Naskh calligraphy, delineate a fruitless controversy over eleven hadiths excised by the traditionist Bukhari.

To the partisan crocodile, the Sumatran orangutan reviles Mu’awiyah and extols Ali; both deny the real and fictional existence of the prior three “rightly-guided” caliphs.

The wolf-cubs howl their false shahada at the moon. “There is no fire but the Fire.” They accuse the sun of stealing from the moon.

The lion — in La Fontaine’s fable, he is Alexander and Alexander’s enemy — offers to protect the monkey’s treasure from the tiger.

They lie, who say that man is the most treacherous beast.

The Mi’raj and Mirage of Alexander

And Alexander rode the Wheel of Suffering into hell. There, men who resembled him flayed, deboned him, as the saints masturbated to his atonal screams (in concord with the erotic fantasies of the Nasrani Shaykh Tertullian).

At the end of each eternity, the demons and the seraphim host an intramural party. The meat and the guests are Alexander. His inexhaustible blood flows into bottomless tankards. His fat regrows without aid of miracles.

In unison the men raised their stones to crush the other Ptolemy, not the Ptolemy who tried to save that Ptolemy who died at Halicarnassus, nor the future dynast and forefather of Cleopatra, but Ptolemy who erected a statue to Gluttony biting her own lips. Ptolemy was now either effacing a life of cowardice by his stoicism or erasing all his heroic deeds by a single act of cowardice. At that moment, Alexander emerged from his tent. The mutiny collapsed, though eight foot-soldiers died and a hyspaspist lost his eye before they could restore order.

What had happened was this. The scouts had found a corpse preserved from the bone stripping Samuum beneath his mule, the mule beneath a dune. A Gedrosian deserter or ronin. The man looked exactly like Alexander.

That had set off the hetairoi, driven by thirst, hallucinations. Their hipparchs insisted that Alexander lived — the real Alexander had gone to scout out a birket kept for thirsty pilgrims — but the hetairoi, suspecting a cover-up, converged on the armory, colliding into a squad of the Companions. In the ensuing brawl, fellowship was discarded. The battle spread, some fighting imaginary Gedrosian infiltrators, others reenacting the River Pinarus where they had crushed the first slave-army of Darius.

And why had Alexander failed to show himself? Was it this, that returning as the mutiny began, one of the loyalist hetairoi had ridden right over him, mistaking him for a mutineer in the chaos (his commander sentenced the guilty rider to death, but Alexander commuted the sentence to twenty lashes and then promoted him)? Or, as Quintus Curtius suspects, Alexander’s agents incited the mutiny to flush out the malcontents who had been planning a wider insurrection? Curiously, the cynical Curtius fails to perfect his conspiracy theory by accusing Alexander of planting the body-double.

He tread on spiderwebs. He had broken the mutiny, but these were wolves not dogs. They prowled. They clumped like blood, babbling now, but from culverts Alexander heard the underpop and shisk of knives, the snick of spear points cresting sand, the baridrone of smothered rage. As in war, when a phalanx does not break immediately but fleeing for a time until opposed by a picket line of rocks or shrubs, suddenly turns in sync. Now comes the choice. Each man adds his momentum to the mob. Would they run? Would they throw themselves like cannibals hungry for second heaps of flesh, they who had done to men what beasts lacked genius to do to other beasts? They only waited for a hero to tip the avalanche.

He must preempt that man.

He urged them not to defeat themselves when salvation was close at hand. The coast was not far. He’d received a messenger from his navarch Nearchus (duly, a letter was produced which seemed authentic) which assured them three hard days of marching. No more.

He recounted their victories, more glorious than Marathon or Salamis. What were those? Minor skirmishes; puppets shedding puppet-blood. They had killed a god, avenged Persian atrocities against the Greeks, freed the enslaved peoples of the world.

He mourned their losses in this disastrous retreat through Gedrosia. He named each fallen soldier, slave, and horse by name, a testament to his perfect memory. And by a rhetorical swerve he had learned from Aristotle, transformed these losses into evidence of their invincibility. Helios himself had taken the field. Only the Sun, beyond the range of their slings, could stand against a Macedonian.

He spoke all night, out in the open air, as his troops hid beneath an outcropping, taught by hard experience to flee the sadist-star.

Seeing how parched he was, Zephyrus brought him a helmet full of water, which Alexander poured contemptuously on the ground. That did the trick. Even the veterans began crying; prudently, they drank their tears. The mutineers confessed with such pathetic zeal that Alexander, trusting to Fortune, pardoned all but the ringleaders who were cut to pieces by their former confederates.

Presently, Alexander fainted and had to be carried back to his tent, though he sent Perdiccas at intervals to reassure the men.

The Myth of Er

His wound was festering. The fever struck. This time he dreamt he murdered his other selves, broke the Wheel of Incarnation to become the dreamshape of his choice, ascending in defiance of mutation canon-law, from worm to flower to butterfly to storm; from thunder-dogs whining to puppicules up to the helium of the magnetosphere to the asteroid belt, his body dividing into the dust of Andromeda, the dust dividing into those atoms which so horrified Democritus. So high he could look down on the gods. He could just pick out his mother Olympias weaving her webs around the other supernal spiderettes. Below them crawled the race of Man, infernal ants, organic war machines who make the bloody-handed gods appear compassionate.

With that same celestial eye, he scanned the Gedrosian waste, whose skinless hills might yet endome a funeral mound for his routed armies.

Wrath, a sudden madness, took him.

His undreaming shell raved so harshly that the slave-girl pressed the wet cloth to his brow harder than protocol allowed.

Alexander moaned. Had they died? The deserters who would deny our cookpots out of spite and feed their flesh to desert birds. The wounded we have abandoned to drink their own blood and seal each other’s eyes with frozen tears. The last to die will guide the resurrected blind across the river Lethe. The Macedonian boast is that we (even the nullipedes, pus-feeding amputees) will spit on the boatman and swim across as a single unit.

Or might they live?

In two hundred years, our descendants may encounter theirs. Overrate ourselves as great explorers. Mistake each other for savages. Slaughter them, as Odysseus is said to have killed the castaway Ithacans, parents of his forgotten parents, on his homeward voyage. Besiege their cities until starving neighbors exchange their children, grieving less to grind unbeloved bones to flour. Hypnos-eyed laestrygonians who eat unnatural flesh that men died to look upon.

The Glorious

The augurs, twice interrogated, replied the words of Oedipus the King.

Alexander feared a pathetic end. To defy this adverse augury, he tried to die as Achilles did. At every opportunity he tried. His own victories appalled him. They increased the chance of illness, old age, a pathetic accident. He must die in battle. Cut down, shot down, drowned, disemboweled. Or vaporized by foreign gods.

In Egypt, he adopted himself as the son of Amun hoping that if the god did not Himself exist, that his angry devotees would tear him apart.

He snuffed out the Seven Unburning Fires of Ahura Mazda. The lofty; the fertile; the compassionate; the beneficent; the defender; the bountiful; the hearth-lord. He crowned himself the Persian Sun. He slept outside, beneath the sadist-star; its vengeful sprays sizzled harmless off his armor.

He substituted himself for the lead actor in the roving theatre that trailed his invading armies and wore the Alexander mask in reenactments of the River Pinarus and Guagamela. He hoped these arrogant attempts to repeat his own godlike victories would invite nemesis and destruction.

Once, he ran naked into the forest but for his rams-head helmet. He clothed himself in mud and moss. He darted with the sacred fawn. Hoping that Diana the Huntress might peg an arrow between his horns.

The Beloved Murshid Or The Undesired One

Was it the saddle-bag or his hand trembling? Alexander had not taken Hephaestion into his bed for many years, but here was the apeirogon,[1] the lover’s cryptogram.

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[1] A polygon which tries to be a sphere but disappoints.

The theogony of the apeirogon is uncertain. The heresiarch Aït Huthayl, on the very steps to the guillotine, worshipped it as a demiurge. Aït Hudayj contends that it existed pre-eternally with the First.

The Akhuans tell us that it was harvested from the hair (“pubic hairs” claims Aït Khidr, our latter-day De Sade) of Penelope, widow of Odysseus. Who, to give a theme to her mourning tapestry and to delay her suitors, spins the tale of her own chicanery. In doing so, she accidentally encompasses all may or may-not histories.

The gullible reiterate that the tapestry repeats perfectly (may The Inscrutable hide us from false opinions). In truth, it is saved from such blasphemy by the subtle errors introduced by human frailty into otherwise redundant scenes.

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How its chiralets, coruscending conduits of braided parasites, dragged the eye. How it shattered the present mind, to reunify flawed continents of memory.

He felt the kisses; their first wrestling match, the musk from fractured pearl drops of sweat; the degrading busy-work, the rear guard commands and sinecures to deflect charges of favoritism; the adulteries demanded by policy; the other adulteries; the make-up sex; Alexander’s habit of twisting left in sleep to thrust his arm through the leather strap lest to grip the pike he drop his shield.

Alexander, le petit morts, reading Plato while humming in chocolate baritone those Lydian harmonies that Plato despised as fatal to the state. As he sang, he improvised lyrics from the Myth of Er, reincarnating dead Persian heroes — Jamshyd, Rustam, Kaikobad — as conscripts in the Macedonian army.

False memories. The misremembering of true memories.

Alexander’s broken leg, bits of bone sticking to the folds of Hephaestion’s ceremonial chiton. The charging mare, trained to trample fallen enemies, driven mad by a peacock from Phillip’s menagerie.

(Unborn horses driven mad. The horse-repellent elephant charge, their feet like celestial battering rams.)

The close escape; how in a sunken chamber, a megaron or a cenote, they renewed childish vows, annually, with oxen gore; each owed their survival to some guiding jinn (or genius) of the other. The limping, lavish boy who roused the roosting royal tailor from his harem to hem a fresh chiton so Hephaestion would not disgrace himself at the feast.

Cardamom coffee in India. Burnt lip. The coolness of his lip sucking his.

Exile, when the plot against Alexander’s father fails. The sheltered bay; the islands winking in and out of fog; the orgiastic hills; epic scenery; despair with no epic deeds to do, no arete, no pursuit of excellence.

The clouds rolling like beheaded kings. The blushing sky; the sky in black, mourning for the ruined East.

Phillip’s funeral. The spasmodic death of Caranus, Phillip’s heir-alternate, and Alexander’s erudite dinner-talk with a notorious poisonologist of cordials masked by Argive wine, toxic ink, a camphor rubbed on Cretan boar. Hephaestion, the first and only one to drain his cup.

The time Alexander made him eat fake grapes, like

Erigone who sold her virginity to Dionysus for the same.[2]

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[2] As a joke, Dionysus teaches her unsuspecting father, Icarius, the fermenter’s art. Icarius shares his primeval wine with shepherds. They think he has poisoned them, kill him, then bury him in penitence. The family dog, led by excessive love, unearths the body. Erigone hangs herself.

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Were all his gifts counterfeit? Alexander knew it didn’t matter. Hephaestion would treasure the fakes the way he ate those grapes, with premeditated gullibility.

Hephaestion remembered the taste of wax; his rage the second time he recalled that taste; how he later regretted that remembered rage; his grief when, sun-struck on a crag in the Gedrosian desert, he could not remember what he regretted or why he raged. The sun is skinning him, but he shivers, decrepit, in soldier years at least and cold, like a volcano puffing ersatz steam.

Three times, Alexander had passed him figs and said. “A side-dish for a side-dish.” His way of saying. “Tonight, I’m fucking someone else.”

Sometimes, Alexander said. “I made you from a dream.”

Sweet sophistic solipsisms.

Sometimes, he said. “I dreamt, and when I woke, you were my dream’s sweet residue.”

Sedulous sentiments.

And once, aping their tutor Aristotle. “Achilles loves all Patrocles…Hephaestion is a Patroclus. Therefore…”

A suspect syllogism.

Hephaestion is walking now. He does not know when he leapt off his horse. Perhaps he fell off. There’s a nasty splotch across his thigh, as when gods scrape the battlefield clean of human bugs.

He sinks again into other Hephaestions.

By the time he emerges, Alexander is already inside of him. After he finishes, it is Hephaestion who wraps his ankles around Alexander’s legs and will not let him pull out. This pain, too, is the only pleasure Alexander has given him in many years.

Three weeks later, Hephaestion dies.

For eighteen years, Alexander had shielded him from the plots of jealous sycophants and resentful chiliarchs. This solicitude preserves Hephaestion long enough to die of pneumonia.

Alexander had loved him. Politically, it was safer to abuse him and once abused, to abuse again. His Persian pretensions had distracted him. The conflation of the Greek Helios with the Unburning Persian Fire demanded careful massaging of Persian brides and Persian mobs, as well as intricate negotiations with Persian priests (and their conniving interpreters). Two delusory civilizations, Greek and Persian, had slaughtered each other. He would fuse them into a single organism.

Alexander mandates monthly sacrifices to his lover. This relieves his rivals. A jumped-up catamite is dangerous; a god is bribeable. Sometimes after a bloody day Alexander forgets, but then he sacrifices twice as many bulls at dawn and pours libations to the gods of Dis, the tri-caste milk of burnt Persepolis: honey, olive oil, and Indian butter.

Alexander carves ayats into Hephaestion’s funeral box, cast from the unused gold of Phillip’s coffin and clad in red ram skins. The box is lost in the power struggles which follow Alexander’s death. The traditionists claim that Ptolemy had the verses recarved to strengthen his claim as Alexander’s prime intimate.

Fourteen centuries pass. A more convincing Persian, Hafiz, supplies those words defaced by time or ambition.

The anka,

Our pure existence,

Is the prey of none.

The teeth of the snare cannot pierce

Our enmeshing skin.

Known of name, unknown of body.

Achilles drank the wine and Patroclus

Drank Achilles-blood.

I have run thirty years in unity

And thirty more in singularity

And still I have not reached

The Desired One.

Ethics of the Baryon

Alexander ejects our modern sociology from his mind. The idea that being matters more than doing was anathema. A good Greek, he worshipped verbs. He would be the first to tell you that “should Alexander ever stop moving, he would disappear.”

The Moon Before the Sun

The document read.

“…the theologians have proven more agreeable than the priests. They posit that the ancestral sunburst of our Argead royal dynasty — which, on the sound advice of (redacted) we have readopted — is identical to the emblem of Ahura Mazda, the pre-eternal fuel of the Unburning Fire. Their certainty is requested.” Here, the word requested has been scratched out in a rheumatic hand and replaced with required. The blank bureaucratic style of the letter could have belonged to any of a hundred court eunuchs or fiscal scribes.

Perdiccas picked at the royal seal. He knew that etched chrysolite was impossible to forge, yet he suspected that were he to tattoo Alexander’s orders across his chest, his own men would skin him alive.

For the third time, he dropped the scroll and turned to the letter. The letter, from the Stagirite. As he read it, he felt his heart flicker like a senile star; his hands trembled, as though diffusing into mist.

He lost his nerve and turned to his own half-finished letter.

“To Ptolemy. A proposal.”

He had struggled all evening to address his rival in the proper tone, to avoid both a suspicious humility or overt contempt.

At last he abandoned all subtlety. Alexander was going insane. In the streets, the people proclaimed that the Saoshyant, the Persian Messiah had risen in the West. The time for reason was past; they had to shatter him…

“…he commands his satraps, in the absence of their god-king, to greet all foreign ambassadors in darkness. Total darkness! The same applies to the weekly court. Even as we pronounce our judgments in blindness, we are now required to wear a dappling moon of brass to symbolize that we are no more than the fetal irradiance of his aboriginal star.”

“As though proskynesis was not enough! I had to disarm the men and lock the armory and still I barely kept them from mutiny, and I tell you now that they prostrated themselves with their daggers wet. Now he wants to rename his horse to Pegasus who Carries the Sun. One of the eunuchs — I think that popinjay, Phanes — planted that idea. A minor disaster by comparison.

“As his exarchs, he awaits our rubber-stamp. We cannot, of course, issue these orders as is. I have marked the statements which I think we can safely strike. I don’t dare more without your public support.”

He sealed the letter and sent the guard to fetch the courier. He wondered how much Ptolemy had offered the man to turn on him, how hard he had considered it. Gods below, he did not have enough men to both spy on Ptolemy and to spy on Ptolemy’s agents in his own camp.

That menial fiend. Now more than ever, he needed to know Ptolemy’s plans. He had exaggerated the mutinous temper of his men (gods above, at least it might plant the seed of hubris in the bastard’s head) and sacrificed twin peregrines to Tyche for luck in deception and inscribed a curse upon the sacral tablet. “Let ants eat his eyes, his organs dissolve in acid. Let me destroy the silk houses of this caddis-fly, the traps and decoys he has devised. Let the traps engulf the trap maker.”

The Wedge in the Wheel

In the early days of the Alexander cult in India there was a dearth of trained da’is to spread the word, so the traveling pandal came into vogue. The call went out. Famous sculptors and miniaturists would compete for a commission to decorate these folding skin-boxes with relief carvings or painted panels. The medium was mottled flesh stretched and mounted on teak or rosewood.

Hirelings could operate the pandal with little training and no understanding what the stories were about, though a pujari was assigned, when available, to answer simple riddles posed by the audience.

The inner flaps were to depict the Core Mysteries and were locked against the uninitiated. The outer flaps were devoted to low-minder art, capricco genre-tales or popular moral fables centered around famous battles or instructive episodes.

Among the most illustrious of these:

There is Alexander shooting the Dagar Bird as it perfidiously venerates the Simurgh, the bird who is and is in all birds.

The siege and sack of Aornus, which even the god Krishna had failed to conquer. Alexander’s victory is one of the talismans or signs of his Deity.

The Admonishment of Dandamis that Alexander had conquered nothing but dirt in which to bury himself.

There is that anecdote that Mencken attributes to Ambrose Bierce of wives guarding the crematorium fires to make sure their husbands did not escape. There is that pandal which depicts Macedonian soldiers burning wooden boxes for warmth during a winter siege. Later they found that the boxes were coffins encrypting husbands of the besieged. Perhaps their wives, trapped in that starving town, breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally, there is the Retribution Cycle which begins with the Great King’s invasion of Greece and ends at the River Pinarus where Alexander’s armies slay so many Persians that they clog the Cog of Suffering. And it is true that Alexander’s wars produce more corpses than the Cog can grind and reincarnate efficiently. There is a modern-day sect whose devotees blame the cumulative effects of this brief malfunction for the present fertility crisis.

C.f., also, the satirical ‘Wheel of Salvation’ by the Saksiwa philosopher Satoshi, where the backlog produces redundant Messiahs. Each begins his preaching before the prior incarnation has had a chance to die on the cross, leading to an infinite loop of messianic coup and counter-coup.

The Golden Child
He was the Golden Child of an Unreal God.

His cult of molecular suicide arose in Hastinapura, in the former empire of Gandhara. Only when human beings learned to nurture death, to leave no monomer, no residue for Rebirth, would they break the cycle of suffering.

Thousands quit their jobs, abandoned father/mother/bride, left their crops to rot in the field, made pyres of their monks and wisdom-books, refused to pay their taxes, and stoned Alexander’s army recruiters to death.

The Golden Child’s devotees soon compounded satraps, serfs and fiscal scribes, generals, import-export kings, astrologers, and those less wise

One famous convert was Ptolemy.

Every night — twice at dawn — he took up the clay tablet and the stylus which still bears the name of the Imposter, knelt before the master, undressed his heart, recited the lessons, hearing the voice; that voice, which the ulema assert, first spoke the suras of the uncreated Quran, predating language, body language, bodies and time.

In the morning, Ptolemy would prostrate himself, that the pilgrims arriving to transfigure themselves might use his hair to lap up blood.

At noon the child, whose body reeked of open sores, whose untreated cuts had grown gangrenous, would die as parsimoniously and didactically as he could to edify the crowd.

Afternoons, Ptolemy would curate death. He starved until his stomach began to eat itself. He remodeled his own body according to the eight-fold path — skinning, erosion, excision, incision, resection, contortion, constriction, lyes. He broke his bones and encased himself in molds. He slept with lepers. He wrapped himself around wire frames until his tendons tore; wore vesicular diadems and rings of belly-fat and when the knives grew dull, plowed furrows with his fingernails.

And when he had surpassed the child in adroit suicide, the Unreal God, Our Lord of Nullity reified, concretized, came into being and manifested himself to Ptolemy. From this revelation, Ptolemy produced supplemental Anatomies and reviled the Golden Child in the weekly Synod as a gnostic, an obscurantist, an egoist who had withheld these Subdermal Sutras (those of wasting diseases, supernal acids, the nine corrosive eczemas) from his disciples out of overweening pride.

Enraged, his dearest acolytes bound the Golden Child in chains and buried him alive to deny salvation to his accursed bones. Against this, Aristobolus claims that they, moved by a lingering compassion, threw the child into a vat of aqua regia, the only primitive acid which could dissolve gold.

Hundreds died in the ensuing schism. Alexander hunted down the rest. A remnant fled into the mountains, but without new members to replenish their numbers, they soon died out in the normal practice of their religion.

By then Ptolemy had apostatized and returned to Alexander, mission accomplished.

On the Generation…

Alexander’s armies had diverted the rivers. The traitors had died of thirst but so had the hellebore fields, though his botanists[3] had preserved a single specimen. He had not thought of his tutor in years, but the flower which he had made unique reminded him of that unclonable mind and of his own secret failure.

Reclining in his tent, Alexander tips the capsa with his toe, pulls out the scroll and reads Aristotle’s admonition aloud, with the inflection of a man who has often staked his salvation on a single speech. “But Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect and Nature ever seeks an end.”

Of Conspiracies

In Babylon, the number of classified documents grow beyond an immortal archivist’s ability to catalogue. Derived from Assyrian numerology, the Macedonian ciphers are so sophisticated that the documents appear as unencrypted Greek, to the point they fool Alexander’s own cryptographers, who accidentally decrypt thousands of embarrassing letters, among them the covert negotiations with Bessus to betray Darius, and an order to suppress the investigation into the drowning of Perdiccas.

Of Phantasmions

Reliable witnesses inform him of young and invasive empires, arable secessionists sprouting throughout his Empire, ever-triumphant, enslaving his citizens, massacring his garrisons, but his scouts fail to uncover these upstart emperors, the mass graves, or the witnesses. In despair, his scouts fabricate troop counts, census rolls, topographies, flora, fauna, mills, treasuries, taboos, temples, blasphemies. They even pose as ambassadors from these real or fabulous confederacies to delay Alexander’s wrath.

Of Enemies

To conquer India, he must take Kashmir. To take Kashmir, he must smash the Punjab and the unassailable fortress of Aornus.

To hold Aornus, he must control the vast Hindu Kush. To control the Hindu Kush, he must conquer India; then, as now, a vortex of fractured powers.

It takes so long to travel from kingdom to kingdom that his most craven puppet-governors forget Alexander’s face, the insignia of the Argead House, even his ethnicity. So far that two Vedic tribes, the Taxsas and the Tugras, who had hailed him as their liberator from Persian rule, attack him as he retires from his “victories” in Sind, not recognizing the ragged prodigal of so many ruined armies.

Unwilling to dare the fathomless Hyphasis River, his demoralized army had mutinied a thousand miles from what the Greek geographers presumed to be the end of the world. They who had boasted they would spit on the boatman and swim across the river Lethe as a single unit had been broken by a single elephant charge.[4]

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[4] In the battle against the Elephant-Lord Porus, two hetaroi see a white elephant, the ghost of that which ancient Rustam slew. It shatters the Macedonian center and nearly tramples Alexander, whom his Persian conscripts had taken to calling the Son of Rustam. Alexander’s fabulists, taking full advantage, had incorporated that hero into Alexander’s demi-godly genealogy, however much the Persian paladin clashed with Amun, Heracles, the Kinslayer Arjuna and other useful forefathers.

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Zeno’s paradox. They can move no farther. Alexander can never catch up to his own legend. Before he can kill all his enemies, he must kill half that number. To kill half, he must first kill a quarter. At last he cuts a single man to pieces. He cuts each piece to pieces. From this fission spills the indivisible baryons which so horrified Democritus.

Of Heroism

“The bee who only pollinates the tallest flowers, exhausted, comes crashing down to earth.”

His epic grows so long that the bards, by custom compelled to embellish rather than invent original songs, grow hoarse before they can reach their own embellishments.

They might have saved their voices by recrooning the same murder 8,888 times. Alexander has killed so many people that in the future he will kill, if not a literal clone, a genetic rehash of his past victims.

Of Happiness

Or how he atones.

He scours the casualty reports for the amputation of redundant limbs.

He seeks barren brides. He appoints incompetent obstetricians.

He spends all his time with eunuchs. His instructs his gardener to clip the reproductive stamens of all the Hanging Flowers of Babylon.

He massacres a sect of dasturs who preach the redundant judgment of Ahura Mazda, who repeatedly clones and sends all your copies to Hell.

He cannot end nor make an end.

He buries himself in the palace of Babylon, a labyrinth of diminishing courtyards, gardens, odalisques. He buries his head in the lap of the Divine Roxanne. To distract himself, he reads aloud the letters of Aristophanes which Harpalus has kindly or perfidiously sent to him. Aristophanes’ second letter to Sellos strikes him as perverse; it outlines the comic dramatist’s solution to the priggish ending of Aeschylus’ ‘Eumenides.’ In Aristophanes’ version, rather than placate the Furies or submit to the arbitration of Athena, Orestes ingests a certain flower and forgets that he is his mother’s murderer. He transforms himself into a guiltless man, if not wholly innocent.

Alexander recalls that flower. Of the several species of hellebore, there is only one, baladhur, whose sepals clutch its bud in the way Aristophanes describes. His botanists had gotten it wrong.

Ingested, baladhur annihilates undesired memories. He had only to revile his tutor. Proper preparation required an expert hand. He sent for Calanus, Ptolemy’s herbalist and intimate.

His slaves find him with a knife in his heart, his fingers covered in correction-powder. An unfinished letter to Antipater lays beside him, instructing his regent to execute Aristotle. Beneath that lies a second letter addressed to Aristotle. Entire paragraphs have been rubbed out. The missing term of his refutation had eluded him all night. Even had he justified himself, he would have forgotten his victory.

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