Tale 4 - Drink - 2/3rdsish

 Every day, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day along with blessings to a spirit on the face of the waters whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

And then the world became drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous. The temperature  warmed and the Earth became fire and rain. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, and eventually all things on earth submerged within our new planet of cataclysmic tsunami. The planet rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of its trillions of drowned beings and salted to parch those who managed to float above its onslaught. Yet again the world was without form and void - and within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

And not a drop to drink. The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no extra ration of fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well must be fermented ere it turn to undrinkable sludge and excrement. So there was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. Not even the children could have water, it must be rationed for certain animals who could not survive on alcoholic content. 

At first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no choice but to take five times a general five month supply - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie - days of merry work followed fine nights of wine and song. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners. The children would be serenely asleep just after dinner, and so torpid that they never wandered. The House of Noah used our great wealth to buy all the crops of the land to feed the animals, and they pickled within buckets of salt water procured from just outside the ark. 

But always quiet and cryptic, Father took to the wine immediately, and his serenely joyful self turned itself upside down to the most dreadful moroseness, he slept through dinners, and said not a word even as he went about feeding the animals. Only Father felt submerged in the drink while our work seemed as play. 

But at the cusp of manhood, no drink could torpor Canaan. In less than one year he'd have taken to wife, but what wife lived to take him? It began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark.

An animal would exclaim that peculiar scream, always the same in every species, and we knew where Canaan was, but we all were so besotted with drink that what did it matter? The world was ending, boys will be boys, the animals were drunk too, and were we to believe Father, the House of Noah was the one family in the world who did not enjoy the company of livestock. 

The loneliness of the ark eventually got to our wives, and then to us, and as the drink increased, the revelries decreased. Never again would we see anyone but ourselves, and that realization necessitated more drink. Every simple disagreement felt like a fallen house, which also necessitated more drink. Whenever the rain's humidity caused a sniffle, we feared the mortality outdoors would spread inside, which necessitated still more drink. And whenever an animal fell ill, which was often, we had to work hard to minister to them, which necessitated the most drink of all. 

All the while, father had built a new cage, and a large one. We wondered if there was a flying animal we'd forgotten. Father would not say. 

Days grew to weeks, memory blurred day into day, and eventually we had no memory at all. Until one day we awoke to find a dove, dry land, and Ham and Canaan locked together in Father's cage.