Tale 4 - Drink - Rough Draft

 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. 

All the while, as the temperature warmed and the Earth had become fire and rain. Father communed with a pool of drink. Every day as he had for hundreds of years, he put a finger into the drink and touched its holy spirit to his lips. Every day he spoke with the spirit of the drink, and the drink spoke back. For seven hours every day Father would walk around the pool, speaking questions and answers, and the pool told him all of creation, of all its trees and crowns, of its spheres both visible and hidden, and the pool's holy spirit made Father the wisest of men. 

The holy spirit had told Father to build an ark and gather every living thing that creepeth upon the earth, for the spirit was wroth with the world and would flood it to begin the world anew in a second Eden where would live none but the righteous offspring of the House of Noah. 

And the Spirit was right, for lo, the world had become drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous, until all the world was again without form and void. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, until the planet itself 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 glazed with salt to parch any floating above. And within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits.

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 in alcohol. But the first thing we brought aboard the ark was Father's pool of drink, of which he made us carry pitcher by pitcher to a second pool he'd constructed alone.

On the ark at first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no extra rations for the animals, but to allow ourselves twelve times an eleven month supply for four families - 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 the deluge outside the ark. 

But Father had always been quiet and cryptic with all but the holy spirit, and though he took to the wine immediately, his serene self turned upside down to the most dreadful moroseness. None saw him eat, and he said not a word even as he fed the animals. Yet while Father felt submerged in the drink, 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? 

The noises 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 were great with labor to minister 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, until eventually there were no memories except the wailing of our wives as dawned on them a world of loss, and the raging mischief of children bored into our heads, which necessitated still more drink. Raven after dove after raven sent forth to find evidence of land; but there was only drink, until finally a dove emerged with an olive branch. The Lord had spared us, and thus could we the survivors multiply in a new era of righteousness and favor and grace. 

But on the very day we were to leave the ark, great human cries awoke us to find Ham murdered, and Canaan locked in Father's cage.

"Canaan! What have you done?" Here is the dialogue between father and grandson which followed:

"I have done nothing! Ham was murdered by you Grandfather!"

"The Holy Spirit warned me something awful would happen, but surely it would be less than this! Murder or defilement among kin is what I expected, but what has occurred is so much worse!"

"Why have you murdered my father?"

"He tried to kill me before I laid my curse on you!" 

"Why would you curse me?"

"Look at the chalky substance within the drink! The imagination of man's heart is evil from its youth! Canaan has gazed upon my spirit's nakedness and spilled his seed into it! He has raped the holy spirit of the Earth! We shall never rebuild Eden! The whole flood has been for nothing! Humanity now shall continue just as it has!" 

"But I did not...."

"Cursed be you Canaan! A curse you were upon Ham and upon this ark, and cursed you shall be upon dry land! A servant of servants shall ye be unto your bretheren! A blessing shall this Holy Spirit of mine be to Shem and Japeth, but the your house Canaan shall be a servant to the servants of Shem and Japeth all the days of their li..."

"Grandfather, that was milk." 

"What?"

"It WAS milk."

"Did Grandfather really think fermentation and salt would keep a kingdom of animals alive for a whole year?"

"I think whatever the spirit in the drink tells me."

"There is no spirit in the drink."

"SILENCE!" 

"If it's a spirit, then spirit told you what your mind already saw."

"Indeed, the spirit told me the world is fornication and wickedness. Just like y..."

"No, grandfather, the world was already flooding, the spirit told you what your eyes already saw." 

"We do not see but with the eyes of our spirit!"

"No, our spirit sees with our eyes." 

"Profanity! You deserve to be cursed all over again."

"You will not lift the curse from me?"

"Never!"

"Then I curse you too Grandfather!"

"Abominable blasphemer! May you be known through all eterni..."

"May you endure your final three hundred years knowing nothing of life but this stupid spirit of the drink or whatever you call that liquid shit and may all the flesh that creepeth upon the earth find no peace in you." 

"Outrageous infide...!"

"May your bullshit visions of the Eden we lost haunt all your days and creep all your nights. May you forever see in me your only impediment to paradise."

Noah immediately charged at Canaan to strike him down but was prevented by the cage he built himself. He reached for the key to the cage, but Canaan pulled Noah's key out of his own tunic. 

"While you all spent your nights in a drunken stupor I was milking all the mammal females and feeding it to their children. I even fed the milk to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because children will never survive on just the alcohol you've spent your whole lifetime warning us against and then made us live on. Shem, do you really think Arphaxad could survive the whole first year of his life on nothing but alcoholic breastmilk?" 

Clearly in grief, Noah reached for his sword with a clear intention to fall on himself. From out his tunic Canaan produced Noah's sword as well. 

"How can you be given power of life and death? You murdered your own son because of some milk and you don't even know what it takes for your own grandchildren to live!"

A great cry went up from Noah. 

"My father is now dead because his own father slew him, and the outside world was the iniquitous place? Fuck you!"

Noah exhaled a still greater moan.

"We have no idea why the world flooded, but you all kept saying that the world was getting warmer every year of my childhood. Maybe it was from all those fires people light to worship their gods." 

Noah began to cry in earnest.

"And if the world was just a place of people killing and raping each other, maybe it's because worshiping all those drinking spirits and drugs were what made them so. You're no better than they are!"

The wailing and crying grew entwined. 

"And alright, maybe I jerked off in the holy spirit, but the whole ark is alive because of me. Me, not your crappy god. I hate the drink and everything it made you all do. I hate the fact that we're still alive and everybody else is dead, and if there is a spirit who did this, I hate him more than anyone and I curse him forever."

"Execration! Astonishment! Reproach! We spit you out of the House of Noah for eternity!" 

"I was planning to run away from this incompetent house for years. Now I've got a whole new world I can start on my own!" 

---------------------------

We never saw Canaan again. Within two days he'd run away with Japeth's granddaughter Arsal. I've had half a millennium to think about that last horrible day on the Ark. It's always possible that Canaan was right in every particular. Maybe there are no spirits and the earth contains nothing but fire, water, and air. But why did Father know to build the Ark? And why did we, out of all the world, survive when no one else did? Did the Drink's Holy Spirit truly know what was to come? And even if the Drink has no spirit, did our belief in the Drink made us survive when no one else would. Even if there was no drink that chose us for its terrific knowledge, could believing in it make us survive through hardships no one else can or would?