Second Part of Perpetuality! Read the First Part here
Wonder. He perpetually wondered how it must feel to watch a life unravel: not in violent spasms, but in the quiet, deliberate retreat of breath, in the surrender of blood to the soil, in the resignation that no mercy was coming. It was a question, that unfortunately, had been answered for he had seen it once. A man’s face, at first flushed with resolve, turned a ghastly shade of green. Then crimson. Then slack and still. A face that, moments before, had been filled with voice and heat and story, now bore only the vacant hues of cessation. And he, he had stood frozen.
Not with fear. Not even with disbelief. But with a strange, indecipherable inertia. As if his limbs paralyzed perpetually.
The Guillotined Man had a solid, broad build, the kind that usually suggested certainty: but his strength only made his helplessness more perpetually absurd. His eyes were a deep-set brown, lined at the corners. His skin, tanned and beaten by countless suns, held the brittle leathered texture of a man exposed to the world. A faint scar crossed his temple diagonally and, yet, perpetually.
He had chosen this place. That much he understood. This world where snakes thrived and men perished was not thrust upon him. It was elected.
The first death haunted him not for what it was, but for what it revealed. That he, in all his size and solemnity, was a man who did not act. Not when it mattered, and when it did not matter, he consumed himself with paroxysms of guilt. He had sworn, foolishly perhaps and perpetually, to change. To tame the venomous; to intercede. He watched for snakes, learned the gait of their slither. He even began to dream of saving lives, the way others might dream of harvest or rain. These perpetual dreams created a sense of apprehensive ambivalence in his mind, something he not knew to put an end to. This, again, was its own kind of inertia. Harvest and rain, snakes and charmers: almost two different sides of the coin. One expressed beauty and longevity, another deceit and death. But there was yet another sort of inertia that stopped him from questioning this, and on he headed with his gait at snakes.
Two weeks later, under the same sun and on the same ground, a man cried out. And the Guillotined Man did not move. Perpetual Inertia, that, he concluded, was his disease. That night, guilt became a fever. He buried his head in the basin of an iron sink. The water ran cold, and the tap shimmered like a silver blade. He imagined it falling, clean and final. The water became a crowd: cheering, indifferent. The drip of the faucet: a chorus of contempt. The Guillotined Man whispered to himself in that half-language spoken only by the self-condemned. “How does one even distinguish warmth from cold in those final moments?” he asked the faucet. Or the blade. Or the gods.
Then he saw it. Not just the shimmer. Not just the mockery. But his executioner stared back. Perpetual Inertia stopped him from moving yet again. There was no audience. No jury. Just the man who failed, and the man who punished him for it. The Guillotined Man and the executioner.
“I watched you die. I watched you die again. Each time, I stood still as roots. And still I dare to believe I carry your sorrow. But what if I carry only mine?” he said to no one is particular.
He remembered the second man who died. Not just the color of his skin turning to ash, but the noise of it. Not a scream; not even a cry. Just the damp thud of knees hitting dirt, like something falling. He recollected that that man was talking to someone, stopping and starting his speech almost abruptly, he called that person The Devil and he called himself The Recycled Man.
The Guillotined Man had never believed in curses and perhaps it really was just his disease but every time he blinked, he perpetually saw the dying. Every time he exhaled, he perpetually heard the silence of death.
In his dreams this time, he stood beneath an actual guillotine. The blade hovered. Not falling, not rising. Just suspended. He lived a thousand years in that instant. He grew old beneath it. He forgot his name beneath it. He was relieved of Perpetual Inertia, his disease, beneath it. He would wake with the taste of iron in his mouth. Some mornings it was blood, others, it was something he couldn’t name.
He stopped trying to help anyone. Not because he no longer wanted to, but because he could no longer believe he deserved to. Or perhaps his Inertia stopped him from doing so. People passed him by: some wept, some raged, and some begged. He did not lift a hand.
“You make a saint of stillness,” said his executioner, the Camel Rider, passing him once without slowing. “But stillness is not sainthood. It is absence.”
That night, he did not cry. Tears had long since dried inside him. But he took a stone and held it to his chest, imagining it was a heart. Cold, unmoving, reliable. Better than his own. The Camel Rider understood this gesture, and left him peacefully as he rode into the darkness on his dead camel. The Guillotine became a parable. The man who let death pass twice. The man who listened to serpents but never to screams. The man, who that the most absurd disease, was now perpetual in gait, walking towards the direction the Camel Rider had went. He wished they would forget him. Because sometimes, the stories that shame us are the ones that last.
He returned to the place of his second death. The grass still bore the weight of the fallen. The soil still looked uneasy, as if it remembered. He knelt. Not in prayer, but in confrontation. “I did not kill you,” he murmured. “But I did not stop it. I wonder—if you stood where I did, and I lay where you fell—would you forgive me? Would you scream louder? Would you understand?”
The blade still hovered whenever he sunk his head in the sink, but the executioner stopped talking. He conceded that this was his rigor mortis.