Tax Protest
Fired in the distance, a moment. Loaded, trigger cocked, aimed; then the crepitation, the focus of the howl, unerring, nothing in the lungs of the world to precede the bullet, at me.
It did not hit me. I don't know if it had been supposed to, if some shapeless foe had invested all his hope and loathing in its so doing. Nor do I know if it hit someone else, and if it did whether this someone else was in fact the intended stricken. Nor if neither. I know nothing of this bullet's origin or destination, calculated or otherwise. Its teleology, supposing I can suppose it, will assume its place in the boredom of modern unsolved crimes. For my part I know only that it was a moment, irreversible, unrepeatable, burning with consequence, after which everything changed beyond doubt and without negotiation.
Thenceforth I gave up. I gave myself up, after that. Se questo è un mondo, where any second spent living is vulnerable to a virgin bullet, an untraceable violence, if this is a world grown fat with sourceless iniquity, if these are this world's collapsed and autistic dimensions, busy with the bullet fire of a lunatic's shadow, quindi questo è un mondo better vacated.
Vacant I left it, then, vacant of life that is. Its unlife continued for some time, grieving. Its stone deserts moaned and wailed and spat unconvincing apologies in the dead face of their final emptiness, their final and empty absolution. This sad eternity I left to mourn in private, even wished it a stoic chin; I had gone by then.
Into the jaw of my new home I slid my key smooth inly, turned it, and the door opened. Music to my ears, its wide yawning craters. Inly. Here I would expend my remnants, here on this unspoiled planet, inly. Undisgraced, innomable, inly.
Days, insofar as there were any, passed under this moon's skies, skies blind to all other conceivable cosmoses, stolid skies thick with rain and thunder threat. Its population was exceptionally slovenly. Citizens busied themselves with dawdle and daydream. At certain seasonal high-water marks their equanimity would slip, though, and the atmosphere would bloat with petrifying arguments which observed the force not of sound but of light. Eruptions of riotous violence sent vibrations through the pockmarked rock beneath me. I began to fear for my safety.
The locals took very unkindly to me. At first this was manifest simply as instinctive insider-outsider suspicion, a genetically inherited and evolutionarily sensible tribalism. Soon, however, rumours began to circulate, and stories carry such might, grow and warp and intensify so quickly, persuade and move people to action so powerfully that my fate was contained in a seed that was sick and distorted even during its oestrus. I was a foreign agent, it was said, an enemy of the state with terroristic intentions. Others claimed I possessed powers of pagan magic, and was here to curse their crops and destroy their agriculture. Still others held that I was a preacher and would poison the minds of their children, or convert the weak and inept through rhetorical legerdemain to whatever it was that I was supposed to have been preaching.
This ailing boulder was to be no permanent home, then. Mine was a temporary residence and was always so intended. I did not belong there and it could not be demanded of me that I belong there, nor therefore could it be demanded of me that I abide by its confused and unenforceable laws. I was a free man, am a free man. I shall never be otherwise. Elsewhere would I some time expire, elsewhere would I come to forgive the flesh and be forgiven by it, in silence, in silent riddles, in the silent end.