Gone the Tides of Earth

At week’s end, or start, on the sabbath day, the villagers come together in revelry. The townsfolk, those who ol’ borough have not abandoned and are less hippy-dippy than the wood dwellers, are in attendance as well.

Alcibiades stands by the bartender’s side, who leans an elbow on the bar’s surface, titillating him over his refusal to have a beer.

‘C’mon, what sort of barkeep doesn’t indulge?’

‘I prefer to serve smiling customers and observe. I feel unwell from the drink.’

‘Alrighty, so be it,’ replies Alci. ‘Then how about instead I promise an exploitatively vulgar tip if you can scrub those glasses fuckety spotless?’

With a wry grin the baldheaded ale-steward with a raggedy cloth starts going to town on a precession of iridescent glasses, humouring uninhibited Alci’s stupor.

‘What do you think, is it perfect?’ asks the bartender, showing inside the rim.

‘It’s fuck-perfect,’ answers Alcibiades.

‘For too long society had been slowed by the stupids,’ I say, clasping my friend’s shoulder, taking up a pint of homemade red and crossing the crowded taverna.

I settle onto a stool by a couple’s table where Jacqueline is speaking passionately with one younger, handsomer of the male villagers. They scarcely pay my intrusion notice.

‘But really, it all and you all are sublimely progressive, spiritual-seeming here.’

‘We’re certainly doing our best. The father says it’s tolerance-patience which is the key in such a world to come to know love and peace. His presence here is a great gift.’

‘Where is old Gherdy?’ I interject.

‘He does not stay out too late or in a busy room very long.’

‘One thing he said to me,’ professes Jacqueline, ‘is that the only time there’s not gratitude is when we have taken things for granted vis-à-vis getting distracted.’

‘Couldn’t be more true. Things we claim to know but have disremembered.’

‘A God is not one who wields great power, sits on a throne or floats about in the sky all robed and bearded,’ I propound, drunkenly boisterous and jolting them. ‘It is thou whom overcomes great adversity, realizing and knowing evermore to look far beyond the woeful perils of the mental processor, even if they cannot see - a little something he said to me.’

‘I will raise to that,’ says the fellow, holding up an ouzo.

‘Now Henry,’ says Jacqueline, countering, ‘I think you should see to Alcibiades.’

As per this request I swivel, engaging the optical sense, spotting Alci flailing and jesting from the swill-saturated countertop, the faithful barman hysterically at heel.

‘Ah, he’s fine. They are all loving it. That is his natural habitat.’

Jacqueline concedes to brandish her gaze at me as the kindly counterpart’s attentions are fixed on the event, alerting me to the fact she is actively on the hunt.

‘Misty the beaver broketh the damn,’ I say, rather nonsensically.

She smirks with both deep amusement and embarrassment, I sip, stand, and salute with the eyes, as the fellow’s focus returns, then depart the polite preamble determining the fate of an (their) impending nexus event. Jacqueline raises her tankard of blonde.

By the back before round to the stair is a troop of older citizens playing the musical instruments of the Ancients: lyre, kithara, aulos. In addition, one strums an acoustic guitar.

I sit by in a ring of people enjoying the music against the dull roar of vocal cords blended in the background. There are young, attractive families, and the middle-aged as well elderly and immobile. Soon my eyes are shut as I listen with profound contentment.

‘It has been a beautiful evening,’ says Mohamed, as we recline in leathern chairs set around the fire, nearly everyone else having cleared off. ‘Like many a night before those autocrats decided to lay waste our world.’

‘And the pandemic and climate changes,’ adds Apollon, the barkeep.

‘Don’t forget the Yellowstone eruption, that was gnarly,’ I edit.

‘Yes, many things,’ agrees Mom, ‘though especially that New Axis.’

‘Putin should have been screened for early-onset dementia.’

‘Not too early. The man was a gerry.’

Alci is asleep on a dining table and Jacqueline reading a novel, the youthful local man resting sleepily with his head eased on shoulder and a hand atop her knee. Taverna-keeper and inn-owner drag on a cigarette and cigar, respectively, while Jacqueline and myself split a sizzling roach, having been tipped-off to the whereabouts of marijuana.

‘Good for the heart and soul,’ offers Mohamed, taking a puff.

‘Too bad more people weren’t using this,’ I answer, taking a drink, ‘less of this.’

‘Hippocrates in session,’ says Jacqueline, eyes peering up off the pages.

‘You mean hypocrite,’ I inform.

‘Exactement. Thanks for the correction.’

She collects a blanket from the back of Apollon - or Po’s - chair, gathers up Alci’s limbs and tucks it around him neatly like a pharaoh, dissected, ready for mummification preparation and eventual sarcophagus transfer. Then she takes the sleepy, smiley guy’s hands and leads him onto his feet. They share peer, partly smoulder and appreciation.

‘We are off,’ she says. ‘Goodnight gentleman. Get Alcibiades to bed, Henry.’

They leave quietly out of the taverna, creaking away from the wooded steps. We smoke silently and ruminate solitarily, the quietude of men among men setting in. Mom indicates the need for sleep, taking leave shortly next, followed thereafter by Apollon.

As above so below; so it is now here as in the beginning. Whence I stayed in the village, and the crone had taken leave on many a night, from silence and sequestering I learned much from her of which Gheronda had had to say. She was the greatest teacher. Merely to have followed her and not led oneself astray, as she thought best, would have been so. To have walked, cooked, cleaned, rested, not having impeached quality of life.

But still then living was unreal, and now even the same. Memories and thought are ghosts, emotion scant a spectre. What to betray divine order leads to castrate living. How one hopes for faith restored. To full-force feel the state beneath the fraught dysfunction.

Embers fall away from the black-burnt wood and dash against a pewter fender. A licking flame spread o’er the entirety of log left, devouring what remains the last billet. Alcibiades moans softly and the shadows close around, falling upon the dark spaces.