FicWad

Chapter II
MADAME YALDA

March 23rd
Thousands of miles away towards South Asia, several time zones ahead.
“ye dharmā hetu prabhavā hetun,
teṣāṃ tathāgato hyavadat,
teṣāṃ ca yo nirodha,
evaṃ vādī mahāśramaṇa”
Thus the mantra was chanted, words from Bardo Thodol, their book of the dead, the mantras that would navigate the soul athwart the bardo, the liminal dimension between death and the rebirth; as the monks stood by the inanimate body of a man, to whom no ties they had, laid miserably on a rock atop the distinctly erect tower, tower of silence.
“It makes you wonder, was he to cry or laugh?” someone joked, standing by the naked and cold cadaver, “had he knowledge of the fate that awaited him, to oblivion!”
The monk in his carrying out of the exequies, displeased with the impertinence of those before him, clapped his hands, twice, trice, venting his pique in words they fathomed not, imparting no sense of consolation to those around him.
“What had transpired out of thin air, evanesced into the dross of nihility once again.” Sir Carl Hannigan repeated after the monks, “this is it, the conclusion to our funeral, where the dead to be reunited with the great womb, give it to them, they have arrived to take it.” Said he when the monk produced the axe from beneath his robe, about to dismember the cadaver, said he when the assembling carrion birds in the grey heights, asked to be fed, so to accomplish the great work of the earth mother, and so the monk hacked through a torso, bloodless and taut.
“Look at them,” the man marveled, “shed no tear for their beloved one, maimed before their own eyes!”
“Psychological hardiness, is the determining factor.” Hannigan expounded, walking away from the crowd that gathered to witness the burial rites.
“The determining factor behind what?” somebody asked, during a respite the team had, as they sat camp on the salty arid valley, where this sky burial of a local woman had taken place, somewhere in the Tibetan desert at dawn.
“Call it pertinacity, endurance or the inexorable tenacity! That seldom and most desirable personal trait, determines the probability of success or failure in releasing one’s highest desire, against all odds!” Sir Hannigan proclaimed, went on rambling, “that’s for one, when it comes to collective hardiness however, it is the determining factor in battle, forget what they taught you about strategic warfare, the precipitation in conduct and efficacy in action, forget the numerical superiority or the advantage of terrain, the hard mental stamina under extreme stress levels in the face of a desperate situation is a dynamic force of incomparable potency, that decided the outcome of decisive wars in the distant past. I’d go as far as to say, the psychological hardiness of a people, is their greatest asset in the Darwinian struggle for world domination in our clash of civilizations.”
“You know, this is what I revere about you old man!” Shteel retorted, “your pragmatic thinking, just transcends all logic! The social Darwinian strife was the impetus behind the cultural imperial takeover of our nation over the crumbling West, oh yes! the will for power of a conquered people to serve the best interest of their colonizers, right? A subjugated people whose country is no longer theirs must be more than happy to build it up into a great nation! No, that’s not how I see it, the Weltzentrum is a puppet state, and you know that. The result of the authoritarian stimulus of the colonists, our people are but slaves with their own consent in their primordial homeland, Alaska! Their hardiness long waned and been defeated the day the Republic had fallen. Your vague survival theories don’t apply on the Zentrum, a nation of guinea pigs in the experimental illusion of democracy, who happened to build a nice country because they had no choice, never out of a national pride. Just like that.” Shteel in his platonic dialog with first surgeon Sir Carl Hannigan, broke off the idle chatter and cut straight to the chase.
“So you believe the meteoric ascent of the free city of Weltzentrum, one in its magnitude only surpassed by antediluvian Persepolis, was the product of couch potatoes trying to live day-by-day in the hollowness of material peace?” a tensely engaged Hannigan fired back, ‘our people are alive, not because their imaginary masters told them so, but because they have something to live for, some people are conscious of that higher purpose behind the wheel of life, while a significant incentive is subconsciously influenced by that purpose, whatsoever it might be, just as the maternal instinct lurking in a woman’s womb at one point will surely kicks in. The sons and daughters of Juneauton got where they are today, not because they were forced to by a superior entity, they did it because of their inner being dictating upon them to carry on with their first class lifestyle, regardless of whose in control. When the Sassanid Empire was vanquished by the Saracen hordes, a four-millennia-old nation rooted in high culture and science was in less than a decade turned upside-down, in the name of a desert religion, an alien social order incompatible with their heritage was forced upon them, under such circumstances did the Persians set back and accept their new reality, as inferior men and women to the desert tribes, their new rulers? Did Persia, the cradle of European knighthood, suddenly deem herself a nation of slaves by consent under the new order imposed on her people? No, it never happened, they never gave in to that meek mentality, maybe their collective image had assumed a different shape, but their individual selves retained the original form, the unalterable monad. Mohammedan Persian citizens of the Caliphate, inside, were the same as their prehistoric blood ancestors, they venerated their language and somewhere deeper inside still they exalted Shahanshah Cyrus the Elder as their God Emperor, it is the Persian factor that made the Golden Age of Mohammedanism possible, it is the Indo-Iranian blood that ran through veins of Avicenna, Alpharabius and Rhazes, Khayyam and Algoritmi, the pinnacle of an ever-rising spring of Avestan wisdom, the Iranian Intermezzo that influenced the Persianate Mohammedan civilization in a thousand and one aspect. The Persians in this case had reversely absorbed their conquerors into their own ways, just ask Alexander the Great, he knew a thousand years before! They who colonized the land, were in turn culturally conquered by the superior-minded people they wished to subdue. Mark my words, the national history of Greater Iran shall stand as a model to our future, Lord of the Word is our godfather, his Shahnameh our gospel. Just as the aspiration for greatness hard-wired in the Indo-Iranian people, never faded after the fall of their empires into the hands of barbarism, a manifestation of their Darwinian struggle in its purest forms, so must our people strive to liberate themselves, not from the Sword of Damocles, but first from within their minds, and the rest will unfold by itself, for they are slaves to no one, we surely are not, we ain’t Shteel.”
“What do you mean by the rest?”
“The macrocosm.”

Meanwhile in Juneauton Weltzentrum, sixteen hours behind.
Dusk rose to his feet, a sigh of unnerving presentiment escaped his lips. “Nothing good comes out of it, nothing good when the night equals the day.”
On spur of the moment the rooftop deck’s aircraft warning lights illuminated, hereafter, the nocturnal moths drawn to the heat, seemed like wiggling electron particles endlessly spinning about their atomic nucleus.
“It’s going to be a tough tonight,” said Hoyden, coming near him.
“You bet.”
“Well, I’ve something for you, I think it’s time to give you this,” she told him as she undid the clasp on her arm ring holding a Black Sun amulet, the filigree amulet a solar disk whose eight jagged spokes inwardly radiated. Hoyden disjointed the arm ring into two halves, kept one to herself, and fastened the other half to the chain Dusk wore, she then confessed, “my mother, my mother who had made me the armlet, told me that one day its other half should be given to someone, the one I’ve admired the most in my life, one day when the vernal equinox has occurred again.”
“As firm as the bond of blood.” Said he, grasping on the broken Sun wheel hanging on his chest, they wove their union under the grace of the unconquered sun, and they kissed, the kiss of betrayal.
And so there hung they on, submersed themselves athwart the haar-ish coastal haze, wanderers above a sea of fog, the sea of rime that slithered enshrouding the boroughs.
Hoyden followed suit, as he jumped off the steel ladder mounted onto one of those large air-conditioning units; some of the machines methodically gutted, now junk, had served the copper thieves. Passing through a back door, reaching down the lobby, they got into a double-deck elevator, then not prior to the whooshing noise would they make sure it’d sunk bottomward, to wind down at the 26th, the hexed floor, the doors slid open. Toward apartment 837.

“It’s dark, isn’t it? But it isn’t time, yet, is it?” peeved for they disrupted the state of serene tranquility she had enjoyed, Madame Yalda the half-blind called for an answer; through her bright achromatic prosthetic eyeballs, implanted into her visual cortex, she detected in hyperspectral thermal imaging, two of her lodgers of the decade, Dusk and Hoyden. “I bet you won’t meet my expectations, tonight, either.” Yalda went on mumbling; in the late seventies of age, that’s the norm. And in disagreement with negligible senescence, her ash grey hair had its eumelanin lost in a matter of a third century ago, with vestiges of long-gone beauty branding her furrows, the youthful charm that once raised eyebrows had faded out in a life-time diet of tobacco and alcohol; while the non-congenital vision impairment she came to be victim to, had resulted in episodes of unipolar disorder. Withal, Madame Yalda had the vibe to run a perfume store, a master perfume maker, she sold in the morning that which she created at night, with the likelihood of worsening her chronic insomnia; still, her small shop at the street corner, the same street where she lived, though frugal in appearance, drew to its front a committed clientele, the crème de la crème residents of the Zentrum devoted to her musky elixir, a puff of her quality fragrance to them was the sweetest drug; needless to say, the store enabled Yalda with a reliable income source during the hardships of her age. Other than that, in her lab coat she so often dressed.
“Worry not, we’re just as close to meet your expectations.” Returned Dusk, flat out giving Hoyden the wink, their shared intent.
“Please, no games,” Yalda made the murmur, as if it took her nothing to catch him in the act, hunching over a paper she jabbered away, ‘so it’s been, let’s say fifty-one hundred and twenty days since your lease, when the mortgage got signed with six hundred and eighty dollars a month, which sum up a hundred and sixteen thousand and forty-eight unpaid bucks.’ Sitting to a gateleg table immersed she herself doing back-of-the-envelope calculations. At intervals, as she longed for what had remained of a cold meal, reaching into a piece of wrinkled aluminum foil she revealed a Juneaumunchie, the local specialty, grilled anchovy and hot pepper seasoned corn, rolled in a tortilla, Yalda tucked into it, then would she sip at a frothing cup of coffee, kopi luak, the pricey ritzy coffee beans made her daily hot cup of ambrosial exhilaration, of course she didn’t buy it in pounds as some would suggest, lest she’ll end up spending a fortune on what! The savoriest coffee in the world?! So what!
Madame Yalda had gotten her own methods in doing almost every single thing the way a Suabian housewife would; somewhere in her kitchen, was a cage, a medium-sized cage, in which she kept a pair of toddy cats, omnivorous little animals native to Southeast Asia, from where berries of the kopi luak were originally harvested, and so to the toddy cats in the wild fed, getting a digestive touch inside the animal’s stomach at the point in which zymotic chemistry takes place, only for the coffee beans oozing through the civets’ intestines to be later defecated, then the feces were sieved out, hence the processed coffee beans collected, roasted, and packaged; and that’s also how Yalda the connoisseur house-made her select civet coffee.
“Yikes, after all this time, same old things still, don’t have the foggiest idea nor a dime.” Hoyden chimed in.
“Oh treasure, before you know it,” said the aging woman, oddly enough, her cervical vertebrae maintained an equivalent degree of flexion, “end justify the means…benign or not, end justify the means.” She added.
“Take into account,” interrupting her, his voice tuned to imp disdain, “adjustment for inflation rate, with respect to CPI at the base fifty-one hundred and twenty days ago, subtracted from CPI of present day at a hundred and thirty-seven, divided by the base year’s price, and multiplied by a hundred, counts you a bonus of thirty-seven per cent in our rent payment.”
“Or we may otherwise,” told her Hoyden, “just carry you to the hills and beyond, leave you where no twigs you can snatch, you’ll dehydrate and starve, till you die.” Tongue in cheek.
“Yaddi, yaddi, yadda--” slurred Yalda, struggled not to take seriously what she’d just heard, ‘listen to me darling, not even then you’ll get rid of me, in sake of the mazuma. It’s in the famine years of the Kamakura past, that this custom of ubasute, of elders like me being taken to godforsaken places by people they’d once loved, just to be left there to die, thrived more than the angels of death.’
“No, you listen to me,’ Dusk blurted out, ‘one year, all I’m asking is one year from now, so I graduate, seal a deal with the biggest contractor in the country, and repay you for the past seventeen years, multiplied by interest, even!”
“Seventeen years down the drain! How fast time speeds by these days.” Groaned she, “still I so vividly recall the day they left you on my doorstep, the bastards never talked of their intent, just gone, no goodbyes, no good wishes! But what can I say, they paid well though, never missed a deadline, good lodgers who paid their rent on time, but screw them for what they’ve done, the bastards just departed leaving you behind, without notice, if only I knew, I’d have got done with their contract, I always thought they’d come back, that one morning they’d knock on my door, but it never happened, God knows I miss them after all! but heck if it weren’t for the kindness He burdened me with, I’d have thrown you down the street seventeen years ago, the street where you belong. Screw it though, I can’t help but to trust your perfidious words young man, I can see that chutzpah in your eyes!” with no signs of bringing her drivel to a halt, shrew Yalda not looking at him in fact, and letting loose a heavy sigh she said, ‘I see how apt you are to the tough work, how willing you are to slog away while everyone else having the time of their lives, ceaselessly awaiting for the magical moment that would take them through the rectum to the stars, one that would never materialize! But you, sooner than later, it is you who will end up living the day ten times as much as they ever did, while they’ll have to undergo the hardships of life ten times as much as you had.’
‘How does the half-blind see that without a lantern?’
‘Eyes are windows to the soul, aren’t they?’
Hitherto, the wall clock hanging in the midst of the disarranged room, had just marked the ebb of another troubled day. Yalda walked to the bay window, gawked through the opaque glass at the northern-side of the conurbation, the borough off sight of the nacreous city; at the hub of this urban web, stood the telecommunication and observation tower, the Quartz. The Quartz building, the axis on which the geometric pattern of the boroughs revolved, over which it loomed in equidistance to three colossal obelisks, among the public known as the Solar Pillars; lofty platinum beams of whitish light demarcating old Juneau, raw iconic symbols; while the larch parks, seemed to absorb the city luster.
And so Hoyden stood to her left, Dusk to her right, flanking their foster-mother, they too stared outside; the blizzard had just begun.
‘It’s now.’

00:41 a.m., the adhesive silence of the night had piecemeal dominated over the little household; Dusk sealed off from the world in his dimly lit room; feeble sounds reaching out, Elgar’s Enigma Variations gave some meaning to the modus vivendi he’d coerced himself into through unfinished nights, back and forth; like the eternal return he believed in, and so did she; for that Hoyden too, was involved in the uncommon practice.
Under fluorescent tubes casting broken black light that scattered through her irides, the emerald irides. He laid down, his upper body exhibited before her, across his dorsum, underneath his skin, the ultraviolet-reactive ink glowed, nara black ingredients incorporated, and the extensive irezumi, the incomplete ouroboros tattoo was revealed, as she engraved the self-cannibalistic serpent on his flesh with two-coil iron; Hoyden was the artist.
“At times, I really am afraid.” She told him.
“Of?” muttered he, his forehead set onto his crossed forearms.
“Spring, spring’s coming, that tomorrow or after, I’ll be kneeling to the altar, to oblivion.” Hoyden distractedly returned, losing her focus on the matter at hand, the piece of tattoo she threaded beneath his skin.
“Alas! you’re too charming for their standards to be chosen.” Joshed he, gallows humor shamming insouciance, but inside, the perturbance he had incurred inside of him, from the thought of Hoyden’s probable fate for the next five years, it alone was consuming him from inside. For the instance however, his words could draw a wry smile on her face.
By the occurrence of the equinox marking the year’s eve, and not until the coming of summer, on the day of the summer solstice, only then the young women of Juneauton would feel relief, while others utter disgrace.
When the winter days were brought to an end, and the gauzy coating of March’s rime thawed down the eaves, fifty-one Maidens, girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, were singled out of each of the nine boroughs, with merely nine of them would endure as the prospective brides of eighteen Senior officers who had sworn the oath to the Temple, the Overseers Templi Occidentalis.
It was all a mass wedding, the relic of a mad long tradition, initiated through select polyandry; the nine brides were human, while the eighteen Senior officers were of alien blood, where each virgin was to be shared by two male aliens, as wife.
The polygamous miscegenation practice verboten by law for every citizen of the boroughs to engage in, it strictly was exclusive to the patriarchal aristocracy of the quasi-religious organization, the Overseers Templi Occidentalis, the Temple. They called the event, the Fount of Youth festivals, the grand finale of the bloody Venatio Games.

Intermittently, resonant sirens of the cruisers patrolling the borough were heard; as Hoyden drowsed off on his bed, without bidding farewell to yesterday.