This follows An Old Memory in the Met, Part III, Part II, and Part I…
Al was certain he was one of the oldest things in the world.
To be fair, there were a handful of other things older yet. And there were rumors that some of the meanest, abstract, and powerful ones still lingered, ready for some opportunity. But to Al’s eye none of the heavy hitters walked the earth any longer. The forces that created most of them, that had formed the clay and breathed themselves into it… the Old Ones, they were gone as well.
Humans failed to realize the forces that had been play on Earth before their modernity arrived. And those forces had achieved intelligence long before the upright bipedal monkeys in Africa had. The humans were but the last ones standing in a world that had been abandoned long before. Humans had this innate sense that the world was ending, in their own lifetime, but what they all failed to realize is that the ending had already occurred. Everything in the span of modern humans was the sad, long tail of the end times running themselves out towards the heat death of the universe.
And some of the eldest could give zero shits about that.
Faerie was older than Al, but the earthly plane of ‘pieneerthe‘, the realm of man, was just that… the realm of man. Not faerie. The Fairie enjoyed fucking about, but when it came down to it, they could shift to their home, and not give a literal unicorn shit about what happened within ‘pieneerthe‘ (which literally translated as ‘the world of pain‘). Faerie did not understand pain. It was an intellectual pursuit, so when it got harder because mankind started inventing things, Faerie collectively shrugged and said, ‘fuck it’. They ran back to their fiefdoms and waged their petty wars, still laughing remembrances of the old times when the human animals were a fun distraction from their static, rule-bound plane of existence.
Humans were definitely fun to mess with. Al understood that exceptionally well. He had been doing it himself for thousands of years.
Humans were smart though. And being smart led to other things. Things that were detrimental to the elder races bound to the plane of Earth and unable to shift elsewhere to escape. The ones left behind in the slowly unspooling and boring apocalypse… they had the choice to either hide or live, and it was but only those two choices.
Al had chosen life. It was hard. It was messy. But it was vibrant. Vibrancy was nearly sustenance.
What was a wi’nteko’wa to do? Modern humans would call them Wendigo.
For Al, the answer was to paint. To sculpt. To throw pottery. To bring his own pain and suffering to his work. When the wendigo had been created it had been a natural thing. Tens of thousands of years ago, the realms were well aligned. Earth was a collection of interrelated systems that gave forth an explosion of life and spirit. Wendigos were creations of the Old Ones. In a harsh world, they were meant to be a harsh consequence. Nothing more. They were but a part of the circle of life in a complex set of interlinked countless circles.
But humans were smart. And they learned quickly not to violate the plans. The rules. The consistency. Humans were born of some indominable spirit, something more volatile, something more explosive. Each human was a singular point of confusion to the old order. For within each simple walking, talking, human being, a singular soul existed, and that singular soul found meaning through connections with others of their own kind. They were beautiful and terrible at the same time. A dichotomy that created nothing but madness for the elder races.
The old order collapsed because of the humans. The humans themselves were the end of the world. Humans were the apocalypse to what had come before.
Al would know. He had been there. All those millennia ago, when the world shifted from a multiphasic plane of intermingling worlds, and with some vast cosmic realization, all of reality had clapped once and pathetically gave up. The realms decoupled, the planes shifted to the left and right, and all those forces, the ones that had shaped all of the universe, moved onwards, leaving a sprawling wreckage behind. Al was one part of the vast, nameless, and sprawling wreckage that modern humans considered absolutely mundane.
He was not meant to be walking among the humans 10,000 years later. He was not meant to be here, starving for a connection to the Old Ones that he could not fill. The hunger was insatiable. The hole within him was deeper than the sea and darker than the void, the only thing that could fill it for any amount of time was prey. To kill. To consume. A soul to take.
A living, breathing, conscious, soulful, beautiful thing to be unmade through satiating his selfish, evil hunger. And the irony in it all? The absolute fucking banger punchline to the joke?
The hunger was not because he would starve to death. No. The hunger was there whether he filled it or not. It was crawling under his skin, pulling at this muscles like spurs on his bones, grating him internally as if skeleton was crafted of razors and just the act of breathing caused agony. His heart beating was continuous suffering.
The hunger would consume to the point of considering death, objectively. But only in the sense that death was nearly preferable to the agony of life.
Humans can glimpse this kind of hunger. They are called addicts. Heroin. Cocaine. Oxy. Fent. Meth. Alcohol. It eats at the very soul. It is endless, and even when satiated, it is already scratching at the door again. Death is too far, but the hunger, it is near. The in-between, that place that every addict dreams of, is always just out of reach.
There is no security in addiction. Nothing to achieve, no bar to reach. The addiction only consumes through consumption.
Now. Imagine that for millennia.
What was a wi’nteko’wa to do?
Al shook his head.
What was a wi’nteko’wa to do? He was just a single thing. An old thing to be certain. But he was only a microcosm of self. An individual among eight billion other individuals on an uncaring blue marble hurtling through space.
The hunger again prodded at his consciousness, and he shook his head. Al sighed heavily, knowing that the need would never leave. It would never cease. It would never relent.
A hand touched his elbow lightly.
“Are you ok, Al?” Nami’s voice was gentle, knowing herself what PTSD looked like. She still had the relapses in reacting to loud noises, reverting to her childhood, wondering what neighbors were dying under the bombs from far off planes, already flying to where they came from as their payloads delivered careless, unfeeling death.
Al snapped free of his reverie, and scooped up more of the clay from the bag on the floor. He slapped it on to the accelerating wheel, wetting his fingers in a nearby bowl. “Yes, Nami. I am well.” He did not look in her eyes, wondering if she would sense the hunger there, lurking behind his eyelids like a wolf in the bright light of the moon.
“You were not here just then, Al. You have been staring at your wheel for a good ten minutes, watching it spin.”
“Ah, yes. Yes I was.” He said, sniffing once.
“Where were you?” Nami asked quietly. She picked up her own clay from the bag and balled it carefully, running fingers and palms across the dull matte brown surface. Where her fingers touched, it was briefly glossy before the clay soaked the water in.
“Remembering,” Al sighed. “Always remembering.”
“I hear that,” she said. Nami placed the ball at the center of her table, and lightly pushed her foot on the pedal below, accelerating the spinning platform. She ran her hands across the brown surface, pushing the clay upwards. “The meds help me with that.”
“Mmmmm,” he murmured. His hands moved of their own accord, pushing his own clay into a form only they knew.
Nami did not press. She knew when the old man needed encouragement and when he needed silence. He would talk when he was ready.
Al dipped his fingers again and his hands moved across the face of the spinning clay with ease. Nami attempted to copy his movements, but he made it look so easy. So unnatural. As if his hands were clay themselves, melded in their own components, an extension of Al. His art was sublime, delicate, and yet, brutal all the same. She was proud to be his apprentice in the Art Collective. Learning from a master was a privilege Nami would never take for granted, and she mimicked as best as she could, wetting her fingers, letting the experience flow.
Al finally looked over at her table, sniffing with an arched eyebrow. “Listen to your own clay, Nami.”
“I am, I am.”
A perceived silence pervaded the air, only the sounds of the electric motors humming, wet clay being shaped, and the rumble of the platforms as they spun. Not silence, but an absence of speech. The collective was light today, as few of the resident artists worked early in the morning, and the heaviest tourist season was still months away.
“Let me ask a weird question, Nami.” Al grumbled.
“Alright?” She said.
“What do you think I am thinking when I drift off?”
“Dementia.” Nami replied without a pause.
“Funny.”
“Its not.” Nami smiled lightly, letting her voice shift towards seriousness. “I don’t know. I guess you are thinking about a great number of things. Being present in memories can be all consuming.”
“They can be,” Al grabbed a shaping tool from the bench and placed the edge of it against the edge of the bowl. “I often wonder if what I remember is real. Then I think about how to define real. What is real? My experience is real. But only when the experience happens? When it is in the past, it is no longer real, and only my memory of it lends it realism? What is real, Nami?”
“Well my practically useless masters of philosophy has well prepared me for a wide range of answers here, Al.” Nami teased.
“Tell me what you believe.”
Nami took a deep breath, thinking. She touched the clay and pushed her fingertips, her fingers, and her palms into the cold brown. “The clay in my fingers is real. My breakfast that I ate before starting is real, because it gives my fingers energy to move the clay. This table is real, because I can interact with it. I know my parents are real, because I came from somewhere. I know my sisters were real, even though they are buried in a country I will never return to. I know that New York is real, because I walk through it every day. I know that my mentor is real, because I am sitting next to him. All my experiences inform who I am at this specific point in time, and that moment in time is real, which infers that all those experiences were real, too.”
“Does that make your memories real for me?” Al asked.
“I was not expecting to get into deep topics this morning,” she said.
“Humor an old man.”
“Ok.” Nami leaned back from her clay, wiping her fingers on her apron absentmindedly. “Uh… who I am, and how I act, and the fact that I am a living, breathing human next to you, interacting with you, means that all those things that make me up, the sum of my experiences, again, through inference, are also real. Because I am real. I am not a figment of your imagination.”
“They are real, because you are real.”
“Yes,” she said.
“So are your thoughts real? Your memories?”
“Uh, they should be. But they can be imperfect. Suspect. Memories change over time,” Nami shrugged. “But the experiences that caused those memories still occurred. Do I remember my sisters before they died? Yes. Do I remember every time we played? No. The memories of them are fleeting in a way, but I still love them. It is like… like a fossil of the experience. The fossil can change, morph, and shift over time, but the imprint exists because the thing that made it existed.”
“Fair.” Al nodded. “And I am a fossil.”
“You aren’t that old, Al,” she replied. She noted that he spoke of his age twice already. Strange. He never had referenced his age before.
“Thanks. Appreciate that.” Al pushed his hand along the rim of the bowl, using his long preternatural fingernails to trim the edge cleanly; a knife could not have done better. “I often wonder if I am the memory. I am the memory of thing that no longer exists. The thing that dreamed of me awoke a long time ago and moved onwards, leaving the dream behind to question the dreamer.”
“You are in a strange mood today.” Nami leaned back towards her sad looking bowl, she glanced over towards Al’s, and noted how effortlessly he brought his pottery to life. He wasn’t a master, he was well beyond that. She was in the presence of greatness that defied artistry. Again she wondered how Al wasn’t revered around the world as the true singular master that he was? Even in New York, everyone should know of his talent, but few did.
“I had an old friend call me. It was surprising to hear from him. It has put me in an odd mood, I suppose.”
“Oh?” Nami was nearly bursting internally, curious what kind of thing could put Al out of sorts. She had a million questions, but miraculously managed to keep all of them to herself.
“He had a job offer for me. And it pays well…” Milos sniffed, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “Extremely well.”
“Are you going to take it?” Nami glanced sidelong at Al as he worked, his brow was furrowed deeply above his bushy eyebrows.
“I think I am? It just has me questioning things, I suppose. I have lived the last few years finding an equilibrium of sorts. Working here, working with you… it is a recovery. Managing pain. Managing myself. It has gone well.”
“And you think the gig will knock that out of whack?” Nami asked.
“Yes.” Al admitted to both himself and to his protege. The realization hit him with violence. The shock of it arriving was so sudden, his hands fell to his sides as the pottery wheel slowly spun to a stop.
He would have to doppel for Milos.
The hunger would come.
It would not be the lingering ache that he felt every moment of every day. It would be the ache unlocked. It was a blood rage. The all consuming red light pouring from within, the gluttony of addiction yet unfulfilled, to take all that he could, gorge on it, and move on to the next to gorge more until some portion of the beautiful world was consumed. An all consuming fire that could never be sated, just subdued.
He would have to doppel for the job.
The hunger would explode into his consciousness and he would be unable to resist it. To contain it. To redirect it. To do anything to stop what would happen after.
He would have to doppel for the comb. The link to the Old Ones that would finally shut it all down.
And he would have to relapse as an addict to gain the cure for his addiction.
How many would die? How many humans would he tear through before his addiction was sated? What number was acceptable? One? Two? Ten? A hundred?
Nami? Killing his protege? Slaughtering her innocence? Splashing her blood across the walls of the studio? How many people, beautiful individuals that were more real than he would ever could believe himself to be, would have to be snuffed out so he could get finally be free of the addiction?
Would he hand a vial of fent to an addict, and tell that poor addict that if he smoked just enough, he would cure his addiction? Every addict presented with that opportunity would die.
But Al wouldn’t. He would rip and tear. Shred and bite. Chew and rend.
The Old Ones should have woken before ever dreaming of the Wendigo. Al should not be here.
“Oh my god, Al. This. This is beautiful.” Nami whispered. “Magnificence.”
Nami stood beside him, looking over the bowl that he had shaped lost in his thoughts. The edges flared upwards as if it was a water droplet exploding from the surface of the water, the sides ponderously held as if they would fall back any moment. The bowl was water given life, exploding outwards towards an infinite universe uncaring.
Al swiped upwards in a brutally quick motion, and the bowl fell into itself limply, the slice from his sharp fingernail rendering the strength of its form mute.
“Why? Why destroy it, Al?” Nami said. “It was perfect!”
“It was a dream.” Al deflated like the sides of his bowl, feeling the itch behind his eyeballs, in his skin, and his bones, as if the hunger was his form, and he was only a passenger.
“It wasn’t real,” he muttered.