One Night in Copan: Chronicles of Madness Foretold Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror - W. E. Gutman

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in the process. Serenely unconcerned, entropy spares the miserable “thing” the passage of time. It is an unlikely act of compassion in a realm of cosmic unconcern.

      Discovered in meteoric debris, Otto’s fossilized remains reveal a brutish organism, apparently legless but equipped with a prehensile tail with which it flogged itself and copulated through an orifice doubling as its mouth. Paleontologists agreed that the improbable entity was covered with a scaly, mottled hide, and that its single eye, capable of polychromatic sight, was probably endowed with a gentle, almost seductive expression. Otto is also credited to have been capable of emitting piercing moans so rueful that they all but froze the hearts of those who may have heard it. The Grand Lexicon of Random Biogenic Anomalies confirms the existence of cosmic influences capable of inducing auto-asexual reproduction, though none quite as peculiar as Otto -- as the monstrosity was christened.

      The ancestor and sole offspring -- the auto-progeny -- of a freak process that doomed it to genetic irrelevance, Otto is believed to have succumbed from exhaustion brought on by futile attempts to reproduce. Tritium dating has tentatively placed the appearance and virtually simultaneous disappearance of this as yet unclassified phenomenon at 500 trillion year ago.

      Otto’s remains were laid to rest and a monument was erected to commemorate the momentous find and incongruity.

      Signs of Man, the legendary if hypothetical vertebrate believed to have accidentally emerged at an earlier period, are never found. An acceptable theory justifying his advent and arguing his brief and noxious tenancy on a minor planet in the Milky Way Galaxy has not yet been postulated. None is forthcoming.

       IN HIS OWN IMAGE

      There is no absolute, no reason,

      no God, no spirit at work in the world: nothing

      but the brute instinctive will to live.

      Arthur Schopenhauer

      It had never been done. It would never be tried again. Not even in a dream. Here was an unrepeatable chance event that upended the laws of potentiality and defied the very core of reason. Bear with me. Imagine absurdity challenging the sublime. Picture the unthinkable. And yet, against all odds, preposterous as it sounds, it happened: A driving force, heretofore unimagined, the offspring of a staggering abstraction that can’t be annulled once spawned -- nor left unexplored -- burst out of a single, indissoluble vanishing point.

      Reaching into nonexistence (or emerging from it?) now ponderable if not fully manifest, suspended somewhere between immanence and dizzying inscrutability (as are all things when first caused), he endowed himself with being. In a single surge of cognition, exceeding his creative potential, he was now his own fait accompli. He had just invented himself.

      Free from his cerebral cocoon, fully transfigured from genderless ambiguity to virile causality, he surveyed his completeness. Heeding a time scale of his own calibration, anxious to add purpose to will, meaning to intent, momentum to stimulus, he separated cause from effect, quintessence from character, provenance from possibility, state from circumstance, identity from distinction, metaphor from divergence. In short, he elaborated all manner of paradox and contrariety which would forever set him apart from those who are not, and can never be him.

      To avert any confusion between him and the teeming realm his incarnation would evoke, he relinquished form for unquantifiable symmetry; he traded transparency for impenetrability. His geometry would be indivisible and without limit, here brimming with presence, there immersed in desolation so vast that even time would stand still at points unmarked and of his own design.

      He then granted himself the capacity to remain unmoved by sorrow and calamity. To justify such dispassion, he endowed himself with ostensible kindness and discernible unkindness, allowing himself to be perceived as possessing equal amounts of benevolence and evil, munificence and heartlessness, genius and imbecility, as circumstance dictated, and depending upon prevailing moods and attitudes.

      Now armed with an ego, he gave himself an indecipherable name by which others would know him. Some followed him in silent awe. Others, whose cries were never heard, wept and suffered and died forgotten because pain, by some outlandish precept, is a path out of bondage. His ear inattentive and his breast unfaithful to the throngs who called on him and sought his succor, he was forgotten, in time, like a distant tragedy, like a bad dream.

      Cynics suggested that he’d been a figment of his own imagination. Others, with greater forbearance, offered that, in a supreme act of mercy, having lost faith in his own inflated image, using his extraordinary powers, he nullified himself for the good of all.

      A great, raging, thunderous roar shook his domain. And the legend, so carefully preserved and perpetuated, was soon forgotten. No one knows for sure whether he was insane or whether those he caught in his devilish trap had lost all reason.

      And peace eternal reigned at last upon the remnant few left to ponder the incongruity of being God.

       THE LONGEST NIGHT

      Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there,

      wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams

      no mortal ever dared to dream before.

      Edgar Allan Poe

      Smokers rebel. Segregated, sneered and coughed at -- “ours is an unreasoned, even absurd pleasure,” they fume, “but it shall not be abrogated.”

      “Smokers may well have the right to smoke,” nonsmokers retort, “but that entitlement deprives us of our right not to inhale their foul exhalations.”

      Intoxicated by their own emissions, if not by their disregard for the well-being of others, smokers reject their nemeses’ argument as “capricious and arbitrary.” Citing the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence which, they insist, endows them with certain inalienable rights, they counter that smoking is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

      Sensing free publicity, the Environmental Protection Agency promptly sides with nonsmokers in hopes of diverting attention from its own hazy record.

      Arguing that the smoker vs. nonsmoker issue is constitutionally insoluble, the Supreme Court recesses for an afternoon nap.

      Smokers keep puffing in designated areas where it is still tolerated, thanks to civil libertarians who would gladly lay down their own lives to protect a smoker’s right to die of heart disease, emphysema or lung cancer. Evenhandedness often leads to absurdity.

      Fights erupt. Spontaneous demonstrations turn out ugly crowds in cities around the world, all barking savage insults and threats.

      In the City of Brotherly Love an angry roar rises from the mob. All heads turn in unison toward the third-floor landing of a once-elegant townhouse. At the end of a rope suspended from a flagpole flying Old Glory, bound together like ham-hocks, dangle the cadavers of a man and a woman caught smoking in defiance of an ordinance prohibiting such activity within city limits. Stirred no doubt by feelings of altruism, anti-smoking vigilantes had rammed a fistful of cigarettes down their throats.

      A few bury their faces, horrified or overcome with shame. Others flee the ghastly scene, vomiting in their tracks. The rest, their qualms flaking away like dead bits of conscience, keep looking in mute fascination.

      Wholesale persecution soon follows.

      In Los Angeles, the police purge smokers from their ranks and transfer them to the sanitation corps. Most adjust quite well once they discover the metaphysical connection between police work and garbage.

      The earth sizzles with rage. The world goes amok.

      In Washington, several legislators who at long last concede that smoking is a deadly addiction countenanced by other legislators because it generates huge taxable revenues -- introduce stiff anti-smoking bills. Others, who refuse to return certain

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