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[Note: This is a short story I first wrote when I was 22, and my first real attempt at prose. It was originally published to Cosmoetica and long forgotten. Over the last few years, however, I’ve received a surprising number of e-mails and comments about it, and think it’s best to re-post it here. Enjoy.]

The Sum Of Others

The bowl is rimmed with thickening smoke. The Maasai walk around it, dreaming in present tense. It’s what separates them from another world’s conception of things — feeble, static, and utterly dull, their stretched earlobes a kind of great corrective to the universe’s sameness. They are remarkably old, and yet they depend on the same tokens — mohawks, body piercing — so recent to other civilizations around them. Or rather, they are the tokens only now re-discovered, lost to the rules of Greek columns and symmetry, but emerging where all beginnings emerge. They have no symmetry here. One man undergoes this modification; another man does not. It is random and it is their way of paying respect to randomness, the real force of change, the only thing — an illness, a great epiphany that seems to come from nowhere — that stops most people from skimming the surface of things and living in an empty reverie. As the earlobe’s stretched, so is, they think, man’s instinct for pattern. But, none appears, at least not at first. They look at each other and see they have nothing in common save for this mutilation. One is old, his mouth a shrinking indentation against the tracery of his face, his eyes, at this point, quite arbitrary, and his fingers, stirring a lukewarm cup for the newest warrior among them, like inert strings that, after a great flowering of will and psychological exertion, finally move to the bidding of some external thing. The warrior, who’d drink the motoriki and drop in convulsions, is, for now, a healthy man, watching the yohimbe’s slender trunk rising to the sky. As soon as it can’t support itself any higher, an explosion of leaves forever caps its ascent. Months after he strips the bark into the bowl, drinks it, and loses his mind to demons, the warrior fears nothing, not even the encroaching whites. And then, almost imperceptibly, he returns to normal. A native intelligence runs through every wild thing in the village.

1

They could tell the jump rope was heavy by the way it struck the terrace, foregoing the sharp woosh for an imprecise and duller sound. It was green and slick and mangled on the bottom from years of shaping shoulders, legs, and health, and although Plaka was very crowded, I felt, gripping the handles, calculating every tough, dramatic jump, like its solitary event — a good, dependable feeling, since, as an American in Greece, one never had to try too hard or talk too much. It was alright by me, since I can’t stand the thought of putting myself through inane conversation, complete with … Continue reading →