Long-Tailed Swift and Long-Tailed Swallows

The long-tailed swallows are calling to each other in that screeching cadence that signals that they would be turning in for the night. Their black wings are becoming ever more invisible in the backdrop of the evening sky as they fly this way and that. The white streak on their underbellies, however, stands in stark defiance to the approaching dusk. The sun, now a pregnant-looking disc of bloated orange, is diffusing so much color into the skies that it is almost jarring to realize that it is only setting and not dissolving into a celestial concentrate of carbonated Fanta. It is one of those evenings, when the sounds of nature resemble the hum of home-bound rush hour commuters in Shinjuku; everything is rushing to take cover from the cold glare of the night sky. It is all moving, down to the microbes in the soil, down to the breeze as it sweetly sweeps through my fingers.
The brightest stars are just beginning to show and I make an effort to memorize their positions in the sky. The dance of the stars is always magical; white balls of flame playing hide and seek with the unobservant eye. The view before my eyes is shaping up, as always, to be a beautiful night.
It is quiet there; that place in the trees where the slightest intake of breath comes rushing into the air like the quiet moans of lovers in the throes of passion. It is ever quiet in that place because I am always alone there, sitting in that clearing of low carpet grass in the midst of those black trees heavy with the cloak of night. Crickets sound different here. They do not croon to call females for meaningless reproduction. They chitter and clatter to make music and provide an ambience for this pocket of reality where reality herself would not dare whisper. I know it in my bones that should I seek them out, they would be translucent cabaret-insects the size of cicadas with nothing but the stuff of the universe swimming through the cavities that riddle them.
I am always alone here.
Nobody knows I am here or there. I simply picked myself from the low-lying mattress of our dorm room and left for that place. Often enough, no one knows I am back when I get back either. I simply stop existing when I do. They always forget about me when I leave there and it makes me happy. I do not want anyone to ask me the dreaded question of where I have been. They must not know the secret; the secret of the place that does not exist until it does and disappears in a breath of air.
It is one of those evenings and I am alone with tears in my eyes. The reason for my distress was on the forefront of my mind during the timeless duration that passed on swift feet as I made my way to the quiet place. I cannot remember why I was crying, the quiet place does that sometimes and most times it takes the entirety of my being to remember the way back ‘home’. I touch my face and it comes away with the black water that causes me sadness. I hope it has not stained the white tee I have on. I try to stifle my sniffles so I do not disturb the endless crickets that seek to mask my angst. I know it would be rude of me to disturb this place that radiates quiet like soupy colors.
I sit there for an eternity trying to quiet down and turn my eyes to the stars that are just beginning to show. I do not know the names of the stars or which gods they represent. I do not even know if the gods in this realm live in those balls of fiery white. The long-tailed swallows have long gone to roost and the skies are empty except for my eyes on them and I stare at one star in particular. It is not the brightest or the most colorful, there are other stars that are just emerging that change color like skins off the back of serpents. This star is nothing special, just another ball of fire in a garden of fireballs, just as I am a scentless candle in a chandelier full of dazzling tapers. This train of thought scratches at the edges of some memory from the other side. I quickly abandon those memories and the nondescript star to stare at the open night sky in its fullness. I continue to sit for an eternity.
“Is this space taken?” comes a voice so close it could have been in my head.
“No, it’s not” I reply, “I am not expecting anyone”.
The Presence, for that is the best designation for an entity one does not fully understand, silently creeps up beside me and settles the enormity of its being on the spot beside my left hand. It breathes a sigh that sounds closer to a whistle than its context would allow. I keep my eyes on the sky and try not to think about how strange it is to not be alone in the quiet place.
Often enough, I have inklings of insights to this quiet place. Sometimes I believe it is a transit nihilo; a waypoint between the world of my dormitory and school and tears and fears and depression, and another world much different from it; other worlds, in fact. I often see, at the back of my vision, transparent objects floating in and out of a spot in the trees where even the dark is scared to go. They look like glass fishes made out of clear plastic as they phase in and out of blades of grass and the sleeping yellow grasshoppers that sometimes litter this meadow to profusion, like some cat-sized lizard was preparing for a feast. Spirits I would have called them but for the fact that I also exist in this plane where they seem to be going about their business with a patience to match a retired librarian or twenty. Spirits I would have called had I felt like an outsider looking into some ritual that was not meant for mundane eyes. But I am not an outsider, I know this just as I know where my nose is in the middle of a firestorm. My place is certain, just like theirs, as I move at my own sedentary pace about my non-existent business in the quiet place.
The strangeness of this Presence is this; the other presences phase in and out of existence and do not register me when I am in the quiet place. I am sure they also see me at the back of their vision and would not be bothered to recognize me just as I do them. This Presence who has just settled beside me is, therefore, an anomaly. The urge to look upon this intruder to what used to be my personal space tickles the peaks of my ears and neck. But apprehension and intuition are two sides of the same coin that goes unnoticed by the human race. A voice whispers in my head:
‘Don’t look, boy. It’s deadly’
And so I sit quiet as a puppy, as the meadow whose stillness is the sole source of entertainment for the both of us exists in a way that only a meadow can, and look at the non-descript star one more time to follow its dance through the grand opera that is space.
“You are an unusual one, aren’t you?” it observes.
“How so?” I wonder, trying my best to sound polite.
“Are you not afraid? Alone as you are beside me” it croons. I can feel the edges of a smile on its lips as it speaks. It reminds me of a Chershire cat whose smile was wide and wicked.
“What good would that do?” I ask in return.
“None much really. If I wished you harm, that is” he replies.
“And do you wish me harm?” I continue.
“I guess not” she answers shortly.
“Can you do me harm?”
“I guess so, if you provoke me” it says.
“And how does one provoke you”
“By looking in one of my wrong faces”
We both sit quiet for another spell and I am starting to enjoy the feeling of newfound camaraderie that our little banter has unfolded into this quiet place. The non-descript star is shining tepidly at the zenith. If I turn my head right, I could make it look like I am a spectator of an astral race and my Lukewarm Giant is in the lead of the more brilliant stars. I wonder where they are racing to and what would prompt stars to gather their frocks to start frolicking across the skyscape every night.
“They dance to their destruction” she breathes beside me, low and close to my left earlobe.
“How do you know that?” I ask, perplexed.
“Because I do” he replies proudly, “I know everything and anything. I know where the sun sleeps and where the sheets for the night sky are folded. I know everything or I would know nothing at all.”
I ponder on this for the next few heartbeats. I wonder if he knows what this place is.
“Do you know where we are and what this place is?”
“That, I do not know” she replies shortly.
“Then how do you know everything?”
“Because I am God” she replies with glee.
“No, you’re not”
“How are you so sure?”
“If you were God, I would know. I would feel it in my bones, I guess” I reply as I struggle to find the right words, “the enormity of the presence of a supreme being such as Himself is not something I would not notice, no matter how dull my senses are.”
“But if I am the supreme being, I can do and undo. I can make you not know what you would normally recognize as the one whose knowledge you are surest of.”
“So we are agreed that you are not God then?”
“Yes, we are”
I scratch at the full head of hair on my head and try not to look at him.
“Are you the devil, then?”
“Only if you look in one of my wrong faces” she says and licks my ear.
“Why are you not scared?” she continues.
“I don’t know yet. It depends on how many faces you have”
“Oh! I have many faces” he replies with glee.
“How many of them are wrong?”
“Many and all” he says.
“How many of them are not wrong?”
“One and none” she says.
“Can I look at it?”
“No”
“Can I look at you?”
“Yes” he whispers, so close that his hot breath grazes my lobe and the side of my jaw.
The Presence is rapidly changing form, I notice with some surprise as I look upon it, and playing a game I think I understand all too well. The image of a wheel of fortune rises strongly in my mind as it does this. The rapidly formless semblance beside me is a creature fighting two clashing desires and leaving it to the fates and my luck to determine which would hold. The instant my eyes rest upon it, the shapeshifting stops in a heavy breath of sulfur, and I am looking upon something equally formless.
The Presence looks like…
“So?” she chimes.
“So?” I repeat, dumfounded.
“What do you see?”
“Do you not know the form with which you present yourself to me?”
“No, no. I don’t. Now out with it!” it commands.
“I…I cannot describe how you look even to myself. It seems to me that the guise you employ cannot register on any of my senses. Yet I perceive you, so familiar yet so strange but my perception does not have words in its employ for the purpose of putting flesh to your newfound form”.
Thinking about it is giving me headaches. Streaks of red spider webs spin their dainty way into my vision. The quiet place blurs for a second before coming back into place and even the others are alarmed. Their gentle movements have taken on an agitated edge. It is just like Shinjuku down to the microbes in the soil, down to the breeze as it sweetly sweeps momentarily through my nappy hair.
“Are you not afraid? Changed as I am beside you” it whispers coming in close and licking my ear again. She floats from my left and hovers before my face before moving to my right side. She licks my right ear and the nape of my neck, waiting for an answer. A shiver runs through me where that forked tongue touches my skin from my center to the tips of my fingers and toes. She licks the black tears from my cheek and clucks in disdain.
“I guess not” I murmur as I close my eyes and track Lukewarm’s colossal flight behind my eyelids. There are other stars exploding inside my eyelids now. I wonder where they are coming from.
“Which one of your faces is this?” I inquire.
“One of them and none of them” she says as she drifts back to that place on the left side of my left hand and sitting softly on the night blackened carpet grass.
“I see”.
She flattens out and purrs a low sound like the growl of a bloated motorcycle. I watch her turn a few times, trampling the grass beneath her, before settling down.
“Look at my face” comes her voice from underneath the folds of her wings. The request carries with it a tone of intimacy that settles the butterflies in the meadow. And so I do.
The face, just like the rest of it, bears no discernible features in color or form except for the pair of rosy lips that peak under the folds of her white streaked wings. They still bear the taste of my skin on them and it licks at bits of it as I watch.
“It is beautiful” I want to say but her heavy breathing brings me up short. I realize that she has fallen asleep.
I peel my eyes off those rosy lips and look to the skies again. Lukewarm is disappearing. It had crashed into another star when I was not looking and now it flutters and sputters like a dying candle.
“I’d like to know your name” I whisper to the wind and no one in particular feeling the familiar sounds of the loneliness I treasured stealing back into the quiet place.
“Nesphearat” she says at the same time that he says; “Keotamep”.
“I’m Kafka”
“Nice to make your acquaintance” she slurs as she falls back into a sleep like any other sleep.

…
I do not recall leaving this place ever since. I think I might have stepped out a few times but the quiet place takes away memories of the other side when I come in so I cannot be sure of my comings and goings. He lays here still, in the space beside my left hand swelling and deflating in her sleep and twitching the edges of her subconscious as he dreams formless dreams. She snores, a screeching cadence that signals that night has come for the long-tailed swallows. I think I have been here for an eternity but I will wait a little more until she wakes up or until the black wings of the long-tailed swallows fade into the night sky.