The Pyrrha Prayers 01

Calling her

Calling her

The Year 2072

At first light, I get up to check the flow. To look at the inlet-pipe. Like I did yesterday. And the days before. As if my hundred ways of staring into the abyss of that big steel tube will somehow bring me new ideas. By now, the giant tap brings in no more than a trickle. Which amounts to a few buckets per day. For a hectare. That's not enough. Sure, nothing ever is enough. But this is the kind of not enough that will soon kill me. And everything else that makes up my world.

It is the North wall that has the water-inlet. A black steel pipe, four meters up. Large concrete basin underneath. I could stick my head in the downward-curved open end of that pipe. My big, wrinkly skull would fit like a cork. If I needed to block it. End it. This canon of a tap is already blocking itself, though. Without me corking it up. All by itself, it's been busy shutting down for a long time.

It shuttin' fucks down the whole goddamn plot.

A blocked main artery that will end me.

Unless I find a way to unclog my sole source of water.

"Eldon?"

"Don't you Eldon Mercer me, I am here, aren't I, first thing in the morning? Let me think."

"Can you?"

"Yes, I think I can. Shut the thunk up."

"Well, we'll be here if you're done thinking."

"Yes, you always are, stuck in the back of my head. But if I die, you die, so if you are even slightly smarter than you sound, you'd know to stop bothering me. Your entire existence depends on my humble attempts of fixing whatever fucks up, so shut it."

I think best while doing the buckets. Fifty of them. Every single day. Twenty kilos of soil in each hand. From the pond to the hill in the southwest corner. Twenty-five journeys. With one act, I enlarge the lake, and make the mountain bigger.

Every single return, I am greeted by the nameless ducks. The fat suckers taste too good to name them. A perfect lose-lose. I lose a duck. It loses its life. Or a perfect win-win. Same-same. They bring me joy either way. Dead or alive. Stupid thunking. All is so wonderfully stupid. Like the bucket-ritual. Before too long, my whole waking life will consist of ritual. Undisturbed balance. A perfectly predictable paradise. A square garden with circular time. Except for that giant steel dick poking through the concrete, fucking up my life with blockage.

Maybe that thought wakes the word blowjob. Floating like an old and nearly forgotten ghost through my inner water-lab, it suddenly ejects a new idea. Accompanied by the accusatory.

"Couldn't you have thought of that earlier?"

My voices are like the ducks. They forget I've killed them many times before.

I have tried poking. A hundred ways. With no effect. I have tried sucking. Fabricating several homemade plungers, and then attaching weights that I dropped like a man being hanged. No results besides a deep resonating foemp, or a majestic ffung. Then a false burble of some extra fluid. Only because it was held back for a bit before I jerked it out. A roadblock for droplets. If only something could crawl up that pipe and help restore the water.

But a literal blowjob hadn't yet crossed my mind. Blowing up stuff -my main first response- this variation on the Eldon-go-to solution has somehow escaped me until now. It triggers a whole new plan, seeds clouds of variations. The inner tree branches out with weedy enthusiasm. If I can pressurize the pipe, that will push back whatever is clogging my water-inlet. I should pump in air or better even create a vacuum by placing a cap or a sealed lid and sucking out all air until the blockage gives way. I must have a one-way valve somewhere. Left-over from one of the inner tubes.

The buzz of having a plan is muffled by the sudden realisation of rule breaking. My own holy law. The prime directive of sanity and superstition. Honoring the shrine to start the day.

I quickly walk back through the garden. Straight through the coppice patch. The little earth temple dome is my center. I feel guilty about forgetting the morning visit. Despite it being totally okay to do it now. It is still very early. The sun has not yet climbed the wall.

I greet myself.

"Eldon Mercer, you are here."

And I answer.

"Yes, you are here."

The entrance forces me to my knees. I crawl in. Get used to the dark interior. Then pick up my duck-feathered brush to ritually dust off the collection of relics that makes up my earth-womb. I greet them, as always, one by one. This is my table of stories, my shelf of remembrance. A skull, an egg-shaped stone, a lightbulb, an enameled sign, the mobile phone, a red bit of glass from a car's indicator light. I have many memories.

Is this meditating? I have stopped wondering and just sit there until the silence arrives.

It sometimes does.

But not today. My mind is too busy. I apologise to the shrine and leave before sunlight arrives. It's barely hitting the top of the west wall, of which I can see a small section. My forest blocks the view on the right. I stretch. The different layers of my mind are working overtime. Next to the water problem, it is the busy season for the garden.

A whole gang of Reddotts is wreaking havoc in the bamboo canopy. Their hyper-excitement an extension of how I feel, I can't spend days and days just on fighting the water-pipe, I will lose seedlings, shoots will turn fibrous and not pickle well. Keeping the irrigation going is half of my day already. I am behind on tool maintenance, sharpening knives, so I can finally carve a replacement for the handle of the felling axe. I have a dozen experiments underway. The nursery is overcrowded. My roof needs repairs. If by chance the rains will come, the holy fluid will leak into oblivion. I don't know how I will manage. I have run out of options. The level of the pond is dropping faster than I hoped.

And I am tired. More so than before. Getting older. Slowing down. Nothing crazy. Still healthy, strong, but levels are declining. Energy, speed, libido, my spatial insight is less supple. And I worry about my mental health. After decades of not caring a damn bit if I was insane, I now wonder about little signs. Doubting my senses. Questioning my judgement. I distrust what I think I know. I am unsure. Unsure in a debilitating way.

And being unsure eats up time. I was given all the time in the world, and still, I'm running out.

After half an hour of transplanting the minuscule seedlings of my last onions, I can no longer stand the fiddly fumbling of ten-thousand newborns and get up to start the project being worked out by levels four, seven, and thirteen. They insist on involving the ground floor crew of the Mercer corp. I walk over and climb the wobbly structure that allows me to reach the limp dripper. I drink from my insanely clean source, then wash my hands in the overflow basin. It is the best thing of all. Water so pure I didn't trust the testing-kit back then.

I now do what I have never done before, but should have. I listen. I place both my hands to help my ears, and awkwardly tilt my head back under the dark exit and listen. I listen hard. Concentrate on what comes out. I really open up. Try to hear what is in there, out there. To sense deeply into the regions beyond my little realm. Like a musician would test a new venue, I produce short bursts of sound. Like sonic pulses sent out by a submarine reading the depths. My ears intensely attempt to read the internal space. It is not the echo of a well, but a subtle indication of the slim tunnel, the hollow root, the vein to my source. I have my eyes closed to maximise my reception, to open up my senses as far as I dare to. Turning the inner knob to the right. So far into the red zone that my skin begins to tingle. What I hear next throws me completely off balance. It shakes me to the core. My tilted head retreats and turns so rapidly to the origin of the sound, I hurt a muscle in my neck. That shocking intrusion doesn't come from within the pipe. That clear clattering cascade of tones pierces me from the center of my plot. I hear music. And it can't be. It has been decades since that phone has last worked. Puddy's phone. It cannot ring. Ten thousand days have passed since the last time it played the familiar ringtone now utterly alien to my ears. I am being called. Or someone is calling her. And it shatters me. The music scratches into my flesh with its tonal fingernails, gets a hold and starts pulling. Trying to skin me alive. Baring my nerves. Ripping off all protective layers.

To the next chapter