Jonestown Read Online Free Page B

hierarchies of brutality sponsored unwittingly perhaps by Privilege, hierarchies in which each theatre of inhumanity is placed on a scale to measure which is less horrendous or more hard-hearted than the last, the symmetry of hell …
    The angels in my Dream-book – playing on harps like stringed skeletons – brought messages I needed to interpret and re-interpret into infinity, into parallel universes that seemed at times to touch, to jar against each other like quake organs or plates within the earth’s crust.
    The music and the drama saturated my Dreams as I lay on my pillow of stone and the angels descended and ascended …
    Yes, it was clear to me that dissonances in music lie in depth within all harmonies to acquaint us with unwritten relationships that disturb our Sleep. Or else harmony would consolidate itself into an illusion …
    *
    Jones withdrew the gun from Marie Antoinette’s temple. She had been loyal, she had swallowed the last drop of poison. He pointedthe gun at the space between his eyes. Time to join his flock on the Day of the Dead. I could not stop my limbs – as I lay on my pillow of stone within the bushes at the edge of the Clearing – from shaking. They shook so hard that a miniature storm, it seemed to me, arose in the leaves and bushes where I lay.
    Jones stopped. His ears were sharp as claws. He could not see who actually lay in the bushes, but suddenly he roared – ‘It’s you, blast you Deacon. It’s you – who else would dare to disobey? – hiding there. You thought to escape. I see it now. God damn you Deacon. You’re dead.’ He turned his gun and aimed at the heart of the shaking storm of leaves. He mistook the vestige of a garment protruding from the bushes for one of Deacon’s cloaks. Indeed it was no mistake. I had borrowed it from him. It had lain beside the table on which we dined the previous day. Jones’s ears seemed to pick up the sight of the blowing garment. They were sharp as a Tiger’s seeing claws.
    In that instant of miniature Chaos that made my limbs shake and tremble I seemed to fly or run back into primordial memories of Maya drawings and sculptures of Tiger-knights, Tiger-priests. And Jones’s blind eyes but sharp seeing claws loomed above me in the Clearing. He was a Priest above his sacrificial victim, above an altar. Altar of death. My death? His death? His blind eyes gave me hope that he – in some unimaginable way – would collapse into darkness before he fired.
    I prayed to the Scavenger of heaven that it would seize him in the twinkling of an eye before he fired. A Maya prayer!
    His sharp ears however were sharpened as if the Tiger in the blind of his skull would win the Day after all, would claim me for Deacon on the altar of Jonestown; would claim me and encompass a circuit of enemy friendships around the globe. The trade in death, the trade in guns, was universal, friend competed ruthlessly with friend for the Tiger’s share, the lion’s share, in the marketplace or altar of industry …
    I closed my eyes but continued to pray, to hope against hope …
    And then I remembered the sensation I had had – at dinner on the eve of the holocaust – that Deacon held a bullet on his tongue or in his stomach as he ate. A Primitive morsel or bullet to bedisgorged as a barn owl resembling an Eagle or a Scavenger disgorges a pellet … I remembered in the nick of time and my fingers clutched Deacon’s stomach, pulled forth the bullet or pellet, inserted it into his hand and gun. Thus I appeared to complete the deadly circuit between Jones, Deacon and myself.
    DEACON FIRED. Answer to my prayer or quantum hallucination of a deadly circuit!
    Out of the corner of my eye I saw him standing at the other end of the Clearing. He wore the Eagle/Scavenger mask that duels with a Tiger’s sun-mask in Maya Bonampak. Eagle, Vulture, Scavenger. He seemed all three in Maya, enigmatic triple portraitures, the mathematics of Chaos. Not one bullet but three pellets had