Prometheus

In the beginning, there was everything. Theoretically, I knew it all, including where my toes were, but in fact, I could not reach my toes, and although I knew they were for standing and walking, I could not have told you what standing or walking were. For one thing, I could neither stand nor walk; for another, I could not tell anyone anything, as I was newborn and unformed.

It is not easy to be born with all knowledge. It is not easy to make sense of it, and for a long time I could not. I could make no distinctions, for example, between my mother’s smiling face and her cooing voice, the fact that the earth had been (and would be for some time) a barren, desolate place, the sensation of being wet when I urinated into my swaddling clothes, and the fact that I would, one day, be chained to a rock, providing a daily treat for a local eagle. Not only did none of it make sense to me; none of it presented itself individually to me.

I was mute until I was fourteen years old. I am sad to say this was a burden on my parents and community. It is to their credit that they did not have me put to death, which was the usual way of dealing with such phenomena. Needless to say, I am grateful that my parents were compassionate enough not to entertain this option, and that they loved me. I have one older brother, of whom you may have heard: Atlas, who bears upon his shoulders the weight of the world. I have made his burden more onerous, I am afraid, by decorating and populating said world, but it was not to punish him that I did so; it was, in fact, because I knew it would be done, and that it would be done by me and my younger brother (more of a burden, in the long run, than was I). Epimetheus’ name, which means afterthought, accurately pegs him. He was responsible for the human race, upside-down noses and all; I had to fix the noses, but I changed nothing else.

Considering what an idiot he is, he didn’t do all that badly.

But let’s not jump ahead, despite my name, Prometheus, which means forethought. I am being born, and I am overwhelmed by, well, the everythingness of everything. No wonder I could not talk, even when my larynx and tongue were well-enough formed. The sun collecting its gases, the same sun burning itself out, the atom, cotton candy and rock ‘n’ roll -- they were, as I have said, all one to me. I have estimated that it took me about seventeen months to sort things out to the point of being able to recognize my mother and look her in the eye. It is, again, to her credit that I ever got fed, although I suppose I suckled by instinct without being aware of it. Be that as it may, I looked into her eyes one afternoon, and the sun was shining off of a brooch upon her bosom; one breast was bare, after the fashion, and the other was covered, and the covered breast was adorned with a ruby that my father had stolen from an enemy of an inferior race during some long-forgotten battle. I looked at the ruby and then my gaze was drawn upward to her eyes, and I saw that she was smiling at me, and knew who she was, and what the smile meant, and that I loved her. I saw, too, in her eyes, the recognition of the moment, and she cried out and clasped me to her, and my cheek was cut, slightly, by the ruby brooch. She licked the wound clean and I never blamed her for the scar that remains to this day.

At the age of two I began to crawl. This made my mother very happy, although my father put no stock in it. I began to crawl because I had begun to believe in the distinctions I’d discovered among the senses, and what I could see now attracted me. Most babies can do this before they are able to reach out for objects; I could not do it until I was able to approach them. Now I was in everyone’s way without anyone’s being the least bit prepared for my interference, and I became an object of much annoyance.

Not much later than that I began to walk, and then my family really began to doubt whether their clemency at the time of my birth had been such a damned good idea after all. I was into everything and no good at anything. Even when I could understand what they meant when they spoke to or gestured at me (this was sometimes still difficult), I pretended that I couldn’t, clever little bastard that I was.

With walking at last came the beginnings of what I might immodestly refer to as wisdom, by which I mean the ability to sort and use my knowledge to best advantage. My most valuable discovery was that the pretense to which I have just referred could not only make my life easier, it could preserve it, for no one likes a know-it-all, and that’s exactly what I am.

You know the story of my adult life: how Epi and I fought on the side of the Gods instead of with our own Titan people, in that little war that changed how things were and would be. You know why Atlas was punished (he remained loyal to our kind) and how. You know that once our little humans had their noses on right I gave them fire, which I wasn’t supposed to do. So much for wisdom. You know how I was consequently chained to a rock and how, with a much-regenerated liver, I was eventually unbound. And what have I been doing with my old bones lately?

Having been, for all intents and purposes, a god, there isn’t any way for my career to progress in the usual sense. This does take a lot of pressure off of one; I am not worried about achievement: not my own, anyway. So I stay behind the scenes and do my subversive bit when I am so moved. You may wonder why good folks such as Gandhi or JFK get bumped off; wonder, instead how they lived so long. I did that. You may ask why some children die of cancer; ask instead how they got born, got to see the sky, got to feel their parents’ love in their short time on earth. I did that. I’m not all-powerful, and I’m not the only force out here. I am, for all my genius, extremely limited. I’m not even invisible. You’ve seen me here and there; you just haven’t recognized me, and I like it that way. It makes my job possible, if not exactly easy. For your blindness, then, I thank you, my little humans. But the next time water goes up your nose, you may thank me that it’s a rare event and not an everyday problem. I did that.

THE END