A story never told

---

The lamp went out for some reason. Maybe it ran out of oil, I don't know, and I don't care. But! It could be that one of the guards turned it off, thinking that the cell had become empty, or that its occupant had passed away. If the last possibility is true, then I also think that it won't matter.

I have lived in fear my whole life until I became afraid all the time. The lamp's light won't make any difference. At least I will rest my eyes from looking at the shadows that its flame draws on the smooth stone wall, and I will rest my mind from the exhausting effort it makes in coloring those shadows and trying to create real images from them.

But let us stop for a moment, and let us reflect on the oil lamp… The oars might not be that important when the boat is in a no-place surrounded by ocean water from every side. The oil lamp is what gave these damp, rotting-air walls of this cell, and its iron bars, a meaning and a name to be known by. If I had not gotten to know them before under the light of the lamp's flame, I would have called them "no-places," and maybe also "no-times." This last naming might also be correct.

My intestines twisted strongly, as if I had swallowed a constrictor snake for breakfast. Because those transparent creatures that look like holograms, by order of the man who looks like a corpse and proudly wears a mask shaped like an old plate on his face, they would only feed me juice-rich fruits.

Despite the effort I made, I could not remember how I used to relieve myself on the days when I was not fully conscious. The air is heavy and dirty, and the smell is full of rot and dampness, but the fur under me and above me is clean and dry. I would never relieve myself in bed. Mister Whitestone, my adoptive father, would have killed me if I did that.

But wait… What was I just raving about just now? What is happening to me? I feel as if there is a whirlwind of fierce winds inside my skull, smashing the archive shelves and scattering the papers on which memories were written. I am not that child anymore. I am thirty-nine years old. And I am not in Toronto, or anywhere else in Canada or on Earth. I am now imprisoned inside a cell, somewhere inside another dimension or another planet, or maybe, as previously occurred to my imagination, I might be in one of the layers of Hell, waiting for my judgment day.

"I need to get out to relieve myself," I shouted in a desperate tone, with a voice I did not recognize because it was so tired.

Except for a mad laugh that came from somewhere outside the bars of my cell, and echoed several times, and remained hanging in my ear for a period of time, I did not receive any answer.

"Do it in your place," someone yelled, breaking the layers of silence stacked on top of each other, "it will keep you warm for a while." More laughs rose, and joyful howling, and words supporting the suggestion. "Yes, do it," "The smell of urine will refresh you," "And if it's feces, it will be much better," all kinds of crazy laughs, and advice, and things like that.

It saddened me that I was forced to submit to what they suggested I do, and it angered me a lot, so I shouted at them before releasing my brakes and letting things take their natural course in an unnatural way. "I am not an animal, you madmen."

"In the homes of nobles, there are toilets designated for animals."

Someone spoke to me with a sharp, limp voice, from next to the cell gate.

I raised my head toward the source of the sound, and found a wide spot of light glowing from behind the bars, swallowing half the darkness of the cell. Next to the glow of a primitive torch's fire, which was the source of light, appeared the figure of a hunched-back old man from that race called the Saxom. His face was concave like a crescent moon, his nose rounded like a fig, his eyes drooping, and from the top of his forehead grew two thick, short horns, breaking the gray of his hair with their blackness. He was holding the torch, looking at me with curiosity, and to his right, the light reflected on another, more solid figure. It was another man of the Saxom, his features sharp and frowning as if carved from rock, and the horns on his forehead were cut off about two inches after their growth.

The old man added, saying: "It is not the type of creature that determines its actions and deeds, but rather the place where it is located. You are now in a dirty place, so why not adopt its nature and be dirty? I think this will be better for you, and will remove a great burden from your shoulders."

"I cannot," I answered in a troubled tone. "I was not raised on dirtiness."

"Ah, the upbringing then. You have brought us back to the start with this answer."

"Yes," I told him. "What you were raised on is what decides your actions, not your kind, and not your place of living.”

"And what were you raised on, stranger?"

"I was raised as a human being. I eat in one place, sleep in another, and relieve myself in a private room, far away from both."

"This makes me human too," the old man exclaimed in a showy tone.

"No, you are not."

"But I have the same habits as you , so why am I not a human like you?"

"You might be human, but you are not human — at least physically. You are a creature..."

He cut off my sentence with a crazy, joyful shout, then turned to his companion and began striking his palm on his worn, black chest armor, cackling with strange, broken laughs. The frowning one smiled at him, then his features stiffened again when he looked at me.

"I bet him on this, but unfortunately, my companion, he is mute, and will not be able to confirm my words."

"And what did you bet him on?"

"That you consider yourself, and consider us, creatures made by some entity and sent to fight and battle, and to love and reproduce, then go back to fighting again. I bet him that you think that you and we are free, unique, chosen creatures."

"But I did not say all of this."

"You said 'creature,' and the word 'creature' implicitly means much more than this."

"No, it means nothing except its literal meaning."

"So, you deny for yourself and your kind, and for me and my mute friend here, distinction and freedom?"

"Yes, I do that, with knowledge that surpasses what you can imagine."

"Well then, answer me this question, and I will take you to a place far from your cell to relieve yourself."

"Ask your question, for I can no longer endure."

His companion nudged him in the ribs, eyeing him, and he said: "Slowly, no one will know about this, and I am confident that he cannot answer me."

The frowning one put his pinky finger in his ear, then moved it violently before a satisfied expression appeared on his face.

"Okay," said the old man. "Here is the question. This solid man standing next to me chose to be mute. He cut his tongue with his own hand, so that no one other than him would hear his words. Did you choose to be created in the first place? To be born as a soft, crying, fragile lump with no power or strength?"

"I did not choose anything. All of that was destined for me."

"Very good," the old man exclaimed. "If it is as you say, then why not defecate where you sit and be done with it?"

I looked at him with patient eyes, despite the distress and difficult situation I was in, and said: "Listen to me well. My answer will be very long, and I will mention in it places and characters that you are not familiar with. But I am sure of your ability to deduce the answer to your question from what I will narrate in lines, for your madness, as it occurs to me, has another face, burning with wisdom. And if you cannot do that, then I will give you the answer at the end. But as I mentioned, my answer will be long, and I am not able to hold it for all that time. So please, take me to where I can relieve myself, and I will narrate to you what I intend to tell while I expel from my body the toxins inside it."

I expected refusal or at least bargaining from him. I prepared myself to try to convince him or make concessions, but I was surprised when he put a key into the metal gate and opened it with two cheerful, light clicks.

He said: "Fine, then we will carry you to the designated place. I don't think you are able to walk yet."

I never imagined that the designated place was only three feet outside my cell. The mute guard carried me, then made me lean standing on a railing made of three thick iron beams, behind which was a dark void with no visible bottom even under the torchlight.

The old man said: "Lower your pants, and throw out what is disturbing your insides."

"This is not allowed," I told him.

"It is allowed. Down below there live creatures that feed on carcasses and filth. They are giant, hungry worms with large, voracious mouths. You are doing them a favor, stranger, so do not be ashamed of yourself."

He gestured to me kindly, which removed my hesitation. The pants they had put on me were loose anyway, and I was bare-chested.

The air was dirty and hard to breathe, but its coldness let a bit of comfort seep through my skin, refreshing the tissues and joints beneath.

I was too uncomfortable with the two guards so close to me, and I could not find enough ease to let the liquid and solid toxins out of my body. "You can hear me from a few steps away, and if possible, please, throw your torchlight and your looks in another direction."

"Not possible. What you ask for, stranger. Relax yourself, and relax us with your story, and consider us non-existent."

"Okay," I said after a moment of thought. "But do not interrupt me, and do not ask me about something you fail to understand, or a character that arouses your curiosity, until I finish my narration."

The old man grumbled in agreement, and the mute guard nodded his head, so I sighed and began narrating.

---

"During a period of my life, I used to think that I was an atheist who did not believe in the existence of the Creator. But I later discovered that I was actually angry at Him, and that my denial of His existence stemmed from that childish, stubborn, rejecting anger. I resented the destiny that I thought the Creator had written for me, and the misfortunes that befell me when I was a boy who had barely opened his eyes to the world. I did not realize then that my destiny, which I was born with, was nothing but a thread woven by the destinies of those living around me, to become an extension of theirs. The Creator did not write for my parents to die burned in that atheistic way I used to think; the Creator wrote this because He knows it, not because He decided that I deserved to live as an orphan and be adopted by a human monster. That monster used to insist on taking me with him to church sometimes on Sundays. The church is a place of worship where humans of my kind visit their Creator in a spiritual, not material, way. He was a hypocrite. He was never religious, nor did he carry the cross — which is the symbol of faith in our beliefs — in his heart. He only took me with him to complete the image he wanted to project to his acquaintances.

There I heard things that contradicted the reality of the life I understood with my simple, childish mind. 'The Lord, the Creator, is love' — where is love in the life I live? 'The Lord is mercy' — why did His mercy not include me? Did I do something wrong? And if I did wrong, why does He not overlook my mistakes, for I am still a child? Why does He overlooks the mistakes of my adoptive father, but does not do the same with me? Why did He write that my torment should continue? My adoptive father does not love me, and that is why he hits me. Is it possible that the Lord also does not love me? But why? What is the reason? There must be a reason for Him not to love me... But Bren Mozas, Emily Kitan, Jack, and others also do not love me, and I do not think there is a reason for that. There is no reason for an innocent child to hate another innocent child, unless the Lord Himself inspired him to do so... That was the furthest I could go to explain what I was going through. And this childish intellectual starting point was the starting point that led me from hating the Creator to denying His existence. In reality, I was not denying the existence of the Creator in the images that religions and beliefs painted of Him, but rather I was denying the existence of the attribute of mercy in Him. How could a Creator who allowed my drunkard, womanizing, usurious adoptive father to torment me and be harsh with me when I was an innocent child, be described as merciful? He must be evil, and His allowing the existence of humans like my adoptive father was because of His delight in seeing the innocent and weak being tormented.

I found myself, after finishing my university studies — which is a final formative stage that allows humans of my kind on the earth I came from to learn skills to earn their living — I found myself indifferent to these issues. I had left home years ago, and I now held a university degree attesting to my competence, and this made the feeling of weakness fade away. My homeland, Canada, is a wonderful country. It rewards the hardworking generously, and I was one of them. However, I knew deep inside that some miracle had helped me succeed. This does not make sense. It is even impossible for me to achieve all this success. What I lived through and was raised on should only lead me to be a nobody, complicated with psychological illnesses fighting inside me. Yet I succeeded, and impressively. Something kept me away from distractions and loitering, and pushed me to put more effort into studying and formation. Something I did not know or understand its nature at that time.

And one day, while I was having dinner in a place called a restaurant, I heard an old man reading to his friend a passage that he said was written by 'Blaise Pascal' — one of the greatest thinkers on the earth I came from.

'The fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars... Joy. Joy. Tears of joy...'

I listened carefully, but most of his words were obscure because of a strong hoarseness in his voice: 'Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.'

When I returned home, I verified whether these sentences were truly written by Pascal, and I found it true. That old man had taken from Pascal's secret notes, which his servant found sewn into his shirt lining after his death. At first, I studied Pascal's life history to understand what led him to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then I studied more deeply the story of the prophet Abraham — prophet here means a pure man sent to his kind by the Creator — and his story led me to a greater understanding of the paths of destiny and the ways it manifests in reality.

Three days after my birth, on a cold winter night, my parents lived in a house inside a building consisting of four homes. A fire broke out in the house below us, and no one noticed it until it spread throughout the entire building. I was told that my father was the one who saved me, then he died from the burns he suffered while lying next to me on the snow. As for my mother, the charred lump of flesh and bone they found inside the home bore no relation to her qualities. My father was from a country called America, and his origins were from another country called Italy. My mother was Canadian with origins from a country called Mexico. My mother was so beautiful that I wondered how a charming, smiling beauty could give birth to that ugly child I was. But my wonder disappeared automatically once I met her older brother, who had emigrated long ago to live in America, in the suburbs of a city called Missoula, Montana. I resembled him strikingly. He almost froze when he saw me for the first time, lifting his eyes to see who was knocking on his door. With his high sense of humor, he said he thought his past self had come to visit him. He told me a lot about my mother and the years they lived together. He said he did not hear of her death until years later, nor did he know that she had left a child. If he had known, he would have done everything in his power to get custody of me. I felt he was sincere. He seemed like a good man, and I felt this from the photos on the walls of him, his wife, and his children. Clearly, they shared a happy life, and I think they would have welcomed me among them. His family was not home at the time of my visit; they were on a trip to a city called Orlando, Florida. He offered me to stay with him, but I could not. I invited him to my wedding, which was three months later. He accepted the invitation and honored me with his wife and his eldest son, who was incredibly kind. He kept calling me 'brother' the whole time, which made me shed tears. Since my wedding, their news gradually faded until communication disappeared completely. It seems the flame of the first meeting had gone out, and that pity had faded after they saw the life of luxury I was living at that time.

I had finished what I was taken out of my cell for a while ago, and cleaned myself, to the point that I completed the second part of the story while standing, leaning on the railing.

'Well, old guard, did you get the answer to your question?'

The old man fidgeted, scratching his prominent chin like an umbrella handle. 'Of course, yes, I got the answer and other things. I will share them with my companion during our shift.'

'Okay, won't you ask me to clarify anything, or introduce any of the characters mentioned?'

'With all due respect to you, neither you nor the characters mentioned matter.'

I wondered to myself after hearing his answer: 'How can a damned philosopher like this be just a prison guard?'

'And now, stranger, we will carry you to your cell. And I have a favor to ask if you are a generous man: do not mention what happened between us to anyone.'

'I will forget everything as soon as I enter my cell.'

'Good. So be it.'

They took me into the cell, placed me on my bed, which was both hard and soft at the same time, then they stepped back to leave. But before the old man's foot crossed the threshold of the iron gate, I called out to him with a plea. He said, with all kindness, 'Ask.' I said: 'Can you light the oil lamp for me?'

---