Rakesfall

by Vajra Chandrasekera

he doesn’t see a need to involve an adult, a person who by definition knows nothing, in the messy business of life.

Oh, it’s all war, in the end—the dead know.

We decide to remember ourselves bright and innocent, untroubled by aches and pains and guilts and fears and abuses, unmarked by the things we did or the things that were done to us. We want to be remembered with childhood’s halo.

We have become the thing we loathe the most: a binary.

I am a historian. I find and reveal secrets.

I voted for peace, even though peace seems like the kind of science fiction that posits a future utopia, sleek and bald and rational, without satisfactory explanation of how we get to there from here, this convoluted, bloody, tainted here, except by appealing to our better natures at critical moments, a long arc bending toward justice.

everything was a devil to the English.

Politicians may seem to be at odds, but they never truly betray each other: they are all patriots to the nation together.

A world is not as the mundane experience it devises: once that was secret and awful knowledge, though now it’s a truism to be found in any glossy magazine. Solids are mostly empty space. Objects are not discrete. The perception of time is an illusion. Seeming biological realities are socially constructed:

It’s hard to teach history, much less poetry.

the Ravenous King, too, sought a marriage—the elevation of mere love, he said, to politics, to alliance, to lineage.

that has been failing to balance its reengineered ecosystem for four hundred years needs more therapy than most.”

The truth is that incarnation is a joy,

both are true and both are lies, grandmother says. —The difference is that stories have endings, and histories understand that nothing ever ends. The difference is that stories are made and histories are told.

There is no practicality with more primacy than the simple truth.

We divide into factions over how to speak of the unspeakable. Some of us believe in reportage, in the alwayscompromised but allthemorenecessary work of uncovering and exposing the truths and the truths beyond the truths: to tell the truth, seriously for real this time. What if the truth mattered some day? What if we take our problems to the United Nations?

Is it so bad to want to be remembered, to have all things remembered, to have and to hold? But maybe it’s exploitative to attempt truth in fiction, maybe it is mere commodification only, maybe fabulism strips histories of whatever dignity realism might have to offer—or maybe it’s the other way around, maybe it’s mimesis that takes away history’s dreams and fantasies, makes it small and lonely and vulnerable in a haunted world.

This is called the innocence of children, Irugal says. Your ignorance of the forbiddings was engineered by our ancestors; they withheld information from you and thought they were giving you a gift.

ninety-nine percent of the bandwidth of the invisible world is occupied by unbodied minds from nearly every century of the human eon, and they endlessly batter on our every shielded port and socket, our every invisible orifice, looking for weakness. Having uploaded from bodies, or risen from programs, all they want now is the one thing forbidden them: embodiment.

Their will to be open to all experience must become greater than the desire of our ancestors that we be innocent.

They desire embodiment, above all else, to chase the mysteries of subjective experience, the things that happen to bodies. They fetishize sickness, fatigue, and pain, but nothing is as tempting as death.

We have forgotten so much from the human eon. But we remember the parts that matter. Punish the guilty, and eat the rich.

As a grandmother once predicted, she has lived long enough to become very strange.

She makes no deals. She hunts, she finds, she puts them down.

This is not justice, though not injustice either. She has no illusions of righteousness. She is revenge, the last cold thing on earth.