Once upon: a knocking. When we opened the door, Mr. Tucker’s head was on fire—burning, but not burning up, flame-tongues lapping greedily at the eternal…
Mom screamed, and dad slammed the door.
“We’ve got to go.”
“Books,” Mr. Tucker yelled, in a voice of ash. “May I have your books?”
“Don’t listen to him,” dad said.
We took little, exited through the back door and rounded the house to the driveway, where the car was parked. Already the stars were going out; the world was blackening. Even the streetlights were dimmed, as if by shadow, and in their still-glow cones bits of the old world whirled like billowing soot.
Most of the light came now from people, if that is what they were. Dark figures with brilliant, blazing heads, dashing madly, standing and staring, knocking on doors, climbing fences, smashing windows. Their faces consumed by fire-masks. Their bodies cracked and breaking at the seams, skin peeling—
We got in.
Dad started the engine.
Mom tried to cover my eyes,
but still through the spaces between her shaking fingers I saw: the widow, Mrs. Macon, take a chainsaw to her head, slice above the eyebrows through skull-bone, before removing the top, as neatly as from a sugar bowl, pour gas from a canister onto her brain, then strike a match and, bringing it burning ever-closer—her tears intermixed with gasoline flowing down her cheeks—set her satiated mind afire.
And staring as she did, as our car rolled past, she cried:
“I am illuminated.”
We drove through eerily head-lit suburbs, across the city, aglow with flickering post-human fireflies, into the country, under its bible-black sky, up the winding gravel road to the monastery on the mountain.
It echoed with emptiness up here.
The catalyst, I later learned, had come simultaneously through television and the internet, through radio and books. “Knowledge was humanity’s great craving,” an old monk once told me. “Pursued recklessly.”
Dad had kept us disconnected for years. Stubbornly, forcefully.
It’s what made my sister leave.
Sometimes, while working the fields, I wonder what became of her—whether she enjoyed the life she had in the brief time before it all happened.
We see them still, of course, shining obtusely in the distance, memorials to humanity’s ultimate achievement of knowing. “Yet there are some things we cannot know,” dad said, and my sister argued.
I had understood his cannot as a should not and secretly I cheered my sister’s lustful curiosity: her bravery, which I so lacked.
But the cannot was not a choice.
It was a physical limitation of the human mind.
As a civilization, we asked a question to which we should have feared the answer. Not because it was difficult, but because it was impossible. There is a programmer among us, and he speaks about the mind as a computer: “A primitive hardware, on which we attempted, in utter foolishness, to run a divine software.”
The hardware overheated.
So they exist, alive yet forever inflamed; sick with understanding—
in perpetuity.