Ataraxy reigns like a catatonic sovereign, present but powerless, a veil drawn across an incandescent arc of sky. I, a revenant, and my cohort, Ba, the therapy cow; no, the mammalian ruminant, perambulate the verdant expanse together, as if seafaring mariners seeking refuge in the serene protected silence of a mangrovian lagoon. Far from here, a memory peregrinates out of the unspoiled, prelapsarian Amazonian world of the Yanomami, an anamnesis of a diagnosis of a serpentine strike; “shinish. . .” “sfinis bori…” Do I finally remember?  After all these years. Yes. “Sfinish habori,” the Shapori said after putting finger to blood and blood to tongue, his eyes aflash with trepidation. The scene fades upon an indelible moment, as I espy my parents, aghast, sweating and out of breath, hurried from their fieldwork, knowing in an instant all is over. I remember, I remember.

When the day arose from its slumber and whence my eyes first cast their purpose, I found myself encased in a world of green, a lush verdure of rich earthy aromas and symphonic hums and howls, of stifling heat, violence, peace, ennui, discovery. A paradisial enclave brimming with opportunities for the studies of archeological and sociological intent, where the impassioned doctorates that afflicted my progenitors were put to use. An amative collaborance progressed to parturition, with me becoming a matricentric cark and a patronymic impediment. They became my teachers, perforce, catechizing me in their professions and utilizing whatever pedagogical apparatuses could be obtained from distant posts. The books most interested me, one in particular, the pages colored only in words, words that spoke beyond their definition, inducing sounds of meaning, fugue-like. And so it was, years until the ophidian injury, I went as the Yanomami went, discovering ubiety in the humus, the animalia, the arthropods, the day-to-day pursuit of survival, and was taught in the margins of my parents’ own Promethean endeavors. Straddling these two worlds were the words; the words held my exhilaration as of an enraptured explorer.

Many years passed in an inexorable drift into the unknown, known only as the past, before the Yanomami allowed participation in the Hekura ritual by us transients, I was included. We were welcomed into the shabono, dressed in loincloths and adorned with streaks of colors from Genipap fruit and Achiote seeds, along with avian attire. The pajés began to dance with ululating cries toward a fire, invoking those mysterious shadows that replicated the leaps and curvets in pantomimic effect. Taking the sap of the Virola tree, the pajés mixed it in a vessel with an unidentified decoction and herbs, culminating in a primordial soup, and then thrust it into amorous flames to simmer. With the primal transmutation complete, the pajés removed the vessel from the fire and set it to cool. A pungent odor of earth and bark engulfed the shabono as the concoction was poured.  All partook; albeit less was given to me. I succumbed as though my eyes anointed with collyrium, and dream-saw the snakes, one a fer-de-lance, squirming in sinuous motion, propelled as if by a rhythm, beat to the syllabic melody of words on a page. It paused and extended its forked tongue, flicking out to taste the warning air through its vomeronasal organ, for it had slithered onto a bushmaster, hidden among the leaf litter. In a velocious instant, a scaly scuffle ensued, and they struck each other with their fangs, twisting into an ouroboros and then left each other, one to die and the other, poisoned itself, to seek depuration. The sight of the ouroboros remained like an afterimage, burned into my retina. It moved, moved like a deliquescent harmony of words, metamorphosing between the chthonian and the celestial in an eternal ecdysis.

Upon the next diurnal interval, my mind now clear but stomach unsettled, I took a walk into the bush, directed off the path by some newly acquired arcanum, when I came upon a snake, a fer-de-lance of an unnatural smell, of an amniotic salinity that vibrated my vibrissae like a bow to the strings of a violin. I sat, situating myself still as death, but it struck anyway upon my arm, and I felt the sting of twin lancinating needles injecting its potion. I ran back to the tribe, breathing stertorously, collapsing before the Shapori.

I do not personally recall, but was told that my case was without precedent and the healers could do nothing to mend me; the ancient wisdom truncated with the unfathomable. I was evacuated out of the jungle to medical facilities in the States, which were able to stabilize my condition. My parents settled and began their secondary careers at the local college. It was at this time, healed enough, that I began my formal edification. My parents, following the recommendation of the Cognoscenti familiar with my situation and having been accepted thereto, enrolled me into the educational institute situated on a sea-girt island not far off the coast. I took my pathognomonic feature with me, two penetrating puncture wounds on the arm, divots of necrosis, scarred for life.

A dinghy helmed by some chthonic coxswain expertly navigates me across the subaqueous depths of salinity to an oaken dock, adorned with antique lamps burning with natural flame, protected from the gentle sea breeze by its vitreous shields. Standing like a sentinel, Provost Vamel, impeccably attired in a sheet-white frock coat adorned with epaulettes and aiguillettes. The coat, buttoned to the neck, drapes to his knees, complementing his tailored black slacks and finely stitched and polished shoes with a prismatic sheen. The monocled bearded face cracks a smile, greeting me cordially with the dignified conferment of a leather-bound book as I disembark. “A concordance,” he announces with a slight bow, his voice imbued with a sonorous sibilance that slips through the silence between words, echoing years of cultivated articulation. “For your studies.  To find the mot juste of linguistic eudaimonia and avoid the verbicide, for we are founded upon the construct of the word.” Utilizing a fermata’s hush to pervade the atmosphere, he concludes in an impassioned susurrating whisper, “Lumine Tuo videbimus lumen,” then repeating, “In thy light, we shall see light.” As I take the book, I feel my wound radiating with heat and discreetly pull up my sleeve to look, and there, rivulets of crimson pulsate and ooze out. I quickly cover myself and hear the Provost direct, “Please follow me.” He leads me down a cobblestoned path flanked with life-sized statues of scholars sculpted from Carrara marble, interspersed with Roystonea regia. Small conversation is made as my thoughts turn to my envenomation mark. The Provost informs me that students are attending a lecture in the Great Hall, allowing for an uninterrupted tour, and that he likes to personally greet new students and settle them in.

We approach the main building. I see its Doric columns rising out of the ground, supporting a pediment hewn out of coral rock decorated with an ouroboros surrounding the blazon of the school, encrusted with three images separated triangularly: a tuft of feathers, a torse of twisted pages, and a spindly tree. In the center, an inescutcheon with two unimpressive dark circles, as if waiting for the completion of some grander depiction. The Provost points to the capsulated ornate carvings, possibly the two dark circles themselves, and gives me a wink of the eye with an indecipherable expression before directing me into the opened double oak doors. I notice the iron fittings on the doors, their intricate design reminiscent of entwined chains like trapdoors of numerous oubliettes, as if guarding stores of pansophic dictates long forgotten by the outside world. As I cross the threshold, I feel the stack effect, an ethereal gust like the breath one exhumes from words spoken coming from outside, pushing me forward into itself, as if an autoscopic presence, oscillating between dubiety and the peristalsis of a transubstantiated reality.

With the tour and introductions to my roommate complete, the Provost gave me a satchel of books and compliments for the night. I pardoned myself and took to the bath, secured the door behind me, and raised my saturated sleeve. Puddled up from the wound, blood. It started to bubble, creating a series of delicate vermilion ripples that spread outward in concentric fashion. I reached in the satchel and grabbed a book, the concordance by happenstance. I started to read, and the blood from the wound syruped as I followed with my finger the words on the page. I began to feel the faint impressions of ink within my corpus. The ink, like a blot of hemoglobin, percutaneously absorbed into my capillaries, hematogenously disseminating the tactile words vessel-like to the posterior auricular. I could hear the beating of my heart, reverberating in my ears like a crazed drummer searching for some kind of melody. Clashing together in a discordant polyphony, a barrage of tintinnabulation, like the tolling of distant bells, invaded the ganglion of nerves in my head, its incessant ringing stirring a vertiginous wooziness. Then, with a subitaneous shift, the pressure began to ebb, replaced by a kind of eldritch ecstasy, like the strange relief one feels in the palliation of a migraine. There before me, I saw, clear as day, the twin snakes of the ouroboros; they unlinked, then entwined themselves upon my arm. The snakes held me paralyzed in a catatonic dance as they twisted around each other. I looked closer, and they snapped at me, their tongues expelling words my mind consumed, eating them phantom-like: sanguinary . . . catafalque . . . circumambulatory . . . floccinaucinihilipilification. My mouth watered, my body perspired. A knock at the door; the snakes disappeared. My roommate: “Everything alright mate?” I answered and extracted myself from the situation. I came out and looked at my roommate, disheveled but presentable, and dissuaded concern.

It has been a few weeks now without further incident, and I am studying in my dorm room, engrossed in the words of my book and the concordance, my longiloquent companion. A gentle luminescence of daylight and sounds of the rhythmic cadence of the trochoidal waves make their way through the open porthole window of the room. My roommate sits cross-legged on his bed, trying to translate some ancient Greek text, often sputtering the text aloud. “Prosphygōn eis ophin!” he yells. I ignore him as best I can but still hear and unconsciously translate, “Fleeing into a snake.” These words tickle my wound like the waters of a Pierian spring, infusing the twin cavities to extravasate a phlebotomy. Before I know it, my escritoire is made incarnadine. I put my book down and look at the spreading suffusion, and there within, words… sesquipedalian… pulchritudinous… hobbledehoy… cynosure… ahh, the syllables, the supernal harmony between meaning and musicality penetrate my mind and body—the euphoria, the rapture! An insatiable avidity propels my need for more, so I dig deep into the wound with sanguinary intensity. My roommate takes notice and does what he can to arrest my ensorcelling craving without success. He flees the room for assistance, and I remain, digging deeper until I feel faint and slowly lose consciousness.

I now peer into the eyes of Ba and discern in their depths my own reflection, tracing the contours of my face and the subtle lines of my forehead. I see the supratrochlear veins, a Tantalic portent of unintuitable exhilaration confined in tunica, throbbing with a mesmerizing grace matching the rhythmic rise and fall of a serpent’s form as it breathes. Breaking my hypnotic gaze, I look at my bandaged wound. I had told no one except Ba of my predicament, for fear that they would take away my blood, my words. A medical break, they called it. It happens, they said. I’ll be back, I must come back to extricate that feeling once again. I look up, and my contemplations fracture as the realization dawns upon me, I have come full circle, standing once more before my parents’ abode. I secure Ba within the confines of the barn and cross the threshold of the house. Within, my parents are busy writing and reading, artifacts and books spread on every conceivable resting place. As I at last remember the phrase the Shapori uttered so many years ago, I turn to my parents and inquire about the meaning of “sfinish habori.” They look at each other, and my father responds, “It means ‘bad blood,’ son.”

I consider this, and think to myself, no, no, my dear father, not bad blood, malefic Stygian ripples of wine-dark elixir. As the words form in my thoughts, the cyclical rubescent currents within rage against the dark subterranean cavities, emitting haunting sonifications like those of the universe, a translation that conveys to me the world.

…

Todd Alfuth, a lexicophile and a sesquipedalian, is domiciled upon the Floridian peninsula with his matrimonial consort, his geminate filial progeny, and his trio of domesticated canids.