The Word Keeper - A Short Story

 

THE WORD KEEPER

 

I can’t recall the moment that everything split.  But I do remember the feeling of being built entirely of fibers that were once so masterfully entwined they came alive.  And I was that life.

Have you ever torn a stalk of celery, or stripped a piece of string cheese? Imagine them twisted together, melded into blood and guts. That is what you are, and what was me.

Then something caused me to unwind. I cannot recall what or why and it doesn’t matter.

I know I streamed through space, peeled apart and came together again, at least enough to maintain a sense of “I”, though that had been lost at some point.  Imagine going down a waterslide and then through a tunnel of emptiness and black.  Then coming out again.

There was a room where I came out, or walls at least.  Stacks and stacks of books formed two side walls that extended beyond my periphery, and a third in front of me contained a small niche on its left, as I faced it. The stacks of books extended up, eternally into what appeared to be a starry night sky, all of them having similar spines, leather bound with ridges where the stitches stretched round the pages. But each also unique in thickness, pattern, and color, as much as that existed.  Everything I experienced was laid out before me in grays and whites that were all tinged with blue.

The stacks of books extended upwards from a plane I can only call a floor, though I did not seem to rest on it.  In fact, everything in my cone of vision appeared to float and shimmer in the way of a flickering image struggling to come into view, or a radio signal fading in and out. It was pointillism come to life.

Next to the niche in the wall in front of me, in the corner of towering books to my right, stood a writing desk that loomed over my position. Its four turned legs extended upwards in exaggerated perspective and held a simple square desk with a slightly sloped writing surface.  The back edge of the desk was flat, where it appeared the top was hinged, and there was a small rail to keep the inkwell from falling off the back. There was also a quill, and it fluttered furiously back and forth, controlled by the frantic hand of the Being behind the desk.

Unable to move, and staring upwards from where I was, the Being’s base danced above me like smoke rising from a recently snubbed candle, and alternately appeared to be a pair of feet in fleet, winged slippers, crossing over, under, and through one another, and a wisp of existence tied to the desk, like a genie to a lamp. Following the form up, I saw what could have been two legs widening out to a recognizable waist, topped with a torso, arms, and a head.  It appeared to me that we were, in fact, created in God’s image.

Although this God was dressed, not in flowing white robes as one might expect, but a vest that was as red as the greys would go, over a dress shirt with the cuffs rolled up and sleeve garters declaring his identity as a clerk. His head was topped with a tasseled fez.

He had a human face as far as his defined features.  But like the rest of him, it seemed to shift in proportions as he moved before me, scrawling something into the open volume that covered his desktop. His pointy chin nearly scraped against the page he bore down upon, and it was covered in a sparse bristle of thick whiskers, which is what led me to gender this form as a “him.” Apart from this growth of hair on his chin and the accompanying wispy mustache on the lip above, his other features all indicated a femininity that was the only thing giving me any comfort about the place I now found my consciousness. His eyes where feline behind wide oval glasses, whose wire frame rested on the slender ridge of his nose that extended to a buttoned tip. His lips formed a pointed pucker and stretched to sharp corners under prominent cheekbones.

All this came to me in an instant as I appeared in this place, and the details I took in all had to be gained quickly, as my consciousness appeared here gasping for something like breath and attempting to cling itself back together.  I could sense that I had no body left to speak of, and wasn’t even sure if I had a form at all, even a wispy one like this Spirit before me. I could shift my view by degrees to the left and right and up and down, but I could not turn fully around and see behind me.  There was no “behind”, only what I saw before me, and if I tried to turn, the stacks of books and the desk and the Spirit all turned with me and blurred, as if wiped across wet glass.

It was only an instant of existence in this space before the Spirit’s eye caught a glint of my appearance, looked away as if I was of no consequence, and then he furrowed his brow momentarily before ripping his attention from the book to gaze straight at my center. Then he screamed like a house-wife who’s seen a mouse.  He jumped from his perch, toppling the screw spindled stool upon which he sat, and threw his body against the wall of books behind him.

“What are you doing here?!!” he screeched in such a mixture of fear and intrigue and confusion that I could make nothing of his emphasis. “How did such a thing happen?” he asked the ether, after a short breath and long pause.

Unsure of just about everything, I thought my thoughts in such a way that they made sound, and even without a mouth, I was able to communicate with the spooked Spirit.

“I’m sorry to be here,” I apologized as quickly as I could. “I didn’t choose it and don’t know where I am.  Or who…or what I am, for that matter.” We stared at one another like threatened kittens for a moment and I asked “What am I to you? What do you see?”

“There’s enough of you to know you’re a human consciousness that’s still tied together in ways you shouldn’t be by the time you get here,” he replied, still cringing in the corner of his stacked ledgers with one knee bent and drawn up across his body and hands clutched to his breast in dire fear.

“Where is here?” I asked.

He softened his stance a bit at this question. Upon realizing that I was as uncertain about my presence as he was, he relaxed, stood on two feet and floated back towards the desk, reaching with one hand to right his fallen stool, and leaning the other on the desk, while never taking his gaze from me.

“ ‘Here’ is the Office of Written Energy,” he began to explain cautiously. “I am the God of Written Energy. Word Keeper to the other Gods,” he added in an offhand mutter. “And you are enough strands of a human consciousness to apparently communicate with me.” He paused and wiped his brow in disbelief, shaking his head side to side as he did it. Then he began to chuckle. “I can’t believe this,” he said, as he began to shake more thoroughly with laughter.

I shimmered and he looked at me sympathetically, as if I were a shivering dog. “I see you are enough of your former energy to be points of light. And that’s saying something,” he added enthusiastically. “You don’t know how little of anyone I usually get down here.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything,” was all I could communicate.

“Ha!” the Spirit began to laugh again, then whistled an exhalation of relief as he sat back on his stool and made himself comfortable with the idea I was not a threat. “I can imagine that you don’t,” he sympathized. “An intact consciousness has only ever been through these levels a couple of times. And then, it was by design.”  He rested an elbow on the desk and held that pointed chin in his upturned hand, looking at me still with wonderment, clearly trying to work out some mystery in his own mind. I was sure it wasn’t the one I held in mine.

“Is this Heaven?” are the words I sheepishly sent out.  And my voice seemed to break him from his reverie.

His gaze switched from distant to present and he scoffed mildly before answering. “Uh, yeah. Sure.  If that’s what you want to call it.”  I had no response as he peered at me casually. “Your human idea of ‘Heaven’ to me,” he continued, “has always implied a hierarchy of sorts. You know? That it is a ‘better’ place.  And of course, there is always the ‘Hell’ that goes with that.  The ‘worse’ place. But the reality is, there is only ‘here’.  It’s not better or worse than anything.  It is the only place and the final place and that’s it. So deal with it, right?” By now the Word Keeper was becoming quite animated and had also begun to scribble in the volume before him again. “But anyway, I can see from your flickering that you’re spinning at all this information. I guess I should start with the basics.

He leaned backwards and threw open his arms broadly, exclaiming “Welcome to the Office of Written Energy! I work with the God of Friction to maintain the spiritual order of strings related to the written word. Some may think it’s a small task compared to, say… sight. But, you know? It’s also much more permanent.”  And then peering at me with steeped eyebrows, as if I was suddenly his adversary in some imaginary argument, “Even photographs get split up between the Gods of Color and Time. But the God of Light thinks he’s the bigshot.”

He exhaled deeply and rested his head in exasperation, dropping his chin to the book again.

“How many Gods are there?” I managed to squeak out.

“How many? ‘Oh my God!’ as you all say, I don’t even know.  There may be as many of them as there are of you humans. Ha! But not really.  I mean, there are a lot and I don’t even know them all.  Let’s see… there is the God of Light, who thinks he’s the most invoked. And I’ll admit,  Light is mentioned many times in the texts, I will give him that.  But what he doesn’t realize is that it’s only because of the texts that he has the power and recognition that he does.  I could cut that string off pretty quickly if I wanted to, you see.” He looked squarely to my center and raised his eyebrows, as if daring me to disagree.

“I see,” I said.

“Oh hahahaha,” he laughed as he sat back on his stool and wiped his brow in embarrassment. “I’m sorry.  I suppose I have not been able to stick to the basics.  And that is…basically…that Energy is…all there is.

“Any energy you ever expended or received still exists, and is tied between you and the giver or receiver, still. Nothing stops moving, really, and those threads make up the fabric of the All. Your… ‘Universe’.

“For instance,” he continued to explain from his perch on high, “I manage the Energy expended in creation of the written word. Which, I must say, went into dramatic decline with the advent of the type writer, and then computerized word processing.  So much of the Energy expended in writing is now split between the Gods of Light and Sound and Magnetism.  But I still manage the spiritual strings of language and context, mind you.”  At this point he took his attention from the ledger and leaned his face quite far down towards my center, peering over the top of his spectacles and pointing the quill tip at me. “And I would say that is the most important part.” He finished with a harrumph.

“When you say spiritual string, what do you mean?” I managed to ask.

The Word Keeper leaned back on his stool and tipped the fez that topped his head. “You humans are actually onto something, with your scientists’ ideas about String Theory.  They even got the name right, which I think is just a coincidence. But some others think it’s a sign that the race could reach an enlightened level of dissolution sometime in the next millenia, which I think is crazy! Right? Like humans?  Reaching fully enlightened dissolution within the millenia?  That’s just crazy talk.” The Word Keeper was nearly doubled over in laughter at the very idea, and had a hard time getting the words out.

“I’m sorry, you lost me again there.  I mean, you’ll have to recall, I’m not supposed to be here as a consciousness, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yeah yeah,” the Word Keeper conceded as he regained his composure and leaned again on his desk. “It’s just amazing to me that you got through.  I mean, if you understand how little of a piece of Energy we are talking about here, you could imagine how many things must have gone wrong, in a truly coordinated way, when you gave up the ghost back there in the Milky Way. Back on Earth.”

The Word Keper stared off into space, as if contemplating how distant a place that was, then mumbled his random thought into space “You know, you guys in general, have a severely oversized influence on the Gods’ opinions, for as small and insignificant as you are.” His hand never stopped wiggling the quill.

“I must admit,” I admitted, “that I’m still quite confused about what and where I am.”

“Well! I must admit that I am also quite confused about who you are and how you got here.  You see, as I was saying, I don’t usually get much of anyone here.  Even in the heyday of the written word, the most I ever got was a pittance of a collected soul.

“You see, when a soul makes any permanent mark on their surroundings, for the purpose of communication, there is an ‘intent’ and an influx of spiritual energy.  And of course, there is also physical energy. Friction. Generally, of graphite on paper, for you humans back on Earth.  And then ink on paper. And there is Energy in the paper, and the graphite or the ink. The lives and energies that made those materials, you see.  Those things are all made of other things. Which other Gods here, working under the God of Friction, take care of. I manage the spiritual energy of words, as I said.

“The intent coming from the author is a much stronger and more prevalent String when the words are handwritten; say, scratched in clay, chiseled in stone, written on animal skins or papyrus reeds, graphite on paper, or ink on linen. With the invention of the typewriter, there was one new degree of separation between the author and the reader. Now the author pushes a button that activates a lever and spring, there are gears and ribbons.  The God of Friction actually loves the typewriter. With every moving part, new Strings went through his hands, but for me, the Energy I can transfer to a reader was reduced.

“For instance, when someone wants to read the writings of, let’s say… for you, Thomas Jefferson, I’m in charge of displaying the Spiritual energy of the author to the reader.  The Strings that connect reader to author are quite strong for someone who gets to sit down with the paper he held and read the pen marks stroked out by his hand. There is a connection, a line, a “string” if you will, that is generated between the reader and the author.  And it will exist for quite a while in your world. Though,” the Word Keeper paused his scribbling and put a finger to his chin as he stared into space, obviously contemplating his next thought, “much of that Energy has been subsequently divided by all the times his words have been reprinted in other mediums.” 

After this he snapped back to his task and said, “Anyway, from here, much of your ‘time’ is only the length of an extended breath.  All Strings fade or strengthen at times.  The All is a dynamic place, of course.”

“Yes, of course,” I agreed.

Accepting my agreement as an invitation to continue, the Word Keeper dipped his quill in the inkwell and began to scrawl and speak once more in unison. “So you see, even a simple human soul is divided into so many Strings that it could be considered infinite.  Not necessarily,” he paused and mused again, “because the number of strings is infinite, but because they are constantly shifting and dividing and rejoining into an endless number of combinations.”  He looked down to my center once again and, speaking against the back of his hand as if he were transmitting some secret, he said. “Incidentally, that is why your scientists are never going to be able to truly map the brain.  It’s just a smaller version of the All.”

“That’s very comforting,” I said. “And confusing.”

He laughed so hard he nearly toppled from his bony perch on the stool, and then he screeched into the air like a madman, “It’s all just a big swirling mess! Hahaha. That’s why it takes so many of us to keep it stirring. And you’re supposed to be out there, swirling around in it.  Feeding us and being us. I mean,” he began to calm down from his manic explosion, “the Strings make me, and all of us.  We Gods are not some ‘other’, some outside thing, that manages the rest of the All.  We are a part of it and made by it. All consciousness splits and becomes the Gods. In fact,” he sputtered, with the raised finger of realization, “I may only have taken shape here, now, because of you.” He pondered this a minute, and then shook his head like a dog after a bath, as if attempting to loosen the thought from his mind and drop it out his ear.

“So, you shouldn’t possibly be enough collected Energy to maintain a sense of Self,” he began reasoning again. “You would’ve had to have done nothing for your entire life but write, incessantly from morning until night,” he added with a chuckle at the unlikely and impossible nature of his suggestion.

“I was a reporter,” I answered, suddenly having some memory of my past, complete with flashing images and children, love, and sunny days. “And I kept a journal.”

“Ohhh, yessss then!” the Word Keeper sat back, clutching his hands to his heart in either genuine or mocking joy, I could not tell which. “You are at least a writer then.” I could tell now his pleasure was true. “For a cosmic flub, you sure ended up in the right place. You could have landed in front of the God of Sound, or something. And let me tell you, you can’t talk in his presence, or even hear yourself think!”

He scribbled a moment more and then muttered, “But what are we going to do with you?  I mean, you really must be stripped and spread out. To prevent there being a hole in the fabric, you see.”

“I rather like my position right now,” I was able to say statically.

“Oh,” the Word Keeper responded quite dramatically, “You could never stay like this.  It would be oh-so boring.  Right now, you are a fixed entity in a flowing environment. You could only exist here like a stone in a stream. And you are supposed to be the water. It would not do to leave you like this.”

“But…” I began before being rapidly interrupted.

“In fact, I know that the alarms are out, and the job will be finished soon.”

“Oh,” I muttered under a breath of emptiness. “Must I really go?”

“I’m afraid so. Waves are the currency of so much of the God’s exchange.  Light and Sound and Magnetism, to name the big three.” The Word Keeper stopped scribbling and stared into space, thinking of more. “All Air and Fluids, of course. They all trade in that manner. And that is what is coming towards us now. A wave. It’s where I exist.”

He paused again in his writing as if he relished the distraction of my presence and was similarly sad to see it go.  It appeared to me that ‘forever’ was a long time “What I can offer you,” he said, poking his head down to me and speaking softly, “is the chance to make a record before you go.  I am the Word Keeper after all!” he declared more loudly, sitting backwards in defiance. “And you are a writer.  I’m not supposed to take a memo through this avenue, of course. But… this avenue has never existed before! It’s a once in the All shot! One last dispatch from the edge before the waves come to take you.” He was nearly hopping up and down on his stool in excitement.  And my perspective was rising.

I saw the desk top more squarely now, and the slate surface beneath the open ledger.  Its pages fluttered with such scribbles as I have never seen and could not read, though it was obvious they carried the weight of communication. Then a new page turned and I heard the Word Keeper say, “Take my quill and make another entry.  I will sneak it back to Earth.  The God of Electricity is quite busy, he’ll never know if I slip it into some unused, earthly blog.”

I felt some sort of control move to my center and I began to write.

I’d love to say some more, but I just heard the Word Keeper say “It’s coming now.” And “Goodbye.” And I feel it too. Tearing. Dissolution.