wax ecstatic

by steven p. q. mcfarlane

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Many years ago, when I was but a boy roaming the Australian outback, a story was told to me. This tale involved an aboriginal man who was smitten by Greek mythology. He chained himself to Ayers Rock, and there he stayed for days and weeks, waiting for a vulture to pluck his liver from his belly.

While his promethean desires were never fulfilled, many climbers of this mighty tor relished the notion that there was such a man, an ascetic being, who was willing to test his notion of immortality in such a way that it became cruel, comic theatre. And so one dusty midnight I climbed that rock, stark naked.

The rough outcroppings and unsociable ascent scraped my body and tore my flesh, but in those days it was a rite of passage. When at least I reached the top of this lonely tower I found the man, emaciated and raving to himself. I spoke to him at length, telling stories of giant millipedes and the value of a mollusk's shell.

Near dawn, as my bloodied body shone with the radiance of Ra, the man whispered something to me. Quietly, softly, he told me that he could never fulfill his wish, that all this was for naught, because it was not he who stole fire from the gods. And he begged me to light a match.

I reached into my marsupial pouch and withdrew a mucous-coated lighter — brought to light the ceremonial hookah which was tied to my back — and I flicked the flinty wheel. The butane combusted and sparks flew, and for a moment it illuminated the man's gaunt face, his eyes brighter than the flame.

He peered into the fire he had sought for so long, for which he had suffered untold agonies, and as his frail body lurched in its rusty chains, he breathed, valiantly trying to tell me some enigmatic truth to which no other man was privy. I leaned in to hear, but the only sound was desert wind and the the terrifying howl of the three-toed sloth-man.

Later, I sat naked on Ayers Rock, the sun rising in the western sky for the third time in a goat's generation, and I smoked my hookah. As I did, I spoke to the dead man next to me, as vultures tore at his innards in a cruel twisted irony. In this one-sided conversation, blurred by the dizzying effects of nine-month old opium bought cheaply in Brisbane from a toothless slave-trader named Jerome, I posed questions for which even Time does not have the answers.

Hearing no reply from either the man or the feasting scavengers, I placed a silver coin under the man's tongue and resigned my hopes to know. Climbing down under the fiery heat of hydrogen fusing into helium, compressing into gaseous iron, my skin blistered. But I was scarred in another way, a way more profound than a simple third degree burn covering 88 percent of my body.

Despite this trite epiphany, my life had been changed forever. And so, here I am, at the ripe old age of 78, sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch in Mayor's Income, Tennessee. As I sip my whiskey sour and twitch from the magnesium plate slowly driving into my brain, I think of that man and wonder if, when my time comes, I will be able to utter those esoteric clues of a higher reality.

Will I manage to exhale that one final truth of the world before jackals slake their thirst on my morbidly obese body? One cannot know until one wanders the labyrinthine hedges of Versailles, lying in wait for the diabolic minotaur to gore my sagging flesh with its icy-hot horns. Perhaps then, gentle reader, if you are brave enough to witness that day, you will be able to ponder a truly empirical notion as you fly from those walls on wings made of wax.

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