Despite the fact that he was quite as long out of
his youth as the rest of us, Scrawl was not
among the ones forced to attend these impromptu
stagings at the Breach Theater. He had attained
full LA membership and was allowed
to come and go as he pleased. It was assumed that
his business was to attend to higher matters.
Nobody could say exactly what were
these higher matters, but they gave him quite a bit
of leeway to do as he wished for the simple
reason that he’d been the one to come forth.
Indeed, if he hadn’t come forth, it’s possible –
quite possible – that nobody would have come forth.
And if no one had come forth…one shuddered
to speculate any further. Truly, we all
looked upon Scrawl with a fascination composed
of various admixtures of envy
(“If only I had been so brave!”), regret (“I should
have beat him to it and stepped forth myself…”)
and awe (“We all had the same idea,
but only he possessed the mettle and foresight…”),
though also of equivocation (“Sure, someone
had to do it…someone would have done it
sooner or later anyway, perhaps better…”)
and malice (“Who’s anyone to say we wouldn’t
be better off if he hadn’t come forth…”).
I’m speaking, of course, of how the greater accord
felt about Scrawl. The LA, on the other hand,
treated him with the greatest reverence,
much as if he were a High Priest of Menahmen.
We couldn’t understand what there was about him
that would make of him such an exception.
Again, it was likely due to the simple fact
that he had been the one to come forth. To be sure,
the LA had been quite young at the time
and hadn’t understood in Scrawl’s act what we had.
Yet they understood what happened in their own way;
that, apparently, was more than enough.
What disturbed us more than anything else was that,
while generally speaking he was taciturn
and even abrupt with us (not a fault
in itself, as that’s how we were with each other
most of the time), he displayed no such reticence
or hesitation in his day-to-day
dealings with the LA, towards whom his aloofness
seemed a more or less conscious attempt to increase
the magnetic effect he exerted
on them. It was maddening to be in the midst
of one of those ridiculous performances
and to suddenly then become aware
of the peculiar, hushed sort of commotion
that invariably tracked Scrawl on some remove
of floor off to the left or to the right.
Yet due to the respect that we ourselves believed
we owed Scrawl, we restrained ourselves from attempting
to dissuade the LA from the homage
they paid him, incomprehensible though it was.
We did, however, attempt to warn them against
making Menahmen a divinity,
although there was little we could do to stop it.
Before long, there wasn’t even any speaking
of a Menahmen cult, for already
it had gone far beyond that. We were witnessing
the making of a new faith and of the makeshift
theology that was haphazardly
drawn up to promote it, and it didn’t appear
unreasonable to predict that soon we’d be
inundated with apostles, doctrines,
martyrs, heresies, scourges and reformations.
We did what we could to stop this from happening.
A few of us tried resuscitating
interest in the old God and in the old rites,
songs and proverbs, of which we had an ample store
of memories on which we could rely.
But we could only recall them in the language
that was already antiquated when we learned
to recite them in our forgotten youth,
and when we tried to impart them in the simple
phrases of everyday speech the LA would soon
forget the god of whom we’d been speaking
and imagine instead we were conjuring up
for their benefit one of the many faces
through which Menahmen had revealed himself
(oddly enough, there were said to be precisely
as many faces of Menahmen as there were
names of Whiff). “The elders are warning us
that Menahmen has many faces and facets.
Indeed, they are right. Menahmen is many-faced
and many-faceted.” But that’s merely
how they explained to themselves the consternation
they read in our own faces. They were not at all
tickled by their stupid solemnity
or by the utter silliness of the language
that they concocted in order to express it.
Early on it became fashionable,
at a stipulated point in one’s later youth,
to visit the “dozen stations of Menahmen”
(later the practice, which initially
assumed the loose form of a bunch of kids looking
for an excuse to set off on an adventure –
like a joyride playing at pilgrimage –
would be elevated into a sacrament).
A dozen locations conveniently scattered
about the Venue’s gray perimeter
were improbably identified as the scenes
where had been accomplished Menahmen’s greatest deeds,
his alleged nativity perhaps
foremost among them, along with the place where he
ambiguously met his death. While we couldn’t
but raise our eyebrows and shrug our shoulders
at the extravagances of youth and the self-
deceptions fostered to sustain them, the LA’s
youthful ventures did have the benefit
of making familiar (refamiliar, perhaps
I should rather say) a good bit of the murky,
unknown, presumably vast area
immediately external to the Venue,
away from the close confines of the Theater
and the academies. Most comical
were the vehicles that they perfunctorily
slapped together in order to better explore
the Perimeter. On the hood of each
was painted a face that, if they hadn’t informed
you to the contrary, you could well have assumed
was an unskillful representation
of one of the many “faces of Menahmen.”
On closer inspection, however, the painted
visage appeared eerily familiar –
a likeness to a companion of your accord,
or to yourself even. On further inquiry
your suspicions were confirmed. The LA
had been paying scrupulous attention to our
improvised answers to the questions that they put
to us concerning the mysterious
former ways and means and manners of Menahmen.
Increasingly, we figured that we had to be
extremely careful with all that we said
during such questionings, for among the LA
were several individuals we couldn’t
identify with uncannily good
memories who took down our speeches word for word,
with the greatest accuracy and attention
to detail – even any stammerings
that might bring meaning to the interpretation
were incorporated. Before long, it became
apparent that our often tongue-in-cheek
elaborations of the Major and Minor
Events were being recorded, compiled, cross-checked
and annotated, to be put into
a future compendium filled with the specious
pronouncements of the “Greater Men of Menahmen.”
Without anyone having informed me
as to the dubious honor, I learned one day
that the suspiciously familiar face painted
on the front hood of a car that had just
flown past in search of one of the Dozen Stations
was my own, albeit rendered with a wispy,
Menahmenesque beard and a wizened look
about the eyes that I didn’t as yet possess.