Among the many things we were forced to relearn
in the academies they had set up
(yes, forced – though the pretense initially was that
attendance was optional and at our leisure,
kept with the simple desire to perform
what was needed “in our efforts to codify
the new arrangements,” as it was ominously
worded) was a song that was somewhat long
and not particularly tuneful (none of them
were, regardless of how much Whiff you had in you).
It was a ballad about a certain
character who had appeared in many legends
and anecdotes that had been pulled up from the Breach.
Fables concerning this man were believed
to have circulated in oral and written
form since darkest antiquity and could still be
recited in languages that no one
could any longer understand, some dating back
to an extremely remote past before people
had acquired the essential implements
for preserving their stories in any other
than oral form. It was he, the tales informed us,
upon whom the responsibility
for all men and women had fallen. The first man.
Now, one of the odd things about this man of men
(I say “men” rather than “men and women”
due to the simple fact that that’s how it was phrased
to our great confusion in the stacks upon stacks
of documents that had been lifted up)
was that there was not even a single record
of him in the admittedly weak memories
of those who comprised our now rapidly dwindling
accord (those of us, that’s to say, who had retained
fragments, bits and pieces of the life and letters
that had been ours in advance of the Breach).
This fabulous Man of Men was not, however,
in any way to be confused with the old God
or any of the early deities.
We had among our group enough to allow us
to piece together everything that we needed
on that topic. I mention this so that
nobody gets the false impression that we all
fell victim to some cheap metaphor concerning
the older faiths that someone might have tossed
into the murky Breach as a practical joke –
perhaps some prankster hoping to trip up any
posterity lucky or unlucky
enough to linger on in undying dotage
after the Breach (assuming, of course that there was
indeed an agency responsible
for the Breach – an idea that no one had yet
come forth to opine was short of the possible).
No one had the slightest recollection
of these fables and anecdotes that the Lesser
Accord were busy piecing together for us
in the academies. The issue posed
another bone of contention separating
us from them, and they took very great pains to prove
to us that this Menahmen (the LA’s
official name for the Man of Men, accented
on the middle syllable) was neither their own
fabrication nor some sort of figment
of the collective imagination churned up
in the joke-tellings, and that this bearded old man
and the documents that told us of him
had most certainly been among the specimens
that had survived the Breach. (In fact, though, they needn’t
have taken such great pains to convince us.
Menahmen was certainly not the oddest thing
that the Breach had coughed up, and likely there’d emerge
yet odder things in the minutes to come.)
Well and good. Who could fathom the inscrutable
process of selection that had preserved some things
and not others for the posterity,
however slender, that we had represented,
or so it appeared, either for the Breach itself
or for the several generations
immediately prior to it. Possibly
such tales had been prevalent in certain districts
but not in any of the areas
in which those of us who had survived had once lived
in our forgotten youths. But the Lesser Accord –
none of them having ever been read to
in the once upon a time of their earliest
childhoods and having had to laboriously
assemble, from the ABC of sound
and acoustics, all the songs that, had they been born
to any other life, would have been sung to them
in the cradle, and so had never learned
from the daily telling of tales to separate
fact from fiction – insisted with great vehemence
on the reality and existence
(former at least if not present and continued)
of this Menahmen and, further, made us sit down
and share our memories of this First Man
and Creator of Men. They would not accept no
for an answer and resorted to a mild form
of physical coercion as they tried
to encourage us to remember what simply
wasn’t or never was there to be remembered.
Then came the additional annoyance
of required attendance at their “didactic plays,”
as they were informally known, which, following
from the fact of the chaos that governed
our theatrical life at this time, would spring up
unannounced on some new patch of floor that was hard
to locate and to which they would rush us,
as if it were some great emergency, out of
the academies and onto the sprawling Floor,
there to witness a performer scarcely
out of his first youth, bedecked in beard, cane and robe,
emoting as growlingly as his breaking voice
would allow about the indecencies
that his depraved creations were getting up to
with each other. As angry as we were to have
this laughably bad art of our struggling
Breach Theater forced upon us, we couldn’t help
but laugh for pity’s sake to see the youth that we’d
called our own wheezing on their cherished Whiff
and petitioning the elders for ideas.
For they could hardly find enough material
to get through a single scene, and after
a few minutes of stammering through a badly
worded monologue patched together from clauses
without subjects, redundancies, Whiff-bred
neologisms, and the most hilarious
banalities, one of these pubescent graybeards
would pause, put a hand to his confused brow,
scratch a chin that jutted out from his dangling beard,
turn to his audience, and ask in a lowered
tone of voice, “So…what did Menahmen say
at this point…you know – the time that he descended
from the top of the mountain into the valley
before he noticed his cane was bleeding?”
We’d look at each other in nervous bemusement
as the rest of the earnest players proceeded
to sweep down on us with that ever same,
detestable eagerness for the pap of lore
scrawled on their faces. “Yes, what did Menahmen say?”
And one of us whom we’d designated
in whispers beforehand would give them the answer
he guessed they were after – partly to go along
with the charade and ensure that matters
were not made any worse for us, partly because,
in this manner, we might gradually relearn
the art of storytelling – a task that
the Lesser Accord certainly wasn’t going
to accomplish on their own. Invariably,
though, the lies we told were inadequate
to their imaginative yearnings, and, although
there was a certain point at which they’d “let it go
for now,” we always felt that we had failed
to give them what they wanted to hear or to know.
[Next: The Greater Men of Menahmen]