C. That sounds like my name being called out, although it can be hard to hear over all the noise of the waves pounding up the beach. I have said before it wasn’t the name I started out with, simply the one I inherited. Like Ernesto Sabato said about his, I inherited it from my dead brother, it wasn’t my real name, the one I had at birth, but I had no choice in the matter.
She/he would welcome a real name too, so let us call him/her “C”, maybe C for Charlie so we do not have to concern ourselves about sex. She. He. Or it, like you say. It, meaning less than human, something altogether more creaturely. Or, on the hand… No, simultaneously… More than human, something less creaturely.
Unwilling to discuss such niceties concerning an entity who might equally be thought of as the Angel of History, the Colonels with their dark glasses looking down at their clipboards are ticking the column with their pencils headed “Lice”. Decision time. Head this one straight for the incinerator.
Or C for Cool. Cool, like cool for Cool Hand Luke. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Then a single rifle shot breaking the glass of the church window, and down goes blue eyes. The bullet has gone straight though his neck, so that after that all he can do is gurgle and gasp. No point trying to listen to what he is saying now.
We’ll take care of things from hereon in.
No point trying to listen to an animal, or an angel. It has, in any event, been an unmitigated disassster up to this point, all C has done until now is complain how everything has gone wrong.
This is not the right attitude to have, subject C.
Of course C is living in a fantasy world, deluded, or worse, psychotic. You took it for something else, the whitecoats tell Charlie, you kept thinking it was real, and it was all a dream. Thank you, thank you, Charlie says, I am feeling much better now.
That is also C for Cuckoo. One flew over.
I get a nudge in the ribs. They are calling your name, somebody says. On your horse, it is your turn. I leap forward, like Sogn Gieri leaping the Rhine, taking his turn in the march of history with that dazed expression* and look of amazement on his face…
…and on my face as if I am genuinely surprised to find my spear has gone clean through the neck of the dragon. I can’t believe I just did that. Did you see that. I can’t believe it.
* That dazed expression: what Uncle Wally calls erstarrte Unruhe, or ‘Petrified Unrest’.