an introduction to capitalism (or how war can be won) - Lilith and Gabriel
My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight. Daniel 6:21
He could not bear a world where he was not sovereign of his own soul, and so it vaguely troubled him the way that his eyes followed her, this slender creature that twisted and turned in a intertwinement of flesh and silk. White and pink took upon it the colored quality of the stage lights, and in the entirety of it was the dance, and the dance was himself, and he despised it and coveted it. The laughing ascetic, the savage priest, he was mind, and air, and light, and still the way she moved was intoxicating, a slender tendril of vine against fence or oak, twisting in trembling exultation to the sun. He could not take his eyes off her, but vines, vines can strangle, and he knew in his heart that he is already ensnared, and perhaps that is what frightened him. Frightened him in the way that a child is frightened upon waking from some dread nightmare, gasping against sweat-soaked sheets, horrors vague and soft and gone. Frightened him in a sense that he had no name for, and he felt lost, his path overwrought, sky filled with mad, alien constellations, and he was prey to that emotion, to that understanding that there is no understanding.
He was not accustomed to fear, to this dim, ape-like recognition of lust and of mortality, that ancient mind dredging up memories of what it was to be helpless, before clothes, before fire, running naked before the pack. It was the part of him that trembled when the white winds blew and the wolves cried out in the depths of the night that conquered now, but he showed none of it. He smiled his easy smile, and sipped his drink, hiding the curve of amusement behind amber liquid. His eyes were bright, covetous, but they were the eyes of a man who knew better than to slake thirst with saltwater, that instinctively understood the need for denial even as these new emotions pulsed through him. The drive in him must burn brightly enough to desiccate decadence, and although he admired curving hips and slender thighs, he had no desire to find another, to spend the night in cheap ecstasy without cause or meaning. His morality prevented it, perhaps, that itching sense of flesh as cheap and time as cheaper, that valued the dank and forgotten flicker of humanity that characterized these wasted shells. Arrogant enough to think that he was chivalrous to forbear such pleasures, when he all too easily allowed himself others.
Pleasures that harmed no one but those who would take from the helpless, and he felt no guilt at his winnings. There was arithmetic in his fingers, trigonometry and Euclidian geometry wired into every nerve in his body, and his scarred, heavy hands moved with surprising decisiveness. He liked to gamble, was skilled at it, for risk was what fired him, what prompted him forward, for his triumphs were always tainted with an edge of tragedy. Ink and card-stock and strategy masquerading under the prettier face of luck had bought his way into the lion’s den, and there he was, watching the luxurious facade crumble before his appraising eyes. The face of evil is not always ugly, he knows, and the face of inequality lovelier still, for how else would one buy into the lie? Cruelty masquerading as democracy, but here perhaps was the last final spasms of capitalism before it writhed its purpose away into the welcoming arms of anarchy. No color mattered, no race, no creed. Money makes the world go ‘round and bits of paper can save a life or destroy one.
It is madness, he knows, but he too plays the game, bitterly and unwillingly, and treats it like a joke, when he knows it is deadly serious. And yet, a miracle, here he is, his jacket soft and weather-beaten, his shoes patched and worn thin, but his eyes are full of lively intellect and they dance in the shifting, endless light. The down and out philosopher under the title of a forgotten god, hope for a revolution and both idiot child and chilling tactician, his eyes traced the girl, and they were perhaps filled with something beyond primal desire, the forefront of that which was understanding.
Survival. Survival came in whispers, but so too came destruction. It was not the cracked, holy voice of a revolutionary that brings down a kingdom, but a whisper, intimation. Everything has its pressure point. He would face the lions as Daniel did with the strength of conviction to bolster him, but with far more of the wit, masquerading as aimless, purposeless, non-threatening. He would risk his life for a word, just as he might sell it well for a song, the white-noise of boredom and need for action driving him forward, restless, again, names springing instantly to his lips as lies. Lies, ah, lies were bitter as arsenic but they flowed like music.
Lies were the mother-tongue here, and Purgatory required fluency, all those unable to master it resigned as dilettantes, but such a place paradoxically, he found, required truth. Truth, discovered then, in the sinuous curve of a female spine, a dark fall of hair, skin, sweat, against a metal pole and outlined tantalizing in lace. Truth that life was fleeting and also forever. But not cheap, he mused, taking another sip of his drink, and again, he smiled.
Life was very expensive.
You could get death for free.