Three in a Carriage
There were three very different individuals riding in an ancient ceremonial carriage. One was dressed in a threadbare shapeless garment that could be a monk’s robe, his face hidden under a large hood, cutting an incorporeal shadow. The other two addressed him as Number One. Sitting beside him was a stately middle-aged man, sporting a gold-embroidered waistcoat, a pair of worn jeans and short boots with buttons and spurs, a combination best described as grotesque, topped by a red brimmed beach cap, with the brim turned backward. The third traveling companion was a cheerful boy with rosy cheeks and whose outfit so far consisted only of a pair of bright-colored track shoes and who had joined the two at the very last minute before the carriage set off.
After a while, as is so often the case, the three struck up a conversation. Number One was the first to speak and his voice screeched like a door in the dungeon of an antique fortress. Turning toward Number Two, the hooded shadow said, “As you must certainly know, Jesus entered the eternal current of Time with me and changed the world and even man. And what useful things have you brought about? You will now start bragging about your revolutions. Religious, bourgeois, proletarian, technological, sexual, informational — or perhaps you will recall bringing into the open one messiah after the next, each even more horrifying than one who preceded him. I wonder where you could have dug up all those conquerors, reformers, dictators, and leaders. I think some of my predecessors must have let you borrow those phantoms from old neighboring despotic realms.”
“You are being very unfair,” Number Two sounded genuinely hurt, his spurs jingling, “because you don’t want or maybe just can’t look over the fence of your kingdom long since gone. Otherwise you would know that I made and brought people what they had never possessed. I mean their Rights.” The hooded shadow gave a crooked smile and reluctantly screeched, “You’re so old you’ve already stepped on the bank of the Lethe, as they used to say in the time of my predecessors, you can vanish at any moment. Yet you think like a baby fresh from the cradle. Can you tell me why the people should need those Rights? Salvation and the Savior is all they have ever needed, the Savior who would save them from themselves.”
After that all were quiet and the only sound was the whistling of the star wind outside the carriage. Then the silence was ruptured by ringing puerile laughter. It was Number Three, the lad who had hitherto sat silently, in a posture of somewhat dramatized reverence for his ancestors, the Times that would always come to pass. And then he could hold himself in check no longer. “Oh, I am very sorry! Please forgive me, esteemed gentlemen, but there seems to be a certain discrepancy in your words, verging on self- abnegation. Is He that saves man from all perils not with us, is He not with the Times? Are not we the ones to patiently cure the gravest of wounds and do we not block that small individual brook of time in totally hopeless cases, diverting it to Nirvana? Nirvana! What other Savior could the people have wanted? All we need is better skill in regulating the speed of Time. Yes, Time. In happy occurrences, Time must be slowed down, and in ordeal Time must fly at a speed faster than light. That’s all there is to it. All!”
Number One and Number Two looked at each other, exchanging condescending smiles and shaking their heads: look who is talking, still wet behind the ears. The hooded shadow murmured, “Would you really want a world war to last but an instant? So that the planet would turn into a desert strewn with dead bodies in that same instant? Don’t worry, the people have thought of appropriate devices to do just that without our help.”
And then their conversation was cut short by something happening outside the carriage, something totally unexpected and unfamiliar. The carriage was stopped for just a fraction of a second, like a racehorse in a photo finish scene. In the miraculous silence that followed the passengers heard the powerful chimes of a heavenly bell no human ear could have heard. The stars around them were flashing and falling, there was a strong gust of solar wind and steam was rolling up from faraway galaxies. Then the carriage was moving again, but with only one passenger, the youngest. There was a huge ball of thread in his hands and it was unrolling by itself. In its bottomless depth were shimmering and twisting snake-like shadows of vague colorful shapes and images. Time would have to lend them form and embodiment. Or not. What would happen? Who would come next?
Number One and Number Two had fallen out of the carriage during the sudden halt and were now moving in the opposite direction, to the Great Scrap Heap of Eternity with spent and disemboweled Times and Millennia. The hooded shadow was showing the way, carefully sidestepping dark bottomless holes, thinking it would be so hard to find a place for Number Two, because the Great Scrap Heap had long been filled to capacity. In fact, it was spilling over. Number Two, meanwhile, was still thinking of the road he had just traveled, of all those things he had left unfinished. He was aggrieved by having left Number Three with a great deal more complicated problems, many of which could not be solved, than he had received from Number One when he took over the job. “Perhaps because many times more people have appeared in the world than at the time,” he tried to console himself, “and those people turned out so very unbalanced; cranks most of them, let’s face it. Every day they would demand something new from me and then would curse me for lack of respect for the tradition. Well, let Number Three, the current and the future one, deal with them now. Let’s hear what he has to say a thousand years from now when I come to pick him up and take him to that hellish Scrap Heap.” Number Two groaned at the thought.
