The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Zach Weber

Never have I sometimes always existed.

§

I see him and think: wouldn’t it be lovely? Stand around and chat. Five minutes later I am caught in a conversation, disappointing both him and myself. Nothing worse. So I’ll sit here under the tree by the stone building, by the bookstore, under the tree with the long branches and the light sprinkled like salt through them, reading my book. It needs reading and if I close it now, I’ll never finish it.

§

I set down my book and rise to meet my friend. His name is Ktskh. This is important, what we’re doing. I’ll finish the book later. We shake hands. Other students pass us on their way to the bookstore. He asks if I’m going to Chaulat’s party tonight. I am there, having a bad time, holding a beer. I tell him no, noticing as he walks away that someone has stolen my book and book bag. Another detail lost in the foam.

I purchase a book in the student bookstore. Selected Works of Andrey Kolmogorov. I tell the clerk that I am in Advanced Probability and Topology II. She doesn’t care. A thousand times she cares. More often than not she doesn’t and I frown and leave. I am walking home in the dark, having finished the Selected Works, and am accosted by a gentleman with a familiar voice. He beats me thoroughly and robs me of my belongings. I do not buy the book, though I consider it. Instead I purchase a collection of early Fantastic Four from the comic book section. I harbor a deep sympathetic relationship, albeit necessarily one-sided, with Reid Richards, insofar as he was another man who knew what it was like to be in two places at once.

§

There, I motion toward Miranda with a limp hand, and she promptly increases the distance between our physical bodies. I am sixteen and I’ve just met a girl named Miranda. She asks me if I’d like to go out sometime. I tell her I’m dating Zhou-Dzi Li-Tzen from Staffordshire High. She shrugs and smiles and says that’s okay. Next Friday I am at the movies with Miranda. The film is Hot Treasure. I am attending Hot Treasure with Zhou. I am there alone. I have known Miranda for five years now. I kissed her goodnight on that date. She has told me since that she wouldn’t go on a second date with a guy who didn’t go for a kiss on the first. She appreciates the confidence. I still watch Hot Treasure on television and I haven’t seen it since then. The memory of it is painful and wonderful, loaded. We are sixteen and she is leaving the theater and I give her a hug and inquire as to whether she would be interested in a second date. She asks me to let her think about it. It will be fine.

§

I am alone. I am thirty, forty. I think often of Miranda and sometimes even Zhou, who I haven’t seen in twelve, twenty-two years. Zhou and I are married and she asks me what I want for my thirty-fifth birthday. It is Zhou’s twenty-first birthday and I am proposing to her. I knew we’d wed. I am with Miranda on the beach and I’m twenty-five, on the eve of America’s Decacentennial Celebration. I’ve just gestured toward her with my limp hand and she has just moved away, across the sand, across the fire. I am lighting the fire by pouring lighter fluid over charcoal and driftwood. I am squatting with the lit match, touching it to the oily patch that gleams at the edge of coals in the last minutes of the molten beach sunlight, a walk away from our ancestors who got stuck in the foam, whose hearts are salty green.

§

I have always never existed sometimes. In my brutal infancy I am tormented most by the impenetrable roaring void. From seventeen through fifty-two it is the fact that the world in which I am not burdened, my peculiar omniscience is only a slim percentage of my experience. In my brief flashes of normal life I am shown what it would be like to sit at the edge of the sea of information, gaze upon it and wonder what might lie beneath, rather than to be submerged in it, constantly swimming up at a ray of light that is maybe just the absence of darkness. And I have never sometimes always existed too.


I am sixteen and fifty-two. At fifty-two I am accelerating towards the end. The last thirty-five years have always been leading to this, particularly since I am twenty-five and on the beach with Miranda and she says that I’ll never see her again. At sixteen I’m standing under bristling storm clouds outside of the movie theater, waiting for Miranda. It is sunny and I am alone.


At sixteen I am being born and am at the edge of the end. I am twenty-one and I can’t stop crying. I’ve seen everyone I love die in every way imaginable. I’ve always seen it and it makes me sad. I cry in the car and at home and I curl fetal on the hardwood floor, dry-heaving under a cat’s inquisitive gaze.


I am outracing myself to the edge of this universe, where it all begins again, just the same, closer than a mirror, a surface always curving, subtly, with the dynamic tension of two realities touching hips, where along the fault line one can glimpse the Nothing that could have been if no thing had ever been, a hairline crack between worlds impassable by any craft conceived by man, and I see myself and I nod and we are on the beaches at night, watching the foams recede, knees at our chests, fires burning, trying not to think.

§

At the CVS buying fucking Diet Coke and candy. Buying cigarettes. Three Heads appear before me in the void. Their spinal cords dangle like dead snakes from their precision-cut necks. Cerebrospinal fluid drips into a blackness that fades away into the condensation on my Diet Coke. The cashier bags my goods and bids me a friendly ete re nous atxevo. Ete re nous could be a cry for help but I don’t give a shit about anyone else. I leave wondering how anyone’s supposed to figure out how to live.

§

Different beach now. Dark still. Storm approaching. Here and there I’m alone but I know a woman named Miranda with whom I’m deeply in love. Sometimes she’s there with me. I want to fuck her on the sand. I want to weep to shame the ocean. To make this storm seem anemic in comparison. I’d like to cry out until my voice breaks like a thunderclap and my chest burns like I’ve been struck by lightning, whatever my soul is, pulled upward, upward, my body discarded like a damp towel. I lie in the wet sand like a primordial specimen and listen to Corcovado playing faintly from a beach house down the row. The meaning of existence, my love.

§

I refuse to discuss the dream. Here it is. It isn’t a dream. Four times it happened. Rows and rows of bare steel pylons extend, in all directions, for one hundred miles from the center of an empty city at night. The base of each pylon forms a sort of upside-down ‘V’ shape which measures, from ground to vertex, exactly four meters, and then from the vertex to the light at the top is no more nor any less than twelve meters. Atop each pylon sits a high pressure sodium lightbulb, shining against the hard night like a gem in the void, a hundred thousand lacerations in the fabric of the vault of heaven.

Weaving in between these structures are the spirits of the deceased from all around the world, each one carrying a quiet fire in their belly. I stand and watch them float along, in the bright light, returning home.


I see those ghosting teens I used to know, sitting on the curb in front of the Shop-N-Save between Sycamore Street and Mountainview Boulevard, catcalling to blistered corpses that swell and wheeze hot dry air from every hole in a grim semblance of life.

—Damn, you got an ass like a onion. Make me wanna cry.

—Come talk to me girl. Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbor.

—Nah, come over here. What were you like when you was alive?

—…

—Shit, I ain’t tryin’ to get into nothin’ serious. I just wanted to fuck you.

Life might be an infinite number of movies all being played at different speeds and with a constantly revolving audience. We all need a witness to our experience.


At twenty-four and twenty-seven I’m with Miranda in Kerala. I see a print of the goddess Kali by Raja Ravi Varma and it’s uncomfortably arousing. When Miranda catches me staring at it, she thinks it’s because it’s a painting with blue tits in it. I don’t tell her that the man she is trampling beneath her feet is her husband, Shiva, who, in one interpretation of the legend, willingly puts himself in this position, choosing to submit to his wife in her most raw and powerful manifestation. Kali is a force of destruction in the form of time which is above time itself. I have stared into the heart of the Black One. I think she’s sexy.


The words taste bad. When I’m not a character in a book I feel like I have more control but a lot of times I know that control is an illusion. Things happen because they do. It’s not fate or God. It’s less mystical than chance, even. What happens just happens. We think we have choices but our choices are just occurrences and so they happen just like a leaf falling happens. When I get to know that control is an illusion and I lay by Miranda maybe while we drift in orbit around some planet so far from Earth that you forget Earth exists, I maybe also touch her cheek while she sleeps and remember that she’ll die.

§

I met Miranda at a college party that I didn’t attend. She was majoring in Concentration. I could never quite grasp it. She told me about her ex-boyfriend, without naming him. I thought that it was a curious thing to discuss with a relative stranger but she was very beautiful so I let her continue. After awhile the man she was describing began to sound terribly familiar. I asked her if she wasn’t actually talking about a young man with whom I’d attended high school. I asked her his name and she confirmed my suspicion. I said some things never change and we laughed over our drinks.

§

Back in a rush, shot backwards out of a cannon, back to the bed and I’m sick. I nudge Miranda, who is laying beside me, I nudge her with my frail hand, the meaning of existence, my love.

Zach Weber is a 23-year-old poet and writer. He is a high school dropout. He never knows what to write for his author bio. He loves you.