Stories of Transience

Pnévma and the Twilight Star

From beneath a cosmology of sparkling nightly deities, a mortal fisherman slept. It was a hot Athenian Summer, and on his fishing days the sun beat so relentlessly that he could not even gather the strength to dock his sailboat. Instead, he waited until twilight to recline against the creaky wood of the hull and lay his head down where he could hear the lulling chop of the waves against the gallows. While the sleeping fisherman drifted in the moonlit sea, olive trees swayed sedately in the distant midnight zephyr. The gentle inhale and exhale of Naiads in a nearby cave charmed the current of the ripples to embrace the contours of their slender white limbs. On the horizon, a soundless streak of lightning lit up the stupendous slopes of Olympus. Beneath him, he felt the pulse of ocean depths he could not even begin to fathom and found a queer sense of comfort in how miniscule he felt in his sailboat.  

Though it was a still night, the fisherman awoke suddenly with a curious anxiety in his chest and the feeling that his craft had travelled further than he anticipated. There was a choir of subtle noises he had unknowingly become attuned to in his many years at sea- a nymphet’s lullaby, a retraction of monstrous tentacles, the flutter of strong, feathered wings. Yet, in this moment he seemed to hear all of them deafeningly. One noise in particular caught his attention, making him flinch every time it rose up again. It was a shrill whisper that seemed to extend from the black clouds above, but also vibrated through the waves beneath him. It was behind him, in front of him, inside of him. Stringing him along slow, high-pitched sentences in which he could not quite make out the phonetics. In the moonlight, the fisherman could almost see the vibrations of the sound move through salty air particles, reverberating hypnotically as it bounced off wave crests. It gave him a headache, and he grew restless with the charmed ominousness of his surroundings. He put his head into his hands and shed a tear of distress, but before it could fall, a light in the fisherman’s peripheral caught his attention and he peered upwards. That was his first fated encounter with Pnévma. 

Pnévma. She was different from other deities, if she could even be considered a deity at all. She was a ghost of a young woman, cursed maliciously by a traveling oracle jealous of her youthful beauty. Her death was tragic and unfair, and severed her maidenhood painfully short. A chorus of Gods arrived at the scene of her bloodied body. Aphrodite and Eros, patrons of love and beauty; Athena, protectress of the land; Hera, mother of divine women; and Lachesis, weaver of fates. Their sylphlike cloaks and bejeweled draperies shifted in the cool blue twilight as they stood guard like a circle of angels, silently analysing the fickle thing that was her doomed life. Yet, even in her grim colourlessness, she was a pearl. The Gods transformed her into an eternal ghost to preserve her charm forever.  

From the moment the fisherman met the illusive gaze of ghostly Pnévma, he knew he was on the brink of something sublime. And he was right. For Pnévma, it was hard not to adore the fisherman, his worn, olive skin, his light, squinty eyes and scruffy human hair. For the fisherman, he felt astonished that he could ever call this ephemeral sprite, descending from above in her pure splendour, his own. Partly this was because he was uncertain of his prospects with a creature so transient. She would often deliver treasures to his bedside: an opalescent shell from the cracks of an uninhabited sea cliff, a juicy pomegranate from the tallest tree in Athens, coins from trades of Gods, and then she would disappear. She would float into his world, coat his clothes in a lingering perfumy vapour, kiss him gently, move through his spaces transparently, look at him with convincingly real eyes. But she could never stay for long. Her romance with any mortal would never be sustainable- what would she do when he died? How would she bear the children he longed for? How long could he withstand the illusion of her disposition?  

Every day the fisherman grew increasingly frustrated with his lover’s flightiness. On lonely days out on the water, he longed for a love he could count on forever. He longed for her to be human like him but would wonder if that meant changing the very charm that allured him in the first place. Confused, the fisherman appealed to the Goddess of Divine Realms, Alithofáneia. Alithofáneia arrived in a dream on a steamy night. She was hard to make out, illuminated so brightly by light that the only indication of her presence were strips of pale-yellow dress fabric billowing luminously from her sides, and a stern voice which promised a hasty solution to the fisherman’s plight. Her prophecy echoed: 

Pnévma, Travelling Ghoul

A blood-red heart deceived  

At the hands of her ignorant impermanence 

A tincture for a fisherman is a curse upon the ghost 

An eternity as a fixed twilight star 

Stuck between dusk and day 

Coruscating in place  

While her forsaken romance withers beneath her 

And her noble fisherman sails seas without her 

***

The Summer days turned restless and stale. Every morning, the fisherman departed on his wooden sailboat to the steaming tide, which now seemed bleak and colourless. When he came in, he sank into his linens which still smelled like her. He counted his collection of her treasures, a collection that would never expand. Though the pomegranate was rotting, and the coins were rusting, he kept them. He imagined her wafting through the door like she did, but she never would again. He lived for twilight, when he could see her shine. Gaze at her up in the sky. Watch her until he collapsed into sleep. Encased within that evening star was his darling ghost Pnévma, and locked with her were the memories of their fated love, the only love either of them would ever know again.  

A Distant Encounter with a Lover on the Train

I saw him on the train five years after we last spoke. He was two rows in front of me, and about a quarter of his profile was obscured by the swaying heads that occupied the seats between us, but I knew it was him. I knew it was him straight away, if not for the slouchy way his shirts always hung off his shoulders, then for the book he was reading. Every time he read from the right side, the cover would rotate slightly to reveal a glossy title: “Epic Greek Myths of Travel and Love”. I smiled to myself despite the subtle crushing sensation that rose in my chest. I thought about all the mythologies he read, and how he sometimes gave them to me afterwards. I would read them and enjoy them and perhaps read them again, but mostly I loved that he had read them and enjoyed them and most certainly read them again. 

The train emerged from a long, dark tunnel and the blinding sun gushed through the windows, filling the carriage with stupendous midday light. His seat in particular was in a bright rectangle of sun, so bright that his form lit up like a glowing spectre. He was irritated by it, and for the first time all trip, he grew restless. He squinted into the page as if the words had evaporated into the bright white parchment. He checked his watch, and then the screen with all the stops on it, and then his watch again, and then he closed his eyes agitatedly and tilted his head back. In the new light I saw all the little features I knew so well. I used to think that I could draw him from memory with my eyes closed. His eyelashes, long and thick in the fluttering sun, his hands, knobbly at the knuckles with oddly bent fingers, the fleshy sunburnt colour of his scalp where his hair parted.  

It had been 20 minutes since he first closed his eyes, and I was pretty sure he was asleep. Strange, I thought, because he was never a day-napper with me. But then, he wasn’t with me anymore. In fact, I don’t think he was with anyone anymore. I searched his hands up and down for a ring, to no avail. This gave me a wicked pleasure. Followed promptly by an immense wave of guilt at the thought that I secretly missed him. I didn’t really want him, I just felt so close to him in this confined space. It made me feel like I did on our last fateful day. Hopeful, anxious, clenching and unclenching my fists on the bed and digging my fingers slowly into my nail beds. He was tall in the doorway, and dark like a looming shadow, but when he moved into the light I saw his face was red and puffy with despair. I just wanted to keep that face, streaked with tears, in a locket close to my heart forever. All I wanted was to keep things that I knew were meant to be transient. I wish I could keep riding this train forever and ever, just so I could watch him sleep. 

I thought about what he was dreaming and wanted to replicate this train scene in his head. Him, seeing himself in third person, thoughtless, solitary. Me, observing his every intricacy with meticulous precision. My fantasy was truncated when he woke up in a sudden panic. His breathing was quick and he crouched over with his hands rubbing his eyes, and then his temples, and then his scalp as he calmed himself down. After a few minutes, he reclined again, but this time his eyes were wide open and he seemed to look out the window with a queer, haunted expression. 

I wondered if he felt that I was here, just behind him. Only a few steps away. If only he moved, turned, readjusted, he would be looking right at me, and he would see me already looking at him, and it would remind him of all the other times that we looked at each other, and all the feelings we exchanged with those consecrating gazes. I knew he wouldn’t turn around and catch me. I knew he would get up at his stop slightly too late and run out the doors a second before closing and never look back. But I wanted him to, so that it felt real. If he just looked at me, he wouldn’t be a stranger on the train. Until I became interlocked with those eyes, I was just a ghost. A distant shadow of the woman I was when he loved me long ago.  

I was right. His body flew out of the carriage so quickly that the image of it lagged in my mind like a slow frame of a camera. I figured I was probably hypnotised, because there was never a louder slam than the doors that jolted closed after he disappeared, severing the invisible string that tied him to me in this sacred passage of time. Never in my life had I felt so achingly alone. And then another smaller slam, and I flinched, and I realised his book had fallen off the seat. He must have forgotten it in his flurry. It soothed me knowing I could perhaps still keep a small fragment of him, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. I thought it must have looked like I was stealing or something, but I knew I wasn’t because I knew him and he knew me and even if we never talked again, we were once one person. I left the book on the floor, about a quarter of the cover hanging into the aisle, thinking maybe if it sat vacant from us long enough, it would be wiped clean of all our memories and be fresh for whoever was yet to find it.  

Arthur’s Book

October 16, 3047  

My father Arthur was an author. He told me many great tales in the time he was alive. Some real, some fiction- it didn’t matter, he was an excellent storyteller. When we sat across from each other in the dimly lit lounge room, nestled amongst brown leather armchairs with piles of blankets, he spoke with such amusement that my brothers and I hung on to every lingering syllable of every momentous word he spoke.  

When the newer technology came in, he leant into it. At first, he liked having his books read to him in AI replications of his most favourite actors, and then he liked to write behind the wheel of his self-driving Volkswagen. In his declining years, there came trials for a new technology, which would track the activity occurring in brain neurons in the moments following a patient’s last breaths, and then translate the experience into a written synopsis. Arthur liked this idea very much. So much, in fact, that he asked that we schedule him to be hooked onto the machine as soon as he turned palliative. He said he would create what could be his greatest masterpiece yet and he wanted us boys to be the first to read it. He called it ‘My Afterlife Memoir’. 

His heartbeat stopped about a month ago. The technicians gave us some time while they finalised the synopsis, and after a few weeks they hand delivered us a physical copy. Arthur still liked his hard copies.  

***

My Afterlife Memoir  

Arthur Stokes  

2955 – 3047 

The big sleep is finally enveloping me, and as I become submerged in a sweet, heavy darkness, my bodily confines fade away like dust and my being becomes nothing but a vast opening for all of the feelings I could never understand until now. I see without eyes, a door shielded by a white sea of mist. With no hands I turn the silver knob and it jangles slightly before revealing a room, bare and white on the walls and floor, but full of several men gathered closely to each other, silently exchanging gazes. They turn to look at me with wide eyes, and I wonder what they see, because to myself it seems I am merely a draft. 

I edge forward towards the men, and one steps away from the crowd to greet me. He is old and carries a haunted expression in his eyes, draped with heavy curtains of wrinkles. I know him from somewhere, but I don’t know where. He says nothing, just continues looking at me. Through his gaze I begin to experience a wordless production of images and sounds and scenes of life that I never experienced myself but understood perfectly. My form occupies his, and I am overwhelmed by a nostalgic conviction that I am both him and me at once. I see a night sky, a boat, waves in a black sea lapping the surface with moonlit twinkles. I see a woman- a phantasm- rain down from the sky and give herself to me. I see a rotting pomegranate and beads of sweat trickle down my nose. I see a star, the brightest star I have ever seen, illuminate a twilight sky with a mesmerising radiance. I see the sea again, this time from the underside, where the surface is growing further and further away and the wet walls around me become increasingly blacker. And then, his gaze turns away, and I see no more.  

There is another man who moves closer to me soon after the old man turns away. This man is young and has a red look to eyes which makes it look like he has been crying. I stare into them, climbing the red veins which crack through the whites like slender tree branches. The pictures come in fast reels. I hear the mechanical whir of a train, the murmur of people’s fabrics shuffling on plastic seats, and a soft echo of a young girl’s voice. I see flashes of bright white  

sunlight appearing suddenly and then disappearing. Female hands tightening at the knuckles. I see hot metal tracks, a thick red book, and feel a big heavy gasp of air rise in me but never fall. And then as quickly as the memory came, it sweeps away again as the boy turns his head down.  

The next person that comes forward is a man, very old and frail, who looks just like me, but slightly different. His eyes are green whereas mine are blue, and the pictures they produce are foggy and fragmented, like old film with leaks of colour. There is a young man, a tall fig tree, a strip of sunshine on a park bench, and a woman that I once loved. The version of her that he has in his memory is one that I had given up. And I am seeing it now, in slow-moving frames infiltrated by vague laughter and giggly conversation. I saw it now, what I could have seen if I chose her. A baby. Green grass. An envelope. A hospital bed. Long brown hair. Pale, youthful skin. A church full of people. A drawn-out frame of an empty lounge room. 

Everyone in the room keeps coming to me, looking at me with eyes that tell of the millions of lives I lived before this one. They are my incarnates, and still not a word has passed between us, but we understand each other. There was safety in the knowledge of the sacred familiarity we share. Our attention suddenly turns to the jangling silver doorknob, and a young girl enters the room, black hair and thick eyebrows, a pensive look on her face and a pen in her hand. I am the first to approach her.