Those born in historical times often have memories that conflict with the official record. He remembers for example that as a boy he had a brother — a twin perhaps but time had robbed him of the precise details. Yet all the documents that purport to be of a biographical nature neglect to mention that he ever had siblings of any sort.
Laying back on his bed, with the ailment coiling its way around the last embers of his life, he listened as the messenger read from a scroll. “To this scholar, this adopted son of the Empire, whose works in service of the Emperor have been without value — I’m sorry, that should obviously read, invaluable. I’ll continue. Have been invaluable, we bestow the honor of a statue, to be housed in the future Hall of Scholars, which shall be named in his honor. The Emperor has decreed it, and so shall it be.” The messenger bowed twice, then rolled up his scroll and plodded out the door, but not before pilfering a few trinkets from the mantle, as was the habit of his guests; such was the degenerate state of the Empire, that nobody had any respect for the dying. Most notably, the messenger had pocketed a small wooden statue of Isis given to him as a tax payment by an old blind woman of the provinces. He thought of Isis abandoning him here at the end of his life, and he chuckled, which shot a pain across his chest and down his left arm.
The disease wasn’t going to let him rest until it was done with him. He wasn’t going to rest much anyway. Now that his life was over, and he lay in bed a helpless slave to mortality, he regretted that he’d never written his memoirs. Cruel fate had, here at the end of all things, filled his head with words, but had robbed him of the means to dictate them. His hands lay gnarled and useless under the blankets. His aide had been sent off to fight in one of the new Emperor’s futile wars. He was left with only a deaf slave upon whom he could dump his memories.
Above all his memories, above the plaudits he’d received from dignitaries the world over, above the shameful intrigues and malicious subterfuges he’d performed on behalf of the Emperor, above the wisdom he’d gathered from the scholars and priests and holy charlatans of the world, above even the wife and child he’d left behind to become a scholar for the Empire, he thought first and foremest of the twin, that haziest of memories. Like a chimerical fog hiding for decades in the corner of his mind, rising out only at the last moments of his life. When the servant placed a wet cloth upon his brow, the scholar opened his eyes and he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. It suddenly all became clear to him. He summoned all his strength, and with his last breath he dictated to his mute servant the chapters of his life he’d thought long lost. With a voice as clear and fresh as a mountain spring, he spoke his tale, beginning with his first memory of the twin. It began on the afternoon that the clay pigeons took flight…
