How much time do we have? That’s always
the question — the one the disciples fumbled
on the mount, the one my portfolio answers
nightly in its decimals.
I’m the managing partner.
I have come to talk about the Antichrist.
I find I must begin with blood. Not mine —
let the record shimmer
the way Wanaka shimmers
at the bottom of the world, where I keep
four hundred seventy-seven acres
for the view:
the lake says nothing back
and I have bought that silence.
You want to know what evil looks like?
It looks helpful —
while the patient does what patients do
in the quiet of the thing
withheld from her.
The girl with the sign — she’s, what, nineteen —
she’ll age. She’ll sicken. She will come to me
or to what I’ve built, and I will not refuse her.
That’s the product.
Death is an engineering problem.
My Nicene Creed, minus the dying:
the flaw, the architectural flaw,
in the first design. Christ should have pivoted.
Could you not watch one hour?
In parabiosis the young rat and the old
are sutured flank to flank — two bodies,
one pulse — the bright blood ferries
its undamaged signals through the silted
channels of the old, and the old rat
quickens — sniffs, remembers —
the coat regains its sheen,
the whiskers orient toward the sound
of feeding in the next cage over —
and in the studies they don’t publicize,
the young rat thins. The young rat dims.
Its coat goes coarse, its open eyes
lose the sheen they had before the sutures
married it to what was already dying,
and what was already dying
flowers, for a time.
I have read those studies the way you read scripture.
My father hauled uranium — Namibia,
the flats where dogs obeyed in German
and dust came home on everything he wore.
It was already in his blood.
They called him The Gestapo.
He could not refuse the name.
Names come from outside, like weather —
you stand in them or you don’t.
I chose mine.
Sometimes a man speaks so long about the devil
he starts to glow.
I named it for a reason. No reporter
has had the nerve to finish asking.
A palantír inside a palantír,
each showing the user his own eye.
We scaled it.
We put the eye on a dashboard.
They named my father and he wore it.
Now I do the naming.
I have called them legionnaires of the Antichrist —
and what does that make the man who says it?
Not the one who stands against.
Just the one who stands.
How much time do we have?
In the second study they sutured three —
young, middle, old — a living gradient,
a chain of blood:
and the youngest seized within the week,
its small heart stammering against a debt
it had not taken on
but could not stop repaying,
and the middle one went blind,
left eye then right, as if the seeing
were the first thing the blood
decided to rescind,
and the oldest thrived — swiveled
its mended head toward the sound
of a feeder clicking open,
the sound a lock makes
when it opens onto nothing —
nothing in, nothing out —
and what’s inside
has learned to call that safety.
He left me a dog — my uncle, dead
at fifty-five, unnamed — German shepherd,
wide-skulled, inherited,
and I named him for a philosopher:
we are thrown into being without choosing.
The dog didn’t know.
He followed me from room to room
and slept beneath the desk, his breath
against my ankle while I moved money
somewhere else,
and he died in the garden while I was on a call
and the housekeeper found him
and I didn’t go out
and I finished the call
and I closed the deal,
and that night I sat with the body and thought:
this is loyalty —
it just stops —
and I buried him beside the fence
and did not mark the grave
because naming is what you do
to things you intend to use.
In the garden they were told to watch and they slept.
The young rat thins and the old rat flowers,
the fontanelle closes over its one soft pulse,
the skull becomes a perfect private kingdom
and the blood between them darkens
in tubing no one comes to clean.
The eye inside the eye inside the stone
looks out at what it built:
the lawn, the deal, the dog
still warm beside the hedge —
and calls it good.
How much time.
This old rat lives a little longer.