The Blue

  In the beginning the Earth was formless and empty, and darkness lay over the surface of the deep. Thunder rolled steadily across the bleak, nondescript land in mighty, percussive echoes, the ground trembling, as though in fear, as white hot fissures of lightning cleft the sky asunder a million times over. Each scorching blaze of deadly, crackling plasma through the abstract ether of stifling chemical fog seemed an imminent foreshadow of that mighty explosion to come, a harbinger of that great abiogenesis, temporary apocalypse for a world theretofore defined by its life-free state of existence.

  And then, there it was.

  The supersonic split, ripping the fabric of stagnation down its center and sending its sentience-free tranquility hurdling uncontrollably toward the chaotic nebula of violently emerging life, a bolt from the blue, striking the chemical bog, and pulling out creation by its roots from the deep dead soil of the gurgling primordial ooze. Sheer hell tore through the molecular buildup of chemical structures, obliterating and redefining, leaving changed and unrecognizable the tenants of reality that had governed the state of the universe for eons previously, and whose overthrow would represent an unthinkable alteration to the fabric of the Earth as it was known and unknown.

  Snaps and pops and cracks as life itself began to unshell, attempts at establishing itself rising and falling with varying degrees of success, forms taking shape without staying power and then collapsing back into the muck, only to reformulate and begin once more, each failed climb from obscurity producing instructions for what errors and pitfalls to avoid in successive attempts. Any skeptic or individual devoid of patience might well pronounce the experiment of life in its early stages a failure, a feeble bubbling of swamp gases leading nowhere for an indefinite period of time, as days, years, eras passed by with no visible signs of animation.

  But the changes, tantamount to imperceptible at their initiation, soon began to ramp up exponentially, the sought foothold now found, and the upward climb now begun in earnest, occasional stumbles and backslides still occurring, but less frequently, and to have been expected regardless. A renewed confidence in the sanctity of the grand plan, and the radiant burst of the Cambrian explosion lighting up the land, life, once the grand unattainability, cum the generally hopeless underdog, cum the interesting but unthreatening exception, now beyond the limits of being contained, sweeping across every plain, every hidden nook and crevice of the Earth's surface, so inundating its soil that life could now exist within life within life, existence as a series of nesting dolls, the complexity mind-boggling, and the effects, for the time being, at any rate, irreversible.

  And then, following the course of a period too vast to be perceived, a cluster of cellular insects mingling with one another, mating and reproducing and birthing identical carbon copies of themselves, their growing numbers tackling and tumbling and crashing like the breaking waves of the ocean into one another, their frantic, bumbling chaos giving way to an order beyond any that had been seen throughout so many years of worldwide evolution, a system of unprecedented scope, complexity, capability and ambition...

  Gasping, drawing her newborn body from the blue muck with an effort that was herculean, the breath of life was pushed through the inexperienced lungs of woman, shaking with cold from the remnants of clay still sliding from her wet body, her blank mind reeling as the newness of existence weighed down upon her, overwhelming her, but then slowly, slowly, fading into focus. Lilith or Eve or Pandora or Ardi, whatever moniker one may choose for her, sitting hunkered in the afterbirth of her sudden eruption into sentience, struggling to comprehend her own gracious wholeness, the completeness of a single, fleshy temple from the disparate wills of so many unseeable entities. And yet, woman herself, conscious and aware as she was, seemed to have no inherent knowledge whatsoever of her own basic components, the little, simple minds that had conspired to will her into existence, her own thoughts instantly revealing themselves as infinitely more complex, yet still unable to fathom even the most fundamental tenants of her being, her physical buildup- all of it, no matter how basic or essential, seemed to elude her entirely.

  She did not think anything, in fact, for a moment, the realization of her capability for thought taking some prompting to set in. Instead, she felt a certain creeping of existential dread begin to emanate through her entire being, although she certainly had no conception of it by such a name, and she could not begin to explain what it was that had led her to feel as such. But then this abstract feeling gave way to a certain, unshakable hunger, a need to understand, to comprehend to some degree or another what or who she was or what she was doing here or how it was she had gone about acquiring the ability to question what or who or how or what she was.

  These hands... Soft and filthy with the last wet remnants of dripping clay, floating just beyond her field of vision, hovering outside the immediate realm of her consciousness... And yet, how peculiar, as the ten trembling fingers were flexed, and the muscles reacted, and her mind somehow processed the effect- these hands, these distinct entities, seemed to be connected to her, attached to the ends of two twiggy, jointed limbs, two thin arms, to be precise, whose origins disappeared just beyond her field of vision, no matter where she deigned to look. When she turned her head, everything else around her shifted and rotated and appeared to reorient itself with regard to her own position, whereas the arms remained constantly affixed in their place, unwavering, indicating that, despite the seeming irrationality of the fact, these, too, these consciously distant points of articulation, were a part of her general being.

  This did little to assuage further questions of identity or to summarize her existence, and in fact only set off a further avalanche of curiosities and concerns about what, exactly, she might just happen to be.

  She could not explain how she knew herself able to do so, but slowly, she began to lift her body up from out of the mire, the ground receding drastically as her head drifted upward, streaming cascades of water and clay forming a dissolving skirt around her lower body as they dripped and poured and drizzled back into the muck. Her legs, nearly as thin and unstable as her twig-like arms, wobbled slightly as they struggled to support her negligible weight, and she felt herself fall forward slightly, catching herself by flinging a leg out in front of her body, which produced a loud, cold splash, and left her wobbling dangerously above the ground, arms outstretched like those of a tightrope walker.

  And now... A heart...

  Up to now, she was as unacquainted with the existence of her internal organs as she was the microscopic little beasts who comprised her fundamental existence, unaware that what she vaguely realized as consciousness was actually the result of a complex organ of gray matter, or that that first gasp, that inhalation of the breath of life, was a basic function of her expanding and collapsing lungs. But she became aware of her heart from the intense, frenzied tapping that now took place within her chest, a vigorous pulsating set off by her near collapse back down to the ground, unexplained, but curious, and worthy of further investigation.

  She lifted a hand, and stood for a moment with her palm pressed up against her left breast, feeling for the source of the percussion, its true purpose or function still not entirely plain, but her curiosity assuaged to the extent that her focus now turned to other aspects of her anatomy, or that which she perceived as such. Her body was a thin one, lean and underdeveloped, fresh to life as she was, but her hips were wide, her stomach flat but fertile, and her breasts were full, nearly to excess, as though the desire to propagate, to further disperse her living essence into a state of separate and distinct existence, was already manifesting itself in this still early and highly uncertain stage of her being.

  And suddenly, she swept her fingers upward, and began to press them up against the side of her face, her eyes wide, and a sweep of horror inundating her. She realized, and was strangely appalled at the fact, that she would never, in her life, be able to visually assess this crucial aspect of her own anatomy, never be able to steal a glance at the very vessel that allowed her to have thoughts, allowed her to perceive and think and have any sort of volition. Any full concept of self would be forever held beyond her reach by her inability to peer into her own eyes, so that whatever form of personal esteem she did manage to cobble together would be nothing more than her perception of what was around her, her own existence minimized, made trivial, by the overwhelming hugeness of all that towered over her.

  The dread began to well up again, anxiety and terror regarding the life into which she had found herself cast...

  And now, to make matters worse, she cast her eyes wildly to the horizon, craning her neck around three hundred and sixty degrees to comb desperately through her blue surroundings, and for as far as her newly opened eyes could see, all was desolate, abandoned, devoid of any presence whatsoever that could come close to complementing her own. Not another living, sentient soul could be spotted within any perceivable proximity, and she knew, somehow, that this was universally the case, that no others shared this vast and unfathomable Earth with her, and that she was, forevermore, locked in her isolation, forced to dwell on a plane of her own horrific existential reality without a soul to put its arms around her, to lie to her and tell her that it was alright, to convince beyond all reason and perception that things were not as bleak as she perceived them to be.

  The herculean strength it had taken her to rise up from the muck now drained icily from her body with the acute realization of her sheer aloneness, felling her to her knees with a large, disruptive splash, her skin once again coated in the cold, slimy muck of her virgin birth. Dazed and shivering, she gazed up at the pitch black blanket of clouds, the flashes of generative lightning still pulsing across the heavens but appearing to recede into the distance, blowing over, and disallowing the possibility of such bolts from the blue ever recurring, of her corresponding Adam ever manifesting himself from the chemical-rich mud of her origins. She seized hold of her knees, then, pulling them tightly up to her breast, tucking her head into her folded arms and trembling there in the muck as such, utterly paralyzed by her involuntary thrusting into the blue, by the cruelty and indifference of fate that would allow a slumbering nonentity to suffer the sheer, utter terror of unrequested vitality.

  For some time she sat there, hopeless and despairing, beginning to trace meaningless, abstract lines in the surrounding clay with a thoughtless index finger, lines which, upon their endless repetition, began to represent her feelings of despair, her wish not to be in spite of her clearly being. Her thoughts raced and swirled in looping figure eights as though in imitation of these marks, these fields of infinity symbols that somehow seemed to chronicle perfectly the nonexistent bounds of her discontent. It would not be difficult, she thought, that is, retreating from this life just as readily as she had entered it. It would be easier, in fact, tearing down, obliterating, wiping from the map that which had taken eons, entire biological epochs to call into fruition. And yet, her mind would not fully allow itself to indulge this sick fantasy, the cells in her body vehemently resisting her potentially thoughtless dismantling of what had taken them such intensive volumes of work to construct, instilling within her an irrational fear of death to avoid the thin-willed snuffing out of her own state-of-the-art self.

  And that was when something stirred, deep, deep within her...

  Without fully realizing it, her hands had begun to sift through the clay beneath her feet, no longer digging in simple outlines, but now scooping, collecting, hoarding. The manifest purpose of this act was, even to her, unclear, yet it felt strangely vital, strangely essential to her ability to go on living...

  She unfolded herself from her fetal collapse, and sat, transfixed, by her own goings-on, the slow accumulation, the building up of stalagmites from the muck, generally formless but taking on a familiar set of dimensions, detail slowly beginning to assert itself from the medium of the abstract and meaningless.

  Pinching and pulling, stretching and chiseling away, and then, lo and behold-

  A reflection!

  She stared in wonder at her creation, an unprecedented pang of joy suddenly inundating her at the realization of what she'd done-

  She had, in effect, reproduced herself in miniature, crudely, perhaps, and to a degree that may have appeared underwhelming to an artisan more accomplished than herself. But, in essence, there she was, a little clay statue resting lifelessly between her legs, successfully echoing the generality of the form that she had so struggled to understand, and thereby giving her some sense of clarification, of purpose in her existence, even if she found herself still largely incapable of putting such a profound notion into concrete terms. She had accomplished in a few quick movements that which had taken the cells in her body eons to achieve, and though she did not inherently know this, her form somehow rang blissfully with realization, these same cells offering her her own reproduction as a viable, if nonsensical, alternative to her desire for self-immolation.

  Purpose was beginning to dawn on her, she realized, as she gazed  down upon her own splendid handiwork. The longer she stared at it, however, the more and more she could find that seemed slightly off- the shoulders, for instance, were rather too broad, and she had left the figure flat-chested and breastless, maintaining, as she had, the most rudimentary of self-impressions in her duplication, a mere stick woman rather than a figure imbued with any real degree of anatomical accuracy. And of course, her little statue self remained devoid of any facial features, sporting nothing more in that department than a lumpy little round head. Unknowing as she was of that specific aspect of her appearance, she preferred the sin of omission over that of guesswork, knowing that the latter might well alienate her clay child's appearance from that of any sort of perceivable reality.

  Immediately she was filled with a desire to repeat her efforts, this first miniature self already beginning to slump and melt back into the clay of its original element, but that didn't matter right now. She would create another, better, more skillfully made, and another, if she had to, until she achieved the results that would satisfy her sudden cravings.

  The aimless thoughts that had plagued her first few introductory moments to life on Earth were now nowhere to be found anywhere in the matriarch's mind, as she dedicated herself feverishly to the duplication of her first success, building up a slightly improved copy of her first little self in a fraction of the time it had taken her to complete the original. This time, she thought, she was satisfied, but then promptly ceased to be so, thinking, once again, that there was ample room for improvement, that surely there was more work for her to do, more that this miniature shrine to herself could become.

  Predictably, this course of action began to unfold routinely into a pattern, each new iteration giving rise to a further realized avenue for innovation, and individual statues giving way to entire generations of miniaturized selves. The great matriarch's interest in her task grew from casual fascination into a necessary obsession, cakes of clay accumulating rapidly beneath her fingernails, her lack of tools leading to an aching in her frenzied fingers, an obstacle, no doubt, but far from one to slow her down in the least, but a mere annoyance, a hindrance, contrary to her wishes and easily ignored.

  Days began to pass, tireless hours of working to build her army of underlings, sleep a necessary evil, a luxury indulged as seldom as possible during her tireless quest to perfect her craft, despite the fact that no concrete or definable purpose for such insanity had yet to present itself.

  From time to time, doubt began to creep in on her over the course of her efforts, offputting and unpleasant, and particularly during periods when she felt herself meeting at impasses, and when further progress seemed necessary, yet unachievable in as far as she could see. In these moments, she would enter into a momentary state of defeat, of sheer collapse, her efforts at a standstill for some time as she inadvertently ruined statue after statue with experimentation, and felt herself at last locked into a tight, inescapable corner. Inevitably, however, she would manage to tear herself away from such dilemmas, struck by sudden pangs of enlightenment or unanticipated inspiration, and flung instantly back into her work, her constitution redoubled and her desire to expand feeling even more imperative than ever.

  Gradually, the statues began to expand in size as well as number, originally measuring at no more than about the height of a single foot, but then steadily making a climb upward, so that they stood to about halfway up along her shins, then up to her knees, then arduously up to her waist, then up to about breast height, and showing no signs of slowing down. In addition to height, the figures began to grow more masculine in appearance with progression, the small dimorphism that had been a slight flaw in her initial replication beginning to take on its own significance, a sort of stylistic alteration in some ways, that made it feel as though the beings she was sculpting were becoming genuinely unique creations, and no longer the mere inadequate reproductions of her distinctly feminine visage, broad shouldered, angular, and largely devoid of the soft, flowing curves that defined her own anatomy. What was more, the structures of the beings had become far more stable than they had been in their first several iterations, no longer sinking back into the mire just as promptly as she could build them up, but sticking around, remaining, and the resulting permanent numbers becoming like some royal guard in her presence.

  At last, at long last, the arrival of the artisan at her masterwork, such quantities of clay being hoisted by her thin, frantic arms that she could scarcely manage to lift them up, this pinnacle of achievement proving quite the challenge of engineering given such limited resources. She grunted and strained and sweated as she pushed the necessary parts into place, her body drenched with hardening mud and the unfinished form of her creation itself beginning to congeal before she could give shape to its features, so that she had to continually slap water from the bog below up onto its form to keep it from drying out altogether. By the time she managed to work around to the thing's finishing touches she was standing on the ends of her toes reaching up for it, towering over her form by at least a few heads as it was, the body so wide, thick, and solidly packed that, were it to have collapsed and fallen forward in that moment, it would surely have crushed her beneath its weight.

  She stepped away, gasping, panting, sweat and mud stinging her fluttering eyes, which reminded her, and she leaned back in, and carefully pressed her thumb into the spots where two eyes would fall on the face, her first and only attempt at expression, her free hand feeling the contours of her own face as she pushed her digits into the clay in order to align her impressions with some degree of anatomical accuracy.

  And what a marvel it was...

  She stood before it in awe, honestly somewhat overwhelmed by her own handiwork, having created what was, in essence, the perfect counterpart to her own slight being, large and looming, a relative colossus in its sheer breadth and immensity.

  Man...

  For some time she leered smiling, wide eyed and expectant, somehow feeling inwardly as though something crucial had changed, something amazing and life-altering should be happening any moment now, though she was unaware, to say the least, as to what that something might happened to have been.

  What was missing, she wondered?

  She had, after all, mastered the elements, replicating with her own resourcefulness and innovation that which had taken eons of natural, perhaps supernatural processes to achieve unaided. She had become a one woman engine of creation, a grand designer and prime mover- and yet...

  And yet, it wasn't genuine life at all, was it? It was not man or beast or any manner of cellular organism... It was, it could not be denied, devoid of something, that very special spark of life that had spelled her own semi-divine genesis, without which it was impossible for it to ever be more than a stationary pile of clay, an unmoving, unthinking, unfeeling lump built up above the ground, a celebratory monument to a life she had never truly wished to become a part of in the first place, and which had been ironically devoid of purpose until the point at which she had thought it somehow worthwhile to honor.

  And then she looked at her hands, just as she had upon her initial awakening from the endless slumber. These tools, these messengers of her mind, these conduits of life that had produced all that she now saw sprawled out before her...

  She wondered...

  She stepped forward.

  Slowly and uncertainly, her breath held in anticipation, she lifted these hands, and pressed them into the clay ribs of her creation, sinking slightly into its being, and closing her eyes, easing out of her defenses, as though falling into some form of placid, meditative trance.

  And then- the spark of life.

  That crucial, absolutely vital first crack of electricity, currents of white static coursing from the tips of her fingers, remnants of her initial electrification still contained within, now transferring from her form into that of her creation, as whole a transference of the gift and curse of existence as is possible to fathom.

  The first, violent eruption of a beating heart beneath the flatly applied palm of her sizzling right hand...

  And with a great gasp, she pulled her hands from the body of the figure, her being weakened by the partial sacrifice of its essence, tumbling backward into the bog, and her eyes darting immediately up in the direction of the golem's lumpy skull, eagerly anticipating whatever results may have been brought about by her efforts.

  All was still, all was dead and black in the sockets of the statue's eyes, and then suddenly, a bright, vitalizing flash, a dual pair of glowing white electric lights peering into its creator's own eyes, and a mood most surreal descending upon the scene like a thick, impenetrable fog.

  For her, the moment was one of ecstasy, a cause for celebration, and she rose quickly, excitedly to her feet from the pool of the marsh, leaning in expectantly toward her creation, perhaps irrationally certain that the golem would be as overjoyed about his abrupt leap into being as she was, Adam created from Eve and therefore bound to her forever.

  But her creation did not move. He simply stood there, perfectly still, his chest very lightly palpitating as though expelling breath, despite the fact that she had given the creature neither lungs nor nasal passages- nor a heart, for that matter.

  That was when the unease began to well up inside her...

  It was faint, at first, a thought that, perhaps, it was just a fluke, that this alarming stillness and interminable silence would give way at any moment, and that her joy and purpose and meaning would all come flooding back to her once the two of them had begun an interaction. But the longer she peered into the eyes of her creation, and the longer it gazed back into her, the further and further the notion seemed to intensify.

  And then, a heavy gasp, and she stepped back a mere half a pace, as suddenly the golem's hand came flying up at an alarming pace, slowing down just in time to gently place its palm against the side of her cheek without causing any damage, the still-wet clay chilling her to her core as she stood there captive beneath his gaze.

  She did not move. Did not breathe.

  Adam's crudely constructed phalanges began to crawl across the smooth cheek of Eve, staining her face with clay as he considered her, studying her soft features and, almost certainly, contrasting them with his own rugged aspects.

  And then, with a motion that was nearly as abrupt as the initial outreach, the golem withdrew his hand to his side, moving not another muscle, but returning to that same, stoic and stationary position as before, no further questions to ask, its curiosity, apparently, quenched to the absolute fullest by that single, considerate touch.

  She shuddered.

  She did not like this at all.

  Not. One. Bit.

  That feeling of terror, that inundating sense of existential dread that had so thoroughly consumed her upon the dawn of her creation, and that which she had gone about avoiding for so very, very long now with her consuming preoccupation, came flooding back to her the instant she felt the cold, slimy touch of the golem's fingers against the side of her cheek. Everything had collapsed upon her in that single, horrific moment, the dawning on her of what it was she had just done sending her spiraling through the hell of uncertainty and self-doubt.

  The power she had felt in that initial act of bestowing sentience had become an instant noose around her own neck, its implications too vast for her to even begin to comprehend, and the consequences, she knew with increasing despair, now utterly impossible to mitigate. Now, questions of existence, of purpose, of place in the universe and logic and reason and function and meaning, all of these things came crashing to the ground around her, unanswerable and impossible to live with as a result of her one foolish act. A being whose very existence had been sheer chance, a fluke, an accident on the grandest scale, had brought life into this world as a means of compensating for her own incomprehension, an entity of purpose wrought by the hands of a being without purpose, in all accounts her equal, quite reasonably her superior, capable of doing all that she was and simultaneously able to overpower her, thus unstopping a cascading accumulation of maddening questions that she could not even begin to comprehend, to put into words, even, let alone answer.

  She felt dizzy, the ground swaying beneath her feet and setting her on the verge of passing out, her constitution only stayed by the clenching shut of her eyes for several moments, and the feeble recollection of her thoughts.

  She had to destroy it...

  Her creation must be obliterated, its scourge of impossible philosophical predicaments cut off at its roots. She could, she scarcely conceived, still recover from the shock of these crippling thoughts if she acted swiftly to remove their source, blighted by insecurity throughout the remainder of her days, perhaps, but still, by and large, intact.

  She leered at the thing for quite a while longer, quivering, but her eyes burning intently into it, steeling up her nerves. Her nostrils then flared as she reared back, and hurled her body forward with a loud grunt, slamming her entire negligible weight into the body of her creation, thinking, certainly, that her form would be sufficient for toppling over the clay giant.

  The figure did not budge.

  Its eyes slid downward, that lumpy head pointed in her direction as she attempted to catch her breath, her chest heaving, and her body expanding and collapsing frantically as she struggled to see straight.

  And then, once again, she reared back, and heaved herself into her monster, and again, and again, and so on and so forth with increasing desperation, her shoulder growing sore from the repeated hits into the golem's ungiving body, which seemed to be hardening even further no matter how furiously she rammed her weight into it. In the act of bestowing life upon her artificially made creation, she had, in effect, strengthened and solidified the thing, shedding it of its hollowness, and replacing it with density and substance, all the better with which to resist being torn down.

  And again and again and again she pummeled the monster, its eyes continuing to bore into her as she flailed and grunted and flung herself through the air, its body seeming not even to flinch with each brutal collision, but the sparks of white in its eye sockets lightening, intensifying, crackling with an unstable energy that began to produce an audible, sizzling hum.

  She shrieked.

  Suddenly, the golem's arm shot up, grasping at her with those clumsily produced fingers, reeling her slim, wispy body into itself. She struggled to resist, screaming and pounding her fists against the chest of her creation, knowing all the while that the effort was in vain. Tears streaming down her cheeks she felt the cold, wet hands collapse around her windpipe, squeezing, and she struggled to inhale as enduring a breath as she could before her stream of oxygen was cut off. She kicked and punched and flailed about wildly in the clutch of her gallows, clinging with as much ferocity as she could muster to the life she had never wanted, and that which she now scrambled to defend with every meager fiber of her being. But it was no use, the golem's strength was volumes beyond that which she herself possessed, its sapping of her life force requiring none of the frenzied efforts which were so failing her in defending it, and at last she began to cease her struggling, her hands on those of the golem in one last fleeting attempt to pry him away from her. Her fingers curled deeply into him, but her body was too weak to resist any longer. Thought itself began to drain away, radiating up out of her like a cloud, and steady, quick flashes of white beginning to obscure her vision, like so many flashes of lightning before her eyes, as fitting an end as was perhaps conceivable for such a serendipitous existence.

  She breathed her last.

  Life was extinguished.

  Animation terminated in a mere flash of what it had taken to be brought to its fruition.

  The vacant body fell face down to the ground with a splash, rejoining the medium of its origins in the liquid-soaked clay, long hair pooling up around its head above the surface of the water.

  The golem stared at its handiwork with none of the satisfaction that its creator had felt in looking upon her own, seeming to consider the fallen corpse for a moment, but the impression gleaned clearly a fleeting and insubstantial one, not to be dwelt upon for long if at all.

  And then, the golem turned. He or it splashed through the chemical swamp with slow, measured footsteps, marching in a fashion that was almost mechanical from the spot, setting its sights upon a far-off point on the horizon, and vanishing, after some considerable amount of time, off into the blue.