(Page 1 of 2) Na'Atal From Betrayed By God by Tristis WardSUMMARY: This is not a complete story, but is a completed moment in a very long story. It is one of the "introducing the family" sections from the opening chapter.Awareness is a tricky thing. Especially when newly emerging. Most especially when there is more than one. He thinks he knows who he is. He might know it twice, and maybe a third time. It is entirely possible the last is merely the narrator of this situation: a voice of lists and facts, measurements and correspondences. It is not helpful right now to know the width of the alley he lies in, or that it is raining. He can tell that with his own bleary eyes that swerve with nauseating shakiness around the dirty scene.
He is in a narrow alley. Rain showers in huge dirty drops all along it, thupping against the metal dumpsters and the plastic bags flooding out of them. He is lying flat - despite a shivering need to curl into a ball - on a thin layer of soaking cardboard, lined with cloth bags stuffed with paper and a bottle jammed uncomfortably against his ribs that the narrator assures him contains less than a milliliter of rum.
What brought him here is too confusing to fathom. For at least one of him, it is a complete shock, but even the cynical, lonely, bitter self who mumbles curses around his cracked lips has no real answers. A wasted life, is it? That damned woman? The god-damned system with its stuff-shirt know-it-alls? He makes no sense.
The name sought is Na'Aatal, the narrator assures. The family is D'As Brenni. The title is Prince.
"Prince," his old man self sputters in derision. "Hoity-toity dreams."
Dreamed I was a prince, he thinks. And a wizard.
Not a dream. We are Na'Atal.
We? He wonders: Is the we the trio, or two of? Does the narrator believe itself to be one and the same with him, or is it Na'Atal, and he its prisoner?
We are I, and I am Na'Atal.
"Stupid. Saw a movie once. Don't remember it," his old self says. "I know who I am goddamnit! Albert Weston! Albert god-damned Weston!"
Numbers flit through his head. Proofs of multiple...threads. The narrator calls reality a thread. In lightning swiftness, it describes splits in the thread, then threads, over and over until there are an infinite number. Simple cause and effect: the impact of time on existence. It is not hard to understand, although it makes him nauseous to try, and in the end, he fails. He will have to accept the polar views of both the narrator and his old-man self.
While the past is watery confusion, his present and impending future are all too clear. He is dying here in this alley. Past the pain of his hunger and the muddle of his sotted mind - is this what it is to be drunk? Yes, the narrator says, and recalls how other lives have felt, drunk on whiskey - he can feel the deeper pain of stiffening limbs. The liver is completely nonfunctional, the narrator says. The kidneys are in process of shutting down. The lungs are unable to evacuate enough fluid. As proof, a weak cough forces itself up through him.
Do something. It is a simple command for a nearly impossible task. He needs to rekindle this body. The failed systems need to be bypassed or rebuilt. Waste needs to be removed from tissues, and oxygen delivered.
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