My voyage to the Inner Station (350 hits)
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Submitted by realpolitik (View user info) at 2007-02-26 16:59:24 EST
I met him once. I took that voyage; damn, it lasted a long time - that journey up the river. The slow, long, languorous voyage up the river, covered in sweat, tears, exhaustion, fear, towards him, the object of our trek. It seemed as though the river hated us - it made us fight it every inch of the way. And vigilance! There was no rest. The deep current tried at every opportunity to repel us, to keep us from our destination. The cannibals were hungry, the pilgrims filled with a primordial bloodlust, and me - I had an insatiable curiosity and a distinct separation from all my fellow passengers. Oh, I hated them, those fools who discharged their rifles into the canopy of the forest. We were all on the boat - on that rusty tin cup of a steamboat struggling, fighting the river for every inch, surrounded by the hostile forest, the dark jungle - for one goal, to retrieve Kurtz from the Inner Station.
He was fascinating, this Kurtz was an enigma. He was an empty man, hollow to the core. This was not to say he wasn't passionate - quite the contrary. He was a void - a place unto which each person could project their own variation of nightmares.
He had found it - the heart of darkness within civilization. And the savages had made him their king, he thought himself to be a deity among brutes. They loved him and hated him, adored him and loathed him, blessed him and cursed him. Maybe he didn't find it, maybe he brought it with him, and maybe the sepulchral city had given unto the world a demonstration of humanity. For that is what he was, a straight representation of humanity - all that was good and everything that was despicable. He managed to be both honorable and vindictive. He spoke of everything as his, "my club, my students, my work." He was so far removed from civilization he seemed to reinvent it, to make it his own, to bring into being a new paternal order where his word was law. But he could not, for his dominion extended only over his club.
And there I was, standing while he sat sedated in a chair. His booming, deep, commanding voice not losing any potency in his illness; his groans appeared familiar, yet foreign. Odd that such a powerful energy would now apply itself to groaning.
He was a shell, his animus had left him. Now, he no longer possessed the same witty commentary or energetic movements that normally characterized his being. He was my fencing coach, what was left of him. But what sat there, unmoving in the chair of the ICU, was not my coach, but a grotesque caricature. He was seventy five, but never looked a day of it - even in his pathetic state you would never know his age. His eyes, normally a vibrant light blue, were now grey. Clouded, like his mind must be.
They had sedated him. He was in too much pain after the surgery and kept howling for morphine, morphine, something to kill the pain. This was ominous in and of itself. He had the highest pain threshold of anyone I knew. My first lesson with an epee he told me never to apologize for hitting someone too hard. He used to fence in the days where they used sharp points covered in a dust that would mark a man's clothing when a hit was scored. Sometimes the points would cut through their clothing and draw blood. He once almost got disemboweled, and as he lay bleeding there on the fencing strip his coach (a legendary figure in and of himself) walked up to him and calmly said, "You should have parried." Those sharpened swords are no longer used (for obvious reasons) but he was always trying to instill in me the sense that I was handling a deadly weapon - that my life was in my own hands. So his pain frightened me.
He was a damn good coach. He would always say, "Never trade in your experience for your passion." But even he found this lesson too hard to stomach. His passion, his perverse sense of honor, of duty, of loyalty had cost him everything. He was a fighter, but he couldn't learn to win graciously to accept his prizes. There was always one last fight, always one last wrong to right. His passion had cost him his children, his club at least one marriage (and possibly two), and almost his life. He developed a serious heart condition and had to receive emergency surgery. The attending physician said it was extremely serious, and that he almost died. But, the Doctor also said that he would make a recovery, that he was lucky. I knew better. He wasn't lucky at all. He would return to the terrible world, he would regain his health, he would return to his wretched existence. No, he will be unlucky enough to survive. The horror! the horror!
User Reviews
Submitted by messmind (user info) at 2007-02-27 02:53:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2007-02-26 22:33:01 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-02-26 22:08:56 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
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Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-02-26 22:08:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by i_can_get_you_a_toe (user info) at 2007-02-26 18:58:14 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
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Submitted by Shlongy (user info) at 2007-02-26 17:22:47 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
I skipped it last fall.
Submitted by Axolotl (user info) at 2007-02-26 17:05:26 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I read this last fall.