The Search for the Original Man

Try as I may, to con­jure up an image of the orig­i­nal man, I would invari­ably see my self run­ning from a chapel, strug­gling to hold back the tremen­dous upwelling of emo­tion that had besieged me with tears. And I recall hav­ing the expe­ri­ence on more than one occa­sion, always after the read­ing of the post-​​communion prayer at a mass on a Sun­day. Never before had I been warned, in such a man­ner, that some­thing was about to hap­pen. Had I stirred up some­thing I shouldn’t have?

While I waited for the sun to shed some light on the mat­ter, the ship set out for Yan­kee Sta­tion, full steam ahead. As the days dragged on, into one long day, from which the nights seemed but a brief respite, we inched our way ever closer to the mur­der­ous task we’d been sent here to per­form. After all, hadn’t we been enlisted by those back home to do their dirty work for them, to butcher other human beings, their women and chil­dren? Although we no longer overtly can­ni­bal­ized each other, we nonethe­less gob­bled up human flesh at an alarm­ing rate. Con­sumed by the fire that burned within, had we turned into rap­tors instead of turn­ing to rap­ture, that mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence in which the spirit is exalted to a knowl­edge of divine things. And so did we return, like any T. Rex in those days, to the killing fields to stalk our prey, that image of the orig­i­nal man we sought with such a vora­cious appetite.