You only live twice

once when you are born

and once when you look death in the eyes.

                    - Japanese poem

Taragus, the great space captain who, it was rumored, was sick of life, was certainly not in the mood for sharing his talents with the Confederation any longer. He was morose, bitter, withdrawn, the victim of the inevitable omissions and transgressions with which bold action always torments the energetic and the ambitious. Who is more to blame? The faultless recluse whose damage is invisible, because no one ever knows the life-giving gifts he is denying to the world, or the daring adventurer who readily accepts the challenges of his times, and aims his weapon at mortal enemies of humankind, firing into the crowd where demons and infants mingle? It is impossible to have compassion without incurring guilt. What else is the conscience for, but to guide us to the highest place we are capable of reaching by torturing us with our shortcomings? Some said it was a woman he had loved and lost, some said an entire planet; others that it was a quarrel between his soul and the most sacred principles of the Confederation. Some said a mere rebuke, from someone who he had let past the last bulwark of his vulnerability, had crushed him, broken him like a child is broken by breaking a precious relic of a god-like parent, who beats him with tears. However it happened, the captain was useless, now, existing only as a ghost, a vestige of his glorious past.

Perhaps that is why the Poet Bombers Society decided to strike. The Pobombsokes were one of several limited revolutionary and sanctioned criminal groups allowed to persist by the Confederation, as without socially tangential threats such as these, the emotional races of the Universe tended to succumb to their inner agitation and destabilize the intergalactic order.

Taragus was inspecting the perimeter of his garden wall, when the Pobom unit burst through, charging behind an explosive charge which opened a breach directly onto his property. Far from the speed and reactions of his days of service, having allowed himself to gather the rust of nostalgia and to fade away into the slowness of memories that were meant to be savored, Taragus was quickly overcome by the onrushing commandos, who trampled his sunflowers as they threw him to the ground, and strapped the bomb pack around his chest, then locked it securely onto him. Up to this point, few words had been spoken, only shouts and curses, and the sounds of a fierce but already decided struggle. Two of the commandos, bloody and hurt, lay on the ground, in spite of the captain’s disengagement from life, but that was not enough to thwart them.

"Captain Taragus!" one of the commandos informed him, dragging him to his feet. "We have decided to choose you! After all, you must have very much to say! Your brilliance and sensitivity are well-known! Time to stop hoarding it! Now you have no choice, unless it is to die in absolute silence!"

Warily, for the Captain was known to have several fierce and exotic pets from different worlds on the premises, they led him back into his somber mansion, their blaster guns drawn. "Here," said the leader, pushing him down into a chair beside a desk in his giant study – a huge room jutting out from the rest of the house, with enormous windows and impressive shelves of books and computer disks along the back wall.

The leader threw a pad of paper down in front of him onto the desk, and handed him a pen, while another man chained the captain’s foot to a pipe so that he could not leave the room. "The bomb will go off in one hour. You have that much time to write something that will justify your life. A poem, a story, an essay, a message…" The leader gave Taragus a small but powerful little box with a lock. "When you are finished, put it in here and lock it, this box will resist the blast. And please – don’t waste your time trying to avoid your death – it’s certain."

The commandos were surprised by Taragus’ lack of outrage. He had ceased cursing them, by now; he did not protest, or resist, he did not berate them for their violent actions, or attempt to change their minds; he did not negotiate, or plead, or rage at them. Instead, he regarded them with a mocking look, at the same time as he seemed to laugh at fate, which had played an astonishing trick on him, ambushing him here, where he had finally chosen to live in peace instead of strife, in safety instead of danger, in obscurity instead of fame.

"Well?" the leader asked. "You have no obscenities to hurl in our direction before we leave you?"

At that, the captain actually laughed. They were amazed to see a man like this, laughing though he had but one hour to live, but then, the great adventures they had all read about could not have come from an ordinary man. "The red books," the captain said at last. "Up there, on the shelves. The books bound in red. Take them. No one keeps books these days. No one reads those authors. Take the books. Don’t let them be destroyed in the inferno."

The leader of the Poboms considered his suggestion for a moment, then shook his head no. "No, Captain, we won’t let you answer death with what somebody else has written. You have to be the one." Turning to one of his men, he said, "Tighten the chain." The man bent down and did so, so that Taragus could not reach any of the books behind him to put into the bomb-proof safety box that was intended for his own work. "Forty-five minutes," the leader of the Poboms said. "Better get busy, unless you want to die a meaningless and silent life."

Every year, the Poboms published an anthology of poems and other writings elicited by their bombs, and this year, Taragus' was sure to be included.

Alone now in the enormous room, with the windows feeding him the world outside, Taragus sat with his pad of paper and a pen, the large and powerful bomb strapped across his body. It reminded him of the hug of a woman he had once known, who held him tightly like that, with a soul that was equally powerful.

His death now certain, and only half an hour away, Taragus was amazed by the rapidity and fluidity of his changing thoughts. In his mind, rivers froze and he could walk across them, then suddenly, the ice began to crack, he had to turn back; then, once more, the ice was solid and he could again walk over it. At times he glided across the peril like an angel, serene and timeless, at times he fell drowning into the freezing depths of the injustice. Spontaneously, as he sat there, wondering what to do, Taragus remembered his voyages, the worlds that were lush green and covered by jungles, and the desert worlds where billions of lives were forbidden by the water that was not there. Proud mountains, and strange harsh rocks existing for no purpose other than to amaze the eyes of people who didn’t exist; worlds of oceans and storms, with hills of waves, never in the same place. Worlds like his moods, sometimes fertile, sometimes desolate.

Time was ticking away. "I don’t need to write anything," Taragus thought, at last. "I’ve lived. Life is the poem. What does it matter if anyone else ever knows what I have seen and felt? What I have discovered, they will discover, because they are human and life will lead them to the same places I have been. Some few with souls like mine will stumble through the haze into the same mountain that barred my path - that embraced me, like a lover, in the guise of an obstacle - and they will begin to climb. And they will learn the mountain’s slope all over again, and reach the same high place I did and behold the world from it. They will be soothed by stars which ride the night to their own holiness, and washed clean of the judgments that cling to our happiness by the healing sound of the sea. They will be caressed, inside their most hurt places, by sunflowers. They will explore love with a new crop of women, that comes from the crop I have loved, and through passion and care they will become meaningful. Eternity swallows us, but not what we stand for. Forever towers above us, but wishes it could be us. We are shattered like glass on the stone of time, but beauty exists only because we are here to make nothingness beautiful with the strange ways of our hearts. Brevity refines beauty, saves it from the strangling hands of the ages that would choke its intensity out of it, turn it into a flat and unavoidable landscape that would end the dancing and begin the trudging. Therefore, to die is no disaster, it is what preserves the beauty of the universe. And if I die now, I will only be doing my part, like a soldier, to save us from the thick hide of things that never die; like a soldier, loyal to the fragility which gives us our tenderness."

After a moment alone and overpowered with these thoughts, Taragus suddenly awoke, as if snapping out of a delirium; he thought, "I had better write this down for anyone who may ever find themselves in a situation like the one I am in; and quickly, time is running out!" But then he thought, "No, that will only be caving in to the coercion of these idiot poet bombers, and giving them what they want! The only courageous thing to do is to leave a piece of blank paper behind me. But what about the future?" he thought. "No, don’t be arrogant. It’s not like these ideas have never been thought before, and will never be found again. Omar Khayyam wrote about something very much like this in the Rubaiyat. Walt Whitman wrote about it in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Izhdi wrote about it in Departure Without Fear. Do I truly need to be a parrot? Does it have to be in my handwriting? If I just think and feel it, it will be enough. I will spend my last moments looking out of these windows, at the little bit of the world I am still able to see."

The broad lawn outside was beautiful, the trees which whispered kind good-byes and swayed in the breeze, like nurses taking care of him. And the birds, jumping and twittering about, as if to tell him, Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the world after you are gone, we won’t let life die. The sights and sounds that brought joy to your heart will carry on.

A heavy sense of peace began to fill Taragus’ breast. He began to drift passively, and almost euphorically, towards the inevitable. But suddenly, two voices shoved him away from the easiness of it. One was the voice of a regret, of something still not finished, of a better ending to the story of his life. It was imperfect, like a painting only half done, like the dark shapes of trees without the brilliant colors of the cherry blossoms added; the artist in him could not stand the incompleteness. The other voice was that of a proud intergalactic captain, a flyer of the great mind ship, a hero of the Emotionals, a warrior, a rescuer, a volatile blend of compassion and egotism. How could such a spirit go down without a fight? "The poem of a warrior is action," he chided himself. "To go contemplatively, reflectively, is more whole, but I cannot betray such a glorious part of me!" Picking up his pen, Taragus wrote, "Do not mistake my struggle for desperation. It is my duty." Carefully, he tore the page from the pad, folded it, placed it in the bomb-proof box, and locked it shut. Then, he began to work on the chain that bound him to the room; if he could get free of it, maybe he could reach some tools in his workshop that might allow him to cut off the bomb pack. Eight minutes left… A beautiful meditation, but now his warrior self resented the time lost. After a few fierce tugs, an interlude of concentrated study, and a few more tugs, Taragus realized that his best bet was not to remove the chain from his foot, but to break the pipe it was attached to. The work was hard, excruciating, by the time he had finished, both hands and one ankle were badly cut, and he was bleeding profusely from the left wrist. Leaping up out of his chair, he staggered out of his study, the chain dragging behind his foot. As he ran, the quiet luxury of his solitude, the silent mansion into which he had withdrawn, began to seem so superfluous, like a giant empty space whose cluttered artifacts ceased to have physical dimensions. There was nothing here, it was a desert except for him; everything he owned was just a way of talking to himself.

"Three minutes left! Damn it!" cursed Taragus, throwing open the door to his workshop. There, his huge horse-dog, Fido-Buccephalus, jumped him, licking him wildly all over the face. "Down boy! Down boy!" shouted Taragus. "Here, outside! " Taragus took Fido-B’s favorite play stick, and hurled it out another door, then quickly shut the door behind him, to save his beloved pet from the impending explosion.

"Power saw! " cursed Taragus, reaching up to a wall, to drag down a heavy piece of equipment. But the piece he had in his hands was only a part of the machine; the power unit needed to be inserted, and, in fact, the saw needed a new one which was still inside of its original delivery crate. "Damn it!" One look at the crate told him this was not going to come open in two minutes. Taragus’ mind raced quickly to another option: his old equipment room, from the space voyages. There was, among all the exotic remnants of his expeditions, an electric interference ray, useful for shutting down electrically-powered appliances on the studied worlds. If he could shut off the circuitry of the bomb timing and detonation mechanisms inside the bomb pack… As fast as lightning, adrenalin paving over his injuries, the captain raced out of the workshop and up a gravitational jump-launch to the third floor. "Damn – locked door!" Mekan, the robot man, inert and statue-like in the hallway, caught Taragus’ attention, like an ancient Egyptian icon in a buried temple. Wildly, Taragus, hit the "On" button. "Warming up," said Mekan, in a daze.

"Break the door down!" ordered Taragus.

"Warming up," Mekan repeated.

"To hell with warming up! Break the door down!"

"My computer is configuring. I am not yet competent."

"Order!" screamed Taragus.

"I warn you that - "

"Order!"

Obediently, inaccurately, Mekan began to pound, accidentally breaking through the wall instead of the door.

"Sorry – daze-error!"

"It’s good enough!" Taragus shouted, "now run! Get the hell out of here!"

"Do I sense you may be in danger?"

"If you are in danger, I am programmed to come to your aid."

"Robot misunderstanding!" Taragus’ distant voice replied. "Program shortfall - Human override!"

"Very well," said Mekan, suddenly bolting away from the danger.

Taragus, wildly disconcerted, searched for the appropriate expedition box. Furiously, he threw open the lid of a promising box, then cursed, "Damn, it’s only hypno-invisibility crap!" Another box lid flew off: "Shit! It’s a culture-compatible wardrobe, the last thing I need!" On the one hand, Taragus was upset that the sanctity of his death was about to be spoiled by the mad bustle of his struggle to live, but he had already made the decision that he must make the attempt. It was like trying to taste a beautiful fruit, but eating sand instead.

"Maybe this box," Taragus said, ripping off the lid of a box marked Arduras. At that moment, all the clocks in his house began simultaneously to ring and chime, signaling the change of hour, and the arrival of the instant that was to be his last. He winced, wondering what the tearing apart of his body was going to feel like, or would he only feel a burst of heat, or some kind of huge blow? Would the brain in his head still be thinking as his body parts flew about in different directions, would his lips be muttering some prayer still, just as the severed heads of the French Revolution, which were seen to remain speaking as they fell into the buckets set to catch them? Would he undergo the mystery of the near-death-experience, only without a definite return? Where would he fly to in this vast Universe so well-known, yet not yet wholly unveiled? Half-wincing, half struggling on, Taragus reached his hands into the box, throwing out one exotic device, one familiar accompaniment of his past, after another, littering the floor with interesting but useless forms of cleverness. The planet and the time that had made them useful were gone.

"Perhaps the clocks are a minute fast!" gasped Taragus. "Or is it that the bomb’s timer has an extra few seconds? Hurry! Hurry!" Fiercely, Taragus continued digging in the box, trying in the midst of his haste to dig not like a fearful burrowing creature away from an overwhelming predator, but like a treasure-hunter, searching for gold which could change the world. "Here! Here it is, at last!" he cried out in ecstasy. The electric interference ray! Hurriedly, he turned it towards his bomb pack, and hit the power switch. But there was no light and there was no sound! Outraged, Taragus threw open the power cell cartridge – it was empty! These kinds of things happen when you hoard your past, and lose touch with the present. "Damn! The power cell!" he cursed. That was tiny, finding that amidst all this alien voyage paraphernalia would be like catching a cockroach behind a wall. "You’re toast," Taragus told himself. "Fate gave you a couple of extra minutes, but now you’ve lost them! The bomb should go off at any moment." Feeling betrayed by the hope he had let himself feel when the interference ray device was in his hands, Taragus’ lips sneered in a bitter reprimand of Destiny; but then, not wishing his last expression to be one of hard-hearted disagreement with reality, he let himself host a smile. Amusing, these carnival mirrors of life, these treacherous yet kind illusions! He slowed his hands down, continuing to work through the box in loyalty to his ethic, but unable to believe, any longer, that he could possibly win this battle. His slowing down was a concession to dignity. Who tries to run away from the firing squad?, you let them march you to the wall, and fight your last battle by standing motionless and tall. They kill you with their bullets, but you kill them with the memory of someone who did not flinch before their leveled guns. You kill them with something magnificent they are ashamed to take from the world, and ashamed to know they will never be. Now, as Taragus’ hands touched the objects in the box, it was not with anger that they were not the thing he was looking for, but with respect for what they were. "Thank you," he said to one communications device that he remembered well, "for carrying to me the voice of someone who I loved, when we were far apart." He remembered her, and he remembered holding the device in his hand on that other world, far away. Talking to an inanimate object? He laughed. The animate and inanimate were so interconnected and intertwined, after all, that it hardly mattered to differentiate them. Anyway, he wanted to talk, so why shouldn’t he talk to a machine, or to a wall, or to a ray of light or to a piece of dust floating in that light? Why shouldn’t that piece of dust become his angel? "This is how we made the world," Taragus thought, at last. "Talking to walls, we turned the Universe on. Before our ships went into space, our hearts went out into every cold place, we colonized the emptiness with the gods, and with our dreams. That is how we were able to spread, to dare to leave our little island."

Taragus, aware of the change in him, wondered if death awakened philosophy as life exudes war. "At the end of everything, at the last moment, are all the noble elements of the Universe created? Just before the star explodes? Is the season of action over, is it finally the hour of becoming tomorrow’s seed? Should I seek the wind to carry me out of this life, into some field I may enrich by having died in peace?"

Taragus awoke from some strange and deep trance he was not even aware possessed him, to find the clocks chiming the passing of another hour. At this point, he was at first amazed, then optimistic, then reverent, then finally doubtful, then threatened again by fear. Hope is a very terrifying thing. Again, he struggled with the straps of the bomb pack, and again he stopped. Somehow, he sensed that he was in the grip of a miracle; to struggle once more would be to demean it, and in some superstitious way, to undo it. No, but practicality should never be abandoned! "Maybe," he thought, "I should order a power cell for the electric interference ray – say, with a rush delivery, it might arrive in one to two days -" And that started him laughing, wildly, nearly hysterically. "Is this laughter-coated panic," he asked himself, "or have I merely become the jolly Buddha? The one with the fat belly, who’s become one with the doughnuts?" And he started laughing again. Becoming aware that he had to go to the bathroom, Taragus continued laughing. "Funny, that a full bladder should bother me at a time like this. How strange, to spend what may possibly be my last conscious moment on the earth urinating! Well, let’s turn it into something special. A holy act." And he did, feeling so much joy and sacredness as that yellow stream left him and fell into the water below, that he felt, in that moment, as though his whole life was worthwhile because of it. Not because he had just urinated, but because he had finally understood it on the deepest level. "If I can feel this way about pissing, I guess my soul is saved! I can die now!" he told the bomb. The idea of being saved by his departing uric acid was so absurd that Taragus had to wrap it up in humor to express it, and yet, amazingly, there was something utterly true about it.

Without rushing, Taragus now resumed his effort to remove the bomb pack. He went back downstairs to return to the power saw option. That is when he ran into the poet bomb commandos, who had returned to his home.

Slipping away from them for a moment, he reappeared behind them with two blaster guns as they sought to follow him. "Freeze! One step, and I’ll blow you away you bastards!" he shouted. "You want a poem? Well here’s one. Roses are red, violets are blue, shit is ugly, and so are you! How do you like that? Can you use that for your collection?"

But strangely, the leader of the Poboms only laughed. "Captain Taragus! You’re yourself again!"

"Himself on a higher level," one of the Pobom leader’s companions reminded him.

Hands raised in the air, they turned slowly around to face Taragus, whose blaster guns did not waver.

"You haven’t guessed by now?" the leader asked.

"Guessed what?" demanded Taragus.

"There is no bomb in the pack. It’s nothing more than a dummy rig. You’re not going to blow."

Taragus looked at the poet bombers in absolute astonishment.

"You needed a perception change," agreed the leader’s second-in-command.

Taragus, continuing to be amazed, regarded them. "You mean, you aren’t really the poet bombers? This was all nothing more than a perception change?"

"The Council sent you?" Taragus demanded, more stunned than angered.

"They want you back. We all want you back," the leader apologized.

Taragus could either be infuriated or flattered. He stood, undecided, at the crossroads.

"You have a beautiful house," the leader continued. "But it’s too small for you, Captain. And the world outside is even more beautiful. It has terrible flaws, and makes terrible demands on us, but in the middle of that storm of choices are the things that truly matter. And there is connection to your fellow man. But I think I am wasting my breath. You’ve just faced death, and by facing it, reencountered life. I can see it in your eyes. And I’m looking forward to the places that that light will bring you."

"Captain," the leader said. "You’re free. Freer than you’ve been for years. You should expect to get some letters and some calls soon."

Then, the PCS’s fell into line, and snapped sharp respect-salutes in the direction of the prestigious Captain. "Captain Taragus. May your voyages continue."

"Thank you," Taragus said at last. "And next time if you believe something like this is necessary, could you please just send me a psychologist?"

Next day, the hole in Taragus’ garden wall had been repaired by the PCS’s, and his damaged sunflowers replaced with new ones. He, himself, of his own accord, installed a doorbell on his front gate, which had previously remained bolted shut and inaccessible, iron and dark with no possible means of approaching him.

Taragus would remain in his sanctuary for a while longer, contemplating what had happened, and what had moved inside him. He felt deeper and richer than ever before in his life, even when he thought he had been happiest. When he looked up at the stars at night, from the refuge of his futile mansion, he knew he would return.

The Adventures Of Zan Taragus

Short Fiction Contents

Creative Safehouse Contents