allahu.cipher

The wall was innocent enough an undertaking at first. Elom only wanted to protect his delicate crops from roaming hungry beasts. He’d noticed something fascinating in his journeys. Just a few years earlier, he and his band had to abandon an encampment quickly because of the ferocity of the winds and rains there. They had to leave everything, including a cache of fruits he’d collected in an animal skin bag. The following season, the band was passing through that spot again when he found the remnants of his bag around a tree that was growing in its midst. That’s when the idea occured to him. What if he placed the fruits in the ground and called to the gods of the heavens and earth and the great embrace of the eternal void of night to foster them and make the grow and give forth their abundance?

Now he had a grove of trees, all producing fruit, more fruit than he and his people had ever seen in one place. They decided to stay here and tend the garden, and send out smaller bands to roam the land and hunt game. Elom heaved stones upon stones to set his garden apart from the wilderness, and to protect his fruit from the insatiable mouths of the creatures. As he placed the last stone and dusted off his hands, he looked at his handiwork and felt proud. But the cosmos looked different now, and the lights of the gods of the heavens and the earth began to dim.

One day, a man of Elom’s tribe named Adama came to the garden and saw the fruit of the trees just beyond the stone wall. Adama felt a pang of hunger in his belly, and so he scaled the barrier and jumped over the other side, and he reached up and plucked a radiant red fruit from one of the trees. Elom was wandering through the garden and tending to his trees when he spotted Adama between the branches and leaves, and he watched him satiate himself on Elom’s hard work. A feeling welled up inside Elom. It was thick and unsettling, as if Adama had reached inside Elom’s very form and plucked out his spleen. Without thinking, Elom reacted. He picked up a sharp stone, and snuck up behind Adama, and smashed him over the head.

Elom beheld the twisted and broken form of Adama, the spot where cracked skullbone mingled with brains and blood and matted black hair, and he was filled with glee at the sight. He pulled the stolen fruit from Adama’s lifeless hand, dripping with the gore of the sacrifice, and put it in his mouth. He tasted the sweet, metallic blood as it entered into him and mingled with his own blood, and became a new force coursing through his veins. Elom cupped the blood of his tribesman in the palms of his hands, and then he painted the exterior of the wall of the garden as a warning to the creatures and a marker of his dominion.

The others began to talk in hushed and anxious whispers. No one in the tribe had ever killed one of their own before. But then there was no one like Elom, who could produce fruits in such abundance, and who could create the glory of a garden like this, and mark it with a barrier. They came to him, even while his hands were still red and warm with Adama’s blood. They prostrated to him and subjected themselves to him. Elom smiled in his new confidence, and said to them, “If you promised to serve me, and me alone, and follow my commands, I will allow you to eat from my garden, and grant you safety in its walls.” They each agreed and became his servants.

Soon they were working the fields within the expanding walls of the garden most of the hours of the day, even before the disk of the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. The men grew weary of the work, and their murmuring grew into protest, then open rebellion. Elom had to do something – he was losing control. So he lured the leader of this rebellion whose name was Habel with the promise of reconciliation. But when the two stood face to face, Elom ran him through with a sharpened spear. Then he hacked at the dead man’s neck until his head came apart from the body, and Elom stuck it on the pike with which he skewered Habel and planted it in the ground in the middle of the garden for all to see.

Elom was sure this would cower the others back into submission, but it had the opposite effect. Canai, the brother of Habel, enraged at the sight of his dead brother’s head, took up a sharp stone and struck Elom in the crown. Then he seized upon the master of the garden and the others joined in, smashing his face until there was nothing left but a bloody pulp. Canai felt a surge of excitement, and in his mania he tore into the flesh of Elom with his bare hands, and tore out his warm heart, and ate it. He looked into the eyes of the tribespeople gathered around him, the look of awe, the look of excitement, that even Elom himself had never inspired.

And so he made a plan to rule over them all, and with more violence and control than ever before. He announced to them, “I ate of the heart of Elom, and now I am the new Elom, taken up in a new form. I am reborn to punish you for your sins and your conspiracies. Behold me and fear me.” This reborn Elom set about killing the conspirators, so that the pond in the center of the garden overflowed with blood.

He ordered a tall gate be constructed at the opening of the garden, and before that narrow gate he had placed a wooden pillar. He painted the pillar thick with his victims’ blood, the crude image of the vengeful Elom, the one true Lord of the Garden, the all-encompassing, the merciless.

That bloody pillar — simple, singular, and erect — that was the genesis of the number one, the birth of history and its endless proliferation of Eloms, and the grievous rupture that would never be healed.