Ship of Theseus

Theseus, she was an Immortal, long ago, long before antiquity, in the days when the echo of the starting gun of the human race could still be heard, when the air was thick with oxygen and possibilities. She (let’s use that pronoun, she, why not: as the Immortals never aged, so they never never reproduced, thus both gender and sex seem arbitrary appointments in telling, so: she) was a tall, proud and black-skinned as were all thirty-one of the Immortals, that tribe, ageless and sexless, living in a verdant valley by what is now known as the Nile, living forever there in that shortest-lived of all species. And curious, oh, they were all curious, but she most of all, evincing that most human of hungers to understand and know everything, searching for answers that satisfied in that particular way that would someday lead to the scientific method: the answers that weren’t excuses for existence, but compelling reasons that always opened the hunger of the thousand other questions to which that reason led. She was in love with the world in the way the proto-scientific could be, in those days when every idea was yet to be had, and there was nothing to reference or build upon and each compound word was a new discovery.

For thousands of years she wandered by the bank of the Nile, watching spiders as they crawled over her hands, chasing bees from flower to flower, catching moths in her tunic. The anthills that danced out odd patterns, that worked like a single being made of thousands of tiny bodies. The flies that lived and laid and died in a day, leaving the next generation for tomorrow. She made boxy bowls out of wood and mud and leaves, bowls that would float in an eddy of the river, tied by twine to a tree branch, where she would keep various species of bugs, watching them live and breed and die. Theseus, she watched five generations of flies live and die in a week, and tracked the movements and dances of a body of ants as it dissected the body of a dead bird. There was on beetle the size of his palm that was colored an iridescent green with a clear blue stripe down its middle that was so breathtakingly beautiful when he found it, so precious and strange, and he watched for a timeless hour until it took flight and flew with such shocking gracelessness and stupidity that from then on she had only to think of it to fall into laughter.

Or Theseus, she would watch the Nile, ever still, always moving. There was something too deep in the river to think of, or perhaps it just washed the thoughts loose as they came, so that you could never quite grasp what it was that was so important about the unending mass of water that was always so forceful in it movement from somewhere beyond to somewhere beyond, through this single place. Standing in the river, she would close her eyes as that pure direction wrapped her legs, pushing and tugging, as her toes kneaded the mud.

And the sky at night, well, one doesn’t need to know of light years and big bangs to feel the crushing weightlessness of infinity on a clear night. She tried to count, sometimes, the number of stars, only to be thwarted by an errant twinkle in between each clear light, that huge uncountable number of finite points only accentuating the infinity in which they lay. The immortals, they had names for constellations, for some stars and for the planets that moved so strangely in relation to everything else, names by which to grid and follow the celestial plane, hooks on which to hand thoughts and theories about the why and how of it all, and often Theseus, she got lost in that too, inventing explanations or theologies, none of which ever quite satisfied, and so it always came back to a simple incomprehensible feeling of being a small thing that ends facing an infinity that does not.

Theseus, when she was a few thousands some years old, the first of her species died. There was silence and blinking as they all stood around the body, broken and trampled by a hippopotamus that had since disappeared. A few cried, but most just stood in shock looking at the husk of what used to be a friend as it lay there without any volition or spark to move again. They stood in silence for hours, until it got dark, and when they finally dispersed, still no one spoke, they just walked away. Theseus, she didn’t speak for days, and spent time instead, alone and lost from herself, watching the river and thinking. She had watched the cycles of death and birth for so long, but it had always felt separate and unreal. She had always assumed the permanence of her own perception, that somehow the spark of consciousness that made her kind different was unbound by the laws of decay and renewal that ruled everything else. To be as fragile as that: to end at the whim of an animal, it seemed shocking that they had lasted so long to begin with. She began to feel threatened by everything. She remembered her fevers after being bitten by spiders and wondered how close she had come to that permanent state to being a husk; remembering watching water buffalo drown in a heavy current and was afraid of the river. And somehow too, the limitless darkness of the sky seemed terrible and threatening; it was no longer the stars that shone, but the horrid emptiness in between that would forever beckon.

And death followed death among the immortals, quickly, as if by realizing the mere possibility of death, they invited it with open arms. A month later, there was a death by drowning, and weeks after that the first suicide - a close lover of the drowning victim. And by carelessness or suicide, seventeen deaths followed that year alone. Those who remained spoke seldom and though they continued not to age, they felt and looked older. Fear and loneliness seeped into their manners, and over the next few hundreds of years, though there were songs both sad and happy, and good stories and happy kisses, their numbers dwindled until Theseus was left alone, the last of the Immortals.

By then she was calm again, and very much her own self, though that self was changed by the death of everyone she loved. Theseus, she loved the world just as much, and now with the intense longing of having something you will loose. She began speaking to the things around her as if they were human. Describing things to themselves, telling them stories; giving as a gift the noise of her voice in the patterns of her consciousness. She sang songs to the stars and told them her name, and the names that she had for them, and how small she felt under them. She told the anthill how impressed she was with the work it did, and how she still wondered sometimes if it thought about her, but that no, she didn’t think it did really, and that even when she died that it would go on living for ages, even as it’s ants died daily, but that she didn’t think it would remember her, and that that was okay. She thanked the river for all of it’s water and for washing her and yelled at it for killing her friends, and forgave it for killing her friends.

Theseus, she cut down the biggest tree she could, and carved it into one of her boxy bug bowls, but much larger - big enough for herself and thirty others. She bored holes and inserted thirty straight sticks to radiate out the sides, and coated the inside and edges with river clay. She dragged this into the river, and filled it half full of all of the bugs she had harvested and gathered. It was dark and clear when she pushed the Ship of Theseus out to float down the Nile toward the Mediterranean.