The Last Challenge

What good is it to live in a world if you actually belong to another? Loves come and go... no matter how wonderful they might seem in any given moment, we realise sooner or later that they were a form of escaping in a Paradise that we so desperately needed… and, fatally, we will eventually return exactly where we left off.. Glory? something less long-lasting and superficial could hardly be invented...Money? Absolutely ridiculous.

And then? What for?

I was sitting in front of the computer screen sad, abandoned. I couldn’t have imagined a fader story than this one. I had the reputation of a cold, somewhat cynical guy.

What are you accusing me of? That which i receive I can give back. I saw on Earth so much pain, so much humiliation, such tragedy that the words can’t describe it. What should I give back? Writings, left lovers and acid remarks. Do you think I like it? That it makes me feel good?

“Love is the atemporal echo of a magic born in the waves of the sea...and passion, a fruit too rare to not be forbidden...”

Do you think anyone will read that? It would sell even worse than an erotic novel.

Then, I shall return to my daily visage. Grey. Fading. Passing.

*

The drunkenness of senses… the magic of colour. When you experience them, you have the impression that you’re floating towards infinity. And after? Returned to your damned, kafkaesque imprisonment, you will search for a new fix of your artificial stimulant, of your drug meant to keep the illusion alive. More and more… until it completely takes over you, asking for a bigger and bigger dose, without being able to actually set you free.

No. On the contrary. It will bind you even stronger.

And then, when you take note of your status, the size of your illusion, what will you do? You will write for a reader that does not exist. You will spout cynical remarks. You’ll leave the Penelope Cruz of the neighbourhood.

Merde. I can’t keep going on like this. I think I’ll throw myself in front of the subway. A predictable, egotistical, not even intelligent gesture.

A fake signature in the book of history, a shakily given autograph.

It will, however, forever stop the illusion. That completely stupid feeling that things are anyhting else other than what they are.

That’s it, I’ve made up my mind. I’ll get my raincoat, though, so that i don’t slip under a car. I want it to be an assumed, responsible gesture. Underground, i dare to add.

“Is that so? Do you think everything is over? Do you know why the one you called the Penelope Cruz of the neighbourhood kept seeing you? Because she wanted to dream of more than living in reality. Don’t you want to know what lies beyond all this? I offer you a fascinating game. You have four levels, which are not easy to pass. The better you play, the more you progress to the next stage...more interesting, closer to the Sky. Winning, at the same time, a valuable prize. If you get it wrong, however, you cannot keep going and you risk falling even further down than you were before. What do you say? Isn’t it better that a leap of faith?”

“Who are you? What is this?”

I rubbed my eyes, as if I was in front of a hallucination.

“Why does it matter? A genie. A spirit. A guide. Better than a cynicism spewing machine.”

“And what am I supposed to do?”

“You listen to my short sales pitch...and if you are ready, if you don’t want to run forever, you accept my challenge.”

I sat for a minute, pondering my breath.

“Alright...if I think about it, I think you’re right. We can start”.

“The first level is relatively easy. But be careful, you don’t have to think as if you already passed it. I had clients that failed, that lost even before starting.”

“OK, I’m listening.”

“It’s about money. You will be put in a unique situation and will be forced to make a choice. That’s about it, I’m not allowed to tell you any more.”.

I quickly weighed my possibilities, my capacity for adventure.

“Alright”, I said, “Accept, I take the challenge”.

“Well then...”, said the voice, then everything turned dark around me.

*

I was in a strange, unknown room. I knew that I was in a difficult situation, without being able to fully understand what was happening. I counted my pocket money.. .damn, I barely had enough for a month.

I could play the lottery....but no, it doesn’t have any sense, the chances are way to unfavourable anyway.

I looked at the ceiling in a despair filled gesture. Something akin to a fog was floating near it, then I saw some numbers forming. “6, 8, 12...”.

“6,8,12,...” What was it supposed to mean? Then, in a flash, I understood. They were the winning numbers.

Oh, goody. And if I use them, will I be able to reprimand myself for anything? I’m not stealing anything. I’m not taking someone else’s thing and making it my own. Maybe I’ll even make a little donation, after I cover myself. Is there anything reproachable in that?

I was about to buy the lottery ticket, but I changed my mind. I’m not doing anything bad at first glance, but a precedent will have been set. Today it’s winning numbers, tomorrow, who knows what ... Life isn’t bought, it’s not taken for granted. It’s meant to be lived. It’s meant to be won after trails of fire.

I chose indifference, silence. The ticket was never bought.

“Congratulations! You passed the first level!”, I heard the voice say.

When I woke up, I was alone in the apartment.

There was nothing new in this, anyway. What truly forbids us to fly? What kills our dream? What maintains our illusion?

In no way is it the traps of earthly wealth. It’s something way more subtle than that....fed up with your touch...because our dreams never overlapped...because what I wrote about love was lost in the aether...

He said you had been meeting me out of a desire to escape...is that true, i wonder?

I don’t think so...if this was the case, you would have told me...i would have known.

One more reply. One more cancelled flight. One more illusion.

I’ll never be free, goddamnit...never!!! NEVER!!! i bellowed a freeing, inhuman cry.

*

I lay among unfinished manuscripts, broken coffee cups, dusty jeans – visage made incomplete in an imperfect manner by a quite modern laptop. I suffer from insomnia, but when I manage to fall asleep, I have terrible nightmares. Once I dreamed that, while we were making love, Penelope’s body was slowly burning, turning into a monster. Instead of total freedom, I threw myself to the side, horrified, hitting myself violently on the edge of the radiator that was right outside our bedroom. My body laid there lifeless, my face covered in blood.

Then, more sublime than the orgasmic freeing that hadn’t taken place, I saw a paradisiac, pure, immaculate light – the first signs of the freedom of the soul.

But everything was only there for a fraction of a second, just enough to realise that it wasn’t an illusion. I would wake up alone, sweaty, suffering, just to do it all again.

Penelope, what curse is this?

After a while, the spirit – or guide – visited me again.

“Are you curious to see what the next levels have in store for you?”

“Honestly, seeing how I feel right now, no. I almost only wish to die. But I realised something: what I see at the end of my nightmare with Penelope, the magic, heavenly, freeing ray, it’s not a trick. It really exists. And you want to know where? At the end of your game. Beyond the last level. So that – yes, I became your client.”

“This level is way more complex...it’s about love, passion – the feelings that interest you so much. Remember: one wrong step and you’ll fall back...way, way back.. and I will not be here to help you anymore”.

I just imagined, for a moment, that nightmare becoming reality, in a parallel universe in which I would have to choose. I closed my eyes and said:

“Alright. I accept. I take the challenge.”

“So be it..”, I heard the voice say, and I fell through the darkness once again.

*

I was alone in a room with access to the internet. I felt empty, spent, as if I had forgotten the breath of life... the magic of interaction.

I lit a cigarette and stared into the void. I wanted to read a good book, to lose myself in the universe of someone’s mind, to take part in a recital... as much as I yearned for the touch of a woman.

After a while, I started surfing the web. I met an extraordinary girl, of an elegant beauty and at the same time of a pure sensuality, who talked about fantasies as easy as she would take a bite from an apple...

An apple... the forbidden fruit.

I let my imagination run freely, leaving myself to the semivirtual delicacies offered by my unique partner.

“You’re special...women are usually hiding, you have to pry secrets from them...I would like to know more about you, to share more than a simple fantasy...”.

“But you only have to say so... I could be at your place in half an hour...”

I gulped. To refuse would mean to do what no man on Earth could. But even so, emptied, with my eyes drowsy from the lack of sleep, I remembered, for a moment, that it was just a game. That my choice has a meaning.

When I entered a new level, I almost forgot everything that happened before, my discussion with the guide – but not completely. I was keeping a small memory about the game – like a dream in a dream.

“You’re extraordinary... I hope we meet each other again someday. But do you know what the stake of my game is? I want to know if Penelope, the nickname I gave to my lover here, will ever be capable of remembering my words. I left her because I couldn’t dedicate a fragment that means a lot to me. I couldn’t replace love with sex anymore, to find out if our dreams could ever overlap. But what do I know? Maybe she’ll give me the answer one day.. a magical, unreal, fatal day... that’s what I actually live for. I’ll still talk to you, but I can’t accept your invitation.

“Your choice...can I ask you something, though?”

“Of course.”

“How does that fragment sound? I’m very curious”.

“I wrote it in a strange morning, lost between dream and reality. Textually, it sounds like this: «Love is the atemporal echo of a magic born from the waves of the sea… and passion, a fruit too rare to not be forbidden...»”.

“It’s very beautiful...thank you.”

“You’re welcome... keep in touch”, I ended the conversation.

“Congratulations! You passed the second test”, I heard the voice say again.

I took a deep breath.

*

Nobody ever took from us the right to dream... we always could create, soar higher and higher...but at the same time, through a cynical, inhumane rule, we never could make our biggest dreams a reality… the model in which we believed, the literary advisor is really just a loser editor, who beats his wife and drowns his sorrows in bottles of cheap liquor. The woman of dreams, the adored one, is in ordinary life a refined whore that serves the exact same portion of ecstasy to every man willing to pay enough. Then, ourselves. We look at ourselves in the mirror, in a moment of lucidity, and what do we see? What does the face in the mirror show us?

We’re pedophiles. Racists. Egoists. We cave convictions that can slip into the fanatical. We have sick fantasies, we’d wish to be whipped until we draw blood. We deny our own religion when we get bored of it. We invent absurd games to get a taste of decadent voluptousssness.

Of course, not all at once. But at least one. One solitary thing. Do you think me, Penelope or you are exceptions? No way. One, I said, and the list is way more comprehensive than how I described it. Look in the mirror without cheating and you will see that I am right.

In our celestial aspirations, in the search for the truth, we run into us... it’s monstrous, absurd, paranoid – and even like that, real.

Once, I wanted to make a joke, paraphrasing the title of a song by Lake of Tears, “So fell autumn rain”. I wrote, referring to the elections in parliament that took place in fall, over an article of my colleague’s, “So fell autumn curse”.

But it wasn’t a joke at all...and it didn’t refer just to politics, I understood that way later. It referred to us. To me.

Rain/curse...miracle/horror...life/death...

I look at Penelope’s photo...I imagine that I would succumb to all kinds of perversions in her company...I crash among , spent, in the middle of the room...

“The third level is very hard to pass. Many stopped here. I think you remember how video games are. The more you progress, the harder it gets. You’ve proven, however, that you are a true player. Do you wish to continue?”, the unique guide told me.

“Yes, of course...I don’t have anything left to lose anyway. I revealed you my target in our last talk”.

“It’s about religion. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re coming from, where you’re going...but how you can confront the moment”.

I closed my eyes and prayed. In a little while, I will probably have forgotten where I was coming from...and I will be alone, helpless, prey to temptation.

“Alright, I accept, I take the challenge”, I said, and I’m afraid that I became so fascinated by the game, by saying that phrase again and again, that nothing and no-one could stop me.

I succumbed to the darkness again.

In the room there only some things of mine, and on the wall, a couple of portraits and an icon. I had fell down into a cataleptic state, without having the power to ask, without having the courage to raise my gaze.

Me in myself. In the darkness. In inferno.

After a while, Satan appeared, taking the form of a zombie that however had a clear, almost human voice.

“You saw, many times, a movie starring… me”, he said, and doing so he burst into laughter. “Sorry”, he resumed, clearing his throat. “The Devil’s Advocate… I want us to discuss one line from that, although it’s way more complex...«Look, but don’t touch...touch, but don’t taste». What do you think of it?”

“I thought about it very much myself. It’s the original sin, whose consequences we suffer today still. If Adam hadn’t bit the apple, all of these wouldn’t have happened.”

“Correct. If. But was it probable (not possible, but probable) that Adam hadn’t taken a bite from the apple? Please consider human psychology. What does a child do when you forbid him to go outside after 9 pm? How about a teenager when you forbid him from going on adult websites? How about an adult when you explain what’s better for him?”

“They do the exact opposite. Not always, but in most cases.”

“Exactly. In most cases. Do you think that God (who, remember, can do anything...or, well, that’s what He says) wouldn’t know what Adam would do? Didn’t he guess what was going to happen? The torture that the descendants of the human race would be subjected to? The pain that takes over you alone in your room, at the memory of the impossible equation with Penelope? Actually, what I want to ask you...” he shaped his voice again in a truly seducing way. “Do you think God likes torture?”

I fell silent, defeated.

“It’s the same, my friend. The fact that it started with Adam doesn’t change the equation at all. It even complicates it. All of those centuries full of hate, blood and pain, and for what? For people to start defending me? Let’s count the adepts now. I’m at a clear advantage. This is what the Creator tortured his sons for? Adam, you? To help you go to the other side? The character that played me was right, God is a joker...a big one.”

He overwhelmed me. I was feeling as if I was running short on ideas, on arguments.

“If this were to be the case, what are you proposing?”

“What am I proposing? For a start, something simple...rewriting history. Don’t you want to be free? I thought that was the idea that started it all, freedom”.

Oh, my. What am I about to do. He knocked me out, it’s true. He’s pulling me over to his side. But where is the sophism? Because I have a conviction that his whole sparkling rationality had an error, perfectly inserted.

With the last of my powers, I looked at the icon. . I fixed my gaze on it, and I started to understand.

“Know the Truth and it will set you free”, I finally said. “Here is the answer. I will be free through the divine way, not through yours. Everything that you said so far is mostly true, but it’s not the entire truth. It’s something split. There was also the war that started in the Heavens… maybe God had a perfect plan for humanity. But at that exact moment you rose up. And cheated, just like now. And the time of truth and freedom hasn’t arrived yet, sadly. And about the adepts... «But will the Son of Man find faith on Earth when he returns?». There, God afforded to ask a rhetorical question. He knew he wouldn’t find anything closer. And everything because of your tricks. You’re a genius, Mephistopheles... but I didn’t bite the bait. It’s everyone on their own road.”

The Devil disappeared from the room, leaving me alone, exhausted.

“Congratulations! You passed the third level”, the familiar confirmation came.

“I think that I am simply too good”, I thought and froze right after, because my line strongly resembled the one said by the young lawyer in the movie I remembered. “I never lose...I win”.

*

We get back what we give, Penelope...it could be extremely fair, if there wasn’t a small fissure...I’m not looking for the ones guilty of this fissure, I gave up on that a long time ago, I’m just saying things as they are.

If one day, weighed down by contradictions, drunk on the maddening desire to cross a line, falling (maybe fatally, even though I’m afraid to say the word) into temptation, I will meet one of the images behind the mirror? Maybe the one of someone thirsty for the virtue of a 14 year old girl...what will I get? Prison? Lynched? Public infamy? What am I to do to convince myself that I don’t deserve that?

If you come back to me and give me, from the desire for everything to go well, your body...eternally your body...what will you get? Sex that doesn’t end? Not even now have you understood that I want to give you the fragment of my work, that I wanted to hurl myself under the subway because you wouldn’t have understood it? Appreciated it?

If I let out another cynic remark, I will have to endure – tomorrow as well – the horror, the mutilation of soldiers, the unleashing of the Apocalypse? I don’t want to anymore, it’s fine. I don’t want it for tomorrow as well.

Is there anything else to do?

Apart from the final gesture...

“Young writer, you have safely reached the last level. Congratulations again! Even if you don’t realise it, you’re closer to the Sky. You have learned new things. It’s my duty to warn you though that nothing of what you experienced so far compares to this level. Nobody has passed it until now. I cannot influence your decision. My duty is to be impartial.”

I felt myself getting dizzy. The last one...beyond it lies the light at the end of the tunnel. Freedom. Truth. I’m so close...

Nobody has passed it until now. Maybe I should stop. Try (but with what strength? with what morale?) to remake my life with Penelope, with my readers. To learn to be more modest, warmer, more serene. To fight more with the image from behind the mirror.

“I take the challenge”. God, what a perfect drug, what a drunkenness of the senses! What a wonderful game! The only thing that could pull me from my initial disaster. I wanted for the last time to change my mind, after which I said proudly:

“Alright, I accept. I take the challenge!”

*

From the deep darkness, I dived into a universe unknown. First, I went through magical, almost unreal places, I saw dreamscapes, like I haven’t seen in photos of the Andes or of the faraway hawaiian beaches. I contacted Nature, I breathed Eternity, stronger, more sublime than anyone could ever imagine.

Then, after a clean, relaxing rest I had the surprise to deduce that I was a sort of employee in a firm of the future. I couldn’t stifle my amazement when I found out that all the things like envy, fraud, cruelty had disappeared. We were normal, moral, honest, authentic people, the lot of us, even if we used the same credit cards and drank the same coffee.

An utopia. Maybe this is what it really looks like. Really, what madness...

I forgot who I was, what I wanted, what I was heading towards. Everything was too close to perfection to leave space for doubt, agony, self-devouring.

For cynical remarks. Break-ups. Pain.

After a week was over, I couldn’t seem to make plans for the weekend. Everything was too new, too fresh. Then I met with the girl that I had met online.

She was truly charming, seducing and still yet bearing the germ of innocence, the candid laugh. We spoke about art, painting, life, with a never before studied natural vibe, with a totally spontaneous effervescence.

“I told you we would meet again”, I said, losing myself in her oddly green eyes.

We spent magical moments together, out of Paradise, and even though we spent our nights together, the most precious memory I had was that of the very clean smell of our bedding. Clean, like our whole relationship.

Back at work, I happily found that any stress had disappeared and exploring the new facilities the laptops had to offer was made with the utmost pleasure.

The next weekend, I bought a book. Based on recommendations, I had gathered that it was something with a profoundly human, psychological aspect, but not devastating, strange, not that would hurt you.

Midnight had caught me lecturing, fascinated, when my weird guide made an appearance again.

I was surprised, since this was the first time that he had intervened in one of the levels.

“What’s up with you? What’s going on?”, I asked.

“Have you really not noticed...that there is nothing to compete against in this level? The last one, the hardest one?”.

“Ohhh...”, I sighed, displeased. “You know that some transformations occur...believe me that I had completely forgotten about the level...the game...everything”.

“Well, I came to remind you”.

“Yes...I’m listening”.

“The things that you have experienced here aren’t really fictive...they’re real, at some point they will happen”.

“Okay”.

“But, to get to live them someday, you will have to go back to where you started. To finish your passing...along with the readers, with Penelope, reading the news about war… all those things… you know...”.

I felt my blood freezing.

“Do you think”, I said in a sudden explosion of anger, “that I’m insane? I won’t go back there, ever, you got that? Not after what I saw here. I’d rather die”.

“I was sure”, said my guide, and for the first time I detected sadness in his voice. Compassion. “That is the last challenge. That is why nobody has passed it”.

“Okay, but...”, I tried to protest.

“I cannot influence your decision. My role is that of being impartial.”, he added, this time in a monosyllabic tone.

I woke up on a subway station, in full traffic.

What good is it to live in a world in which you don’t belong to? (...) What truly keeps us back from flying? What kills our dream? What maintains our illusion? (...) And, fatally, we will return, sooner or later, exactly from where we left...

To go back. What a sinister farce. What a nightmare.

To return. There, now I found out how the game could be lost. From too strong of a desire to win it.

“All of those things...you know...”

No, I don’t want those things anymore. I didn’t want them from the start. I had the rare stupidity of believing that if I enter the game, if I am a good player, I will manage to dodge. To not answer that blasted question.

The rare stupidity.

Penelope, if you were able to understand me...if you hadn’t refused me that fragment...

I loved you, my beauty! Goodbye!, I said in my head, and being a few meters from the rapidly approaching train, I jumped.

*

In the station opposite to that, a girl in a blue tracksuit cried continuously, writing on one of the walls a few words that she had never read anywhere… but that she wanted to express for a long time.

“Love is the atemporal echo of a magic born from the waves of the sea… and passion, a fruit too rare to not be forbidden… Forever your girl, Penelope”.

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