Still, you are born

Joseph didn’t remember where he had come from, because it was from forgetfulness that he was created.

***

When God created Adam, the Angels were confounded. They asked, “Why create this creature who will sow corruption and spill blood while you have already perfectly formed us from your emanating light to praise your Name.” God responded to His stewards, “I know that which you know not.” Or so the story goes.

***

When Joseph woke up, he took a quick look around to make sure he was safe. The sun had just risen, but he had no idea of this event from deep down inside his well. Every morning when he woke up, he not only had to reacquaint himself with his surroundings but also had to relearn how to protect himself. It was only in his sleep that he was safe. Joseph didn’t have nightmares, because Joseph didn’t dream. Awake, however, he was constantly harassed by spirits, or more properly, by jinn.

***

Exegetes had always been flustered by the angels’ question. If the angels really didn’t know as much as God thought they did, then how were they able to describe humankind’s fate? Angels were basically God’s automatons, created to constantly praise and glorify Him by fulfilling all of His commands. How could such creatures have any kind of forethought of a yet-to-be-created Adam and his descendants?

***

While most are accustomed to being awoken by a cockerel or an alarm clock, Joseph was almost always awoken by the jinn Khannas. And instead of the chanticleer’s proud crow, Khannas made himself content with silent whispers. This morning, Joseph opened his eyes to his cold, damp world upon hearing, “Hold fassst to the rope of Allah!” hissed into his ear. After the initial, usual shock of realizing he was alive and had to survive another day, Joseph had an entirely new feeling this morning. Joseph’s soul had become accustomed to Khannas’s usual whispers, “There’s no reason for you to get up this morning. It is better that you close your eyes and wish for death,” so that even though he had no mental recollection of those words from days past, their imprints left a deep mark inside his heart. Today’s encouraging words– in fact these words were taken straight from the Qur’an, God’s word– did not inspire any hope into Joseph but instead unsettled him to his core from their novelty.

Joseph’s instinct to look around his surroundings for the source of the whispers proved futile. He was further confused because it didn’t seem like the whispers were coming from anywhere in space but reverberated throughout his entire body. It began from his bowels, swam through his blood vessels and echoed within his skull. The more he thought about it, the more it felt like the words were resonating within his ear as they were exiting his body rather than upon their entrance. He decided Khannas lived inside of him, a parasite feeding off of his paranoia. But this realization did nothing to assuage him of his fears. In fact, Joseph began to listen more intently, Khannas’s words becoming a mantra “Hold fasssst to the rope of Allah.”

As the words became louder and clearer and enveloped all of his senses, Joseph became more and more aware of his physical body and his environment. He felt the cobbled, stone wall on his back, the damp earthen floor beneath him. His wet wool tunic had an intolerable stench and stuck to his body as if it were a second layer of skin. The words began to repeat themselves to an ominous beating. He sensed his heart pumping blood throughout his body all the way to his nearly frostbitten toes. His ears began to pulsate and he took notice of water dripping from a stalactite nearby. The more he focused on the droplets forming on the tip of the rock, slowly growing and becoming heavier until they fell into the puddle underneath, the more in sync the drops became to his pulse, to the point that he could not even differentiate between their sound.

The entire cavern seemed to breathe with his lungs as he felt a cool breeze blow across his face. But the tail end of the breeze carried a foul stench and seemed to take a turn, loop back around, and head straight for his stomach. Joseph became acutely aware of his hunger and yelled out in pain. Doubled over and retching, he grasped the floor with his bony fingers, dug into the ground, and picked up a clod of dirt. The gentle breeze by this point had strengthened into more of a gust and was still blowing directly into his stomach, creating a vacuum within him. He shoved the dirt into his mouth and swallowed it with no effort of even chewing. The temporary relief it provided him encouraged him to keep picking up clods of earth and scarfing them down. The taste of the dirt didn’t register in Joseph’s mind until he was forced to pause in order to properly swallow and avoid choking. It was grainier than he expected, not a smooth mush but an ugly conglomerate of pebbles, soil, moss, fungus, and rhizobia.

Finally satisfied, but now disgusted with himself, he spit out what he could from what was left in his mouth. To rid himself of the more stubborn constituents of his meal, Joseph reached a finger inside his mouth and swept across the inside of his cheek. In his hand, among the fibers and grains of dirt, was a tooth. Joseph wasn’t shocked at this; he just stared as it seemed to shine in his dim surroundings. It looked lonely in his ruddy palm, like a lost sheep wandering in a town of confused dirt roads. Joseph attempted to bring the sheep back inside the pen, but only more teeth fell out of his mouth as a result. With half of his flock now scattered on the ground, Joseph felt hopeless and scared.

***

Before creating humans from clay but after forming the angels from His light, God made the jinn out of smokeless fire. What the jinn lacked in closeness to God, they gained in agency. The jinn weren’t limited to certain realms, as the angels were, but were free to travel as they please. To this day, humans are fascinated by the jinn’s ability for travel and can only make sense of it by positing multiple dimensions or even universes for their existence.

The most noteworthy jinn in all of history was Iblis, sometimes referred to as Satan. The confusion in some circles over his status as a fallen angel arises only because Iblis, unlike the other jinn, had no shame in remaining so close to God and his inner circle of angels. In fact, Iblis was present when the angels questioned God about the creation of Adam; however, he was not satisfied at all with God’s answer. It is easy to mistake the angels’ question as stemming from curiosity, but the angels, unlike humans and jinn, are not capable of such a disposition. Even their question was an act of obedience, but Iblis’s confusion at Adam’s creation gave way to his crime as God made His next revelation to the inner circle, “Bow down before my creation.” Iblis had never bowed down before anything but God. All the angels faced Adam and bowed down, but Iblis turned towards God, “I have praised you my whole life, and the way you reward me is by creating this creature? I am better than he is; he’s made from dirt, and I’m made from fire. I will never bow down to someone lower than me. ”

And God commanded, “For your arrogance, you are forever banished from this realm. You will never see my face ever again. I will send you to the valley of Gehinnom, and from there you and your descendants can live alongside Adam and his, forever enemies to each other.”

***

Joseph wiped his mouth and shook his hands dry as he stood up beside the pool of water. Looking up, his eyes met another’s. “Who are you?” Joseph said.

“I ask myself that every day, son” the stranger replied, “My theory right now is that ‘I’ am just a convenient fiction that I’ve created so that the sum of my experiences and memories can form a coherent narrative. Don’t ask me why I would even want such a narrative, because I’m still trying to figure that one out.”

“Okay, but what shall I call you?”

“ You can call Mnemosyne.”

“Well, Mnemosyne, you’re the first person I’ve seen who looks like me. I mean, you’re not ugly like the afareet, and I can actually see your face without any feeling of disgust or horror. You stand upright and you speak with your lips. The whispering has stopped and I can finally think clearly, but I am still confused. But at least this time, I know what I’m confused about: you”

“Well thank you kindly. Let me explain something to you. That pool you just drank from is called the River Lethe—“

“But that’s not a river.”

“Yes, not yet. Right now I guess it’s more the Puddle Lethe, but very soon it will shoot up into a river. I’ve just come from its source, and pretty soon it’s going to explode. So I escaped, and here I am.”

“It’s going to explode? Well am I safe?”

“It’s always about you isn’t it? Well…” She stretched out her arm, palm facing upwards, and a bucket slowly descended into her hand, “here’s your exit strategy. And it’s about time that I made my own.”

With that, Mnemosyne disappeared. The bucket fell from where his hand once was and into the pool of water, bobbing up and down. A rope was tied to its handle and seemed as if it lead infinitely upwards. As Joseph neared the bucket, the water level began to rise. As soon as he grabbed the rope, the water from the pool gushed in to fill the entire cavern. Joseph was dragged upwards by the rope as he stuck both feet inside the bucket. Rushing upwards, he could feel the warmth relaxing his tunic from his skin, expanding it into a flowing robe while the column of water beneath him was lapping at its edges. Before he had the chance to admire his new coat, it became tangled with the rope.  Stripping the robe right off of him and leaving him naked, the rope continued to twist around his body until it wrapped around his neck. Finally reaching the mouth of the well, Joseph let out his first and final breath:

Hu…