The Strange Time-Bending Tales of Eris and Alphine: Incompletion
Mystical Outer Space Planetary System
Alphine looked at Eris with wide eyes of disbelief. “Wait,
so you guys have countries too?”
“Well, not exactly countries, but different territories, yes.
Many of the cool demons you can think of exist in the coolest territory of all
- Hades. Oh, how I wish to join their country and be part of their cool club.”
“So, d…do you have passports or vitu kama hizo?” Alphine
asked.
“What, no!” Eris replied, her face twisted in agony, as
though hurt by the suggestion that they would have passports. “We don’t have
passports. Pfft, hizo ni upuzi gani?’
“I was just asking,” Alphine replied. “You already have countries,
so why just stop there?”
“Well, they are not really countries. More like bases of
operations. Dungeons.” Eris said. “And to move from one dungeon to another
would require enduring torture for billions of years. So if I were to move from
Tartarus, my Dimension of Extreme Depravity, to the wealthy Hades’ Place, Dimension
of Extreme Torture, I would have to lick the buttocks of my overload, Aeacus,
for 1. 3 billion years.”
Alphine almost coughed up the soda he had just drunk. “What?”
“Yes.”
“That’s torture!”
“Oh, trust me, you don’t know torture,” Eris said, a
thousand-yard traumatic look in her eyes. “Licking his buttocks isn’t the worst
part of it.”
Alphine shook his head, baffled and extremely confused. What
could be worse than licking someone's buttocks for 1.3 billion years?
“What could be worse than licking someone…Oh my God, I feel
nauseous!” Alphine said. He leaned down on his bench and began retching, trying
to breathe deeply to cool down the queasy feeling in his chest and stomach.
“It’s the years. That’s the real torture,” Eris said.
“Oh, its everything,” Aplhine replied.
Eris shook her head. “You don’t get it. It’s the imprecision
of it all. What do you mean by 1.3 billion years? What does it even mean? Does
it mean that I will lick his buttocks for exactly 1, 300,000,000 or 1,
399,999,999?”
“Really! That’s what you are worried about?” Alphine shouted
back, still pale and nauseous. “Bwana, you will be licking someone’s
buttocks, isn’t that bad enough?”
“I don’t like imprecise figures!” Eris fired back, looking
offended. “It’s like you humans. When you say 1 kg, what does that mean? Does
it mean exactly 1000 grams or 1001, or 1020? I can’t stand it. Aaargh, it's
making my human head hurt! How do I stop this throbbing at the sides of my
head! AAAAARGH!”
Alphine watched in horror as Eris’s face distorted in all
sorts of ways. Her nose bulged, and her forehead began to protrude forward, and
her eyes were stretched to the sides of her face. Her head began to split right
down the middle as a blinding light began to emerge from inside her. Alphine
quickly jumped in front of her and tried to hide her from the human traffic
passing along Uhuru Highway.
“What are you doing?” He castigated, trying to keep his
voice down as he looked around the park. A couple passed on the walkway close
to them, looking at the two with accusatory stares. It must have looked
compromising to see a man stand in front of a seated woman, holding his jacket
out to hide the sides of her face as though trying to keep her face hidden as
she blew him.
“Oh, it’s not what it looks like!” Alphine said to the
passing couple, with an awkward chuckle.
The couple quickly looked straight ahead, their lips pursed and
the edges of their mouths twitching as they tried to keep themselves from
laughing.
“What was that?” Alphine asked as he sat back down. Eris'
face had gone back to normal.
“Sorry, that tends to happen whenever I begin to overthink
numbers,” Eris said. She looked into the distance in rumination, as though
pulling up memories from a haunting past. “It happened to my friend, Akhyls.
She wanted out of Tartarus, and so Aeacus, the Grand Juror, made her lick him
for 2, 100, 000, 000 years.”
“Oh shit, that must have been tough for her?”
“Yes, it was, but not the licking part. No, Akhyls was
already prepared to do that.” Eris said, her eyes glistening with tears. “ No,
what was tough for her was that Aeacus forced her to stop at 2, 099,999,999
years, just one year short of the end.”
Alphine gave Eris a bemused look, as if to ask, ‘That’s a
good thing, right?’ But had to stop himself when he remembered just what an
imprecise finger did to Eris and presumably, to those like him, too.
“That lack of closure, that lack of clarity, that lack of
hitting the actual figure was torture for Akhyls. She was allowed to leave, but
she is like me - she likes complete figures. That’s why we get along so well.
She likes absolute closure. Her torture was to end at exactly 2, 100, 000, 000
years but Aeacus knew exactly what he was doing by stopping her a year short. It
was eternal torture. Even after leaving, Akhyls continued to be tortured by
that lack of closure. It continuously tortured her so much that she just
decided to come back to Tartarus after a few years and has been begging to
complete her previous torture ever since. She has even begged to start a fresh
torture session that she gets to complete, but Aeacus is adamant. Word around
Tartarus is that her father, Tartarus himself, the King of the land himself, commanded
every Aeacus move. He didn’t want his daughter to leave, and so he interfered
with the judge himself.”
“Ah. Good to see that interfering with the judicial system
isn’t just a human thing.” Alphine said with a chuckle, looking at Eris and
hoping she would join in the laughter even if she didn’t get the joke because
‘it was too earthy’, as she always did. But Alphine saw great torture in those
eyes. She stared longingly in the distance, at the City Shuttle bus belching
smoke into the scorching hot 2 P.M Nairobi sun, ruminating.
“I can’t understand what it feels like,” Alphine said. “To
endure years of torture, billions of years of torture. But oh my word, I relate
heavily to not having to complete something.”
“You do?” Eris asked, looking at Alphine with tender eyes,
as though pleased that she had found someone to share her tormented thoughts
with.
“Mmhmm,” Alphine said, nodding. “I also like completion. I
can’t not complete something. Once I start doing it, I have to finish
it, or else I will never stop thinking about it. It will cling to the base of
my brain like a fungus, slowly eat away at my heart like a cardiovascular
disease, and make breathing difficult because it compresses my chest like a
respiratory disease.”
“I can’t quite get the picture of that,” Eris replied dryly.
“But I totally understand what you mean. To me, imprecise figures and lack of
completion feel like having countless tiny dust particles shifting all through
your body, floating in space, causing pain and discomfort that you are unable
to exorcise because you can’t see them. It’s like an endless bite from insects
too small for you to touch.”
“Yeah,” Alphine agreed. Then he stared into the distance and
looked back down, his eyes watery. “But also, Eris, lacking completion is also
a part of our existence,” He said. “And
I know…I know you are not human, so this won’t make a whole lot of sense to
you, right now at least, but I can see in your eyes that you are beginning to
grasp the concepts of humanity. I see that your eyes shimmer with sadness
whenever you speak of the torture your friend, Akhyls, endured. So, believe me
when I say, we also live in an incomplete world.”
Eris looked at Alphine. “What do you mean?”
“We learn to live with incompletion because that’s our
entire existence. We are born, some of us get to live our lives doing stuff we
love, others don’t, but it all ends the same – death. Even if someone has lived
a long, fulfilled life, there is still an element of incompletion that they
feel, I think.”
“That must suck,” Eris replied, her voice breaking a little.
“To die, I mean.”
Alphine nodded and continued talking. “Our loved ones die
sometimes without saying goodbye to us, we sometimes die without saying goodbye
to our loved ones, all because sometimes we don’t see it coming; most of the time,
we don’t see it coming. It’s like a question mark in the middle of a sentence.
It’s an incomplete question to an incomplete sentence that will never make
sense and will never be answered. And what do we do?” Alphine shrugged, tears
welling in his eyes. “We grieve, of course, ruing lost time and reliving
memories of a person we will never see again. Sometimes we grieve until our
very own death, but often, we just try to continue with our lives even as this
grief eats away at us. So, yes, Eris, I totally relate to your hatred of incompletion
and imprecision, but we live in an incomplete, imprecise, and chaotic world. We
just adapt to it as best as we can.”
“Is that how it always feels without your mother?” Eris
asked, her voice heavy with sadness, her eyes twinkling with tears.
Alphine nodded as he suddenly broke down and began crying
into his hands. Eris reached over and wrapped a warm hand around him, and began
rocking him like a mother rocks her crying baby.
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