Becoming night

It took him many years to realise how to command the night.
The day was no good; the day was chaotic. But once the sun died, and the only light came from tiny tears in the sky’s canvas, then he could have dominion.
He had slept at first for he didn’t even know that he wished this, wished to fly at night. Then one day, one summer’s evening some sixteen years after his birth, he stayed up through the night and saw the dawn giving birth to light.
An awesome sight for any to see, but it was the feeling of the night that surprised him most. It seemed so still, but frightening. In the rampant chaos of the day it seems everything happens, but there is a concurrent pattern to every action. Little happens that is not planned. It occurred to him, to this growing man, that the company of so many other human beings, so many throbbing lives, was a restriction, was the restriction against the infinity that life promised.
Perhaps that is why religion is held sacred in the day; it is the only glimpse into infinity we are allowed to see with the sun’s light in our eyes. Once these other redundant, copying minds are allowed to rest, there is space for individual consciousness to breathe.
So he would sit up for hours, his apartment lit only by the light of candles, and converse with his soul. Great journeys would be taken across strange voids of thought, now that he was unfettered by other minds.
By his 41st birthday, Alaric has started to leave the house only after the hour of midnight. He would walk about the skulking streets watching the lives of the neighbourhood cats. He observed their societies with the interest of a god. Sometimes he would throw stones into their midst like thunderbolts, other times he might throw fish.
In the darkness, bright long roads become strange tangential avenues to untold groping pits of despair. Oftentimes his mind would ascend while journeying a once familiar street, and he would lose himself to the infinite and awake with the sun, weeping naked in a garden pond or a forgotten brook.
It was on a thick autumn night upon the dunes I met him. He was howling and incandescent as the hailstones pelted his bare body. I understood that he hadn’t registered my presence. It was as if angels were the only sight he expected to see on the beach that night; only a divine mind did he wish to converse with.
The time was roughly 3am and thunder tumbled atop waves that swept up the beach. I climbed to the top of the highest dune peak and tore at my shirt until the buttons burst and my skin was exposed, like his, to the ice bristles that crashed down upon us.
The sky fizzed grey above and I was transfigured before him - my shirt floating wings about my arms.
In that instance the scales fell from his eyes and he saw the world to be translucent. He had witnessed the presence of the divine mind and it had burned his retina sorely.
Once the storm passed I went to Alaric, blinded but penitent, and helped him to his feet. He told me he now knew everything, that he had tasted the fire of heaven and survived its draught.
I took him home and asked him to teach me all he had learnt on his journeys. I feigned awe often but siphoned much from his babblings. Truly this man was insane, but his methods were sound for I had come to the same conclusions as he, as to the power of the night.
After many months, when I had learnt all that he had encountered throughout those 25 years since he shunned the light, I took him back to the beach where we had first met and bade him walk across the boiling seas until he find the maker of his near perfect mind.
I’m sure he journeyed with a bright smile even as the wintry waters tugged at his flesh. Whether the divine mind lay above or below the waves, he wouldn’t have known or cared.
Now I am alone, able to continue this experiment in solitude and silence. I am the true hermit, the true holy man. I have survived in the dark wilderness for more years than any but Alaric, and with his insights I will grope even further. I will have mastery over the black alleyways and dank canals, I will walk where shadows even fade away. I will transcend the body and will inhabit only mind.
I will become the night, for the night offers nothing more than the light it takes.