After about seven minutes of solid sleep, I awake and don my blue mantle; then I head toward the door.
“Wait, King Bryan!” sez the mirror; “don’t forget to eat breakfast — I set your dish on the table!”
“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” I say, holding the knob of the pyramid’s front door while halfway outside. I turn back and head toward the dining room. “What did you prepare, this morning?”
“You’re going to love it,” sez the mirror. “It’s homemade tagliolini topped with two pounds of fresh lobster, and also black truffles.”
I lift the silver cloche from the plate and inhale the aroma. “O Mister Mirror, this smells wonderful!” I sit down before the cuisine and hold my silverware in either hand, then I close my eyes and say: “Do you want to pray, or should I?”
“How about we both say grace,” sez my magic mirror; “then we’re doubly covered, in case one of our prayers is uninspired.”
“Alright, you go first.”
“Ahem,” sez the mirror, very commandingly, “dear Lord of All Worlds, creator and destroyer of existence, bless Bryan’s food to his body, and make him a good, strong warrior today. Amen. Now I’ll hand the prayer over to Bryan…”
“Give ear, dear God; this is your chosen one speaking: Bryan of Egypt,” I say. “First, I would like to thank you for this food that you have provided by way of our looking-glass here; and I ask that you grant me the knowledge to build an attic in this pyramid, so that my personal chef Boccaccio can move back in — not because Mister Mirror’s food is anything other than exquisite; for it is top-rate, and I really mean that,” (I even open my eyes when I utter this last parenthetical remark, to meet the gaze of my reflection, then I close them as I continue;) “it’s just nice to have a being of your own species around the house, to chat with, and to help fetch willing damsels for bedmates. Now I ask that you grant me the strength to kill many oxen this morning; for, as you know, the skyjacks are attacking,” (skyjacks are lumberjacks from the sky, who usually send their blue oxen to ruin the crops of a city by acidifying its main water source — in our case, the Nile River — and the oxen accomplish this by befouling it with their piss. But occasionally the sky oxen’s owners, the heavenly lumberjacks themselves, appear in person surfing on top of the backs of their their rough, rude beasts, it’s like they are riding the wings of the wind; as it is written: He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet; and he rode upon a cherub, and did fly... —Psalm 18:9,) “and not even a messiah like me can slaughter heaven’s blue oxen without a little help from my friends. So I thank God that I have comrades in high places: and that means you, God. Thank you so much. Amen and amen.”
I now lift my two knives, which are the only utensils I ever use to eat breakfast, and I begin to slice and jab and cut my breakfast, moaning with pleasure at every mouthful: “So delicious!”
Then I go outside and stand by the River Nile to protect it. Suddenly a blue ox falls from the sky.
“Take this, evil cherub!” I shout, and when the ox gets near enough to start pissing into the water, I slice and jab and cut its fat blue hide with my sword. (I exchanged my dining knives for my famous glittering sword before leaving for work today. — I forgot to mention this, because I was in a hurry to get to the battle.)
The ox drops over lifelessly, and I carefully butcher it and clean its meat in the Nile; then I separate it into cubes and salt them, and place them on a large wooden pallet. At the end of the workday, my friend Bill will come with his gator-drawn chariot and haul away the spoils, to feed my nation. We just offer the ox-meat for free, in the marketplace, because we are generous. This, by the way, is the same Bill that I befriended near the beginning of my other book Quantity over Quality. (He is not William Shakespeare, as the best of my readers have suggested — for, if that were the case, I’d refer to him as Will.) You’ll note that, since those days so many pages ago, he has traded in his signature wooden buggy for this new chariot. NOTE ALSO: if I proclaimed, when Bill and I last parted ways, that we would never see each other again, then my prophecy failed, because I did indeed meet up with him here, in this wartime food-prep scene from Not Novel 11. However, as Harold Bloom writes, in the “Prelude” to his Omens of Millennium:
Prophetic religion becomes apocalyptic when prophecy fails, and apocalyptic religion becomes Gnosticism when apocalypse fails, as fortunately it always has and, as we must hope, will fail again.
Now another blue ox descends the escalier from heaven. Then another and another. Also another, and soon yet another ox follows after the rest. So five total oxen, all blue-hued, come stampeding towards me out of the sky. Thankfully, none of them has a lumberjack atop him — that would have been too much even for an Egyptian Messiah like me to handle, all at once.
So this fivefold ferocity of feral fatsos all gallop straight toward me, as I stand there holding my glittering sword, ready to strike. The first draws nigh and trots out upon the surface of the Nile and begins to make water. Then the second follows suit. Soon all five blue oxen are clopping atop the Nile River and pissing.
I run from beast to beast, slicing and jabbing at their bellies with my sword. Divided they fall, and I drag their huge carcasses off the water-surface; then butcher and clean them and salt them and pack them on the pallet.
“By the blazing disk of Ra,” I exclaim, “this pallet’s almost full already, and it’s only 9:27 AM, according to my sundial.” I hold the wristwatch up to my ear and shake it, to make sure it’s not clogged, then I look again: “It’s pretty early for so many of these oxen to be answering nature’s call.”
Then the earth begins to tremble, and I remark to myself: “Uh oh, I know what that means.” — Now, out of the blue comes an extra-fat ox with a skyjack surfing atop it, and the latter rider is holding his country’s flag. The skyjack maneuvers the beast so that it leaps aside when I first try to strike it. The ox now jets out a stream of piss at the Nile. I dash forth and lunge, but the skyjack again makes a sharp turn; then, while the beast is still pissing, just to show off, the jockey makes his ox do a backflip, causing a glittering circle of ox-pee to spray in slow-motion, dazzling the audience and even wetting some in the front rows. (For a crowd of my countrymen have gathered to watch my morning battle.)
“Alright, no more mister nice guy,” I shout. Then I dash over the surface of the Nile straight at the blue ox, and I jab my sword in its belly. The thing wheezes and falls with a thick blomp onto the water. Before dragging away the carcass, however, I must deal with the skyjack that was piloting this beast:
I remove my golden bracelets from my wrists, and I attach them to my thick gold chain, so as to makeshift a pair of manacles; then I clamp these onto the ankles of the heavenly lumberjack, and he cries out: “Stop, Christ Bryan of the Nile! These cuffs are tight!”
“Cry me a river, Skyjack. It’s only temporary,” I say. Then I address some of the men from the audience who have stepped forth to help me with this familiar part of the duty. “Take this jack to the silversmith’s and put in an order for some less luxurious ankle bracelets; then add him to the skyey chain-gang that builds all our pyramids. Once you’ve swapped them out, return my golden manacles to me, and I will pay you in ox hides. I’ll have a blue mantle ready for each of you, when you return.”
Then I spend the rest of the morning slaying oxen, arresting skyjacks, sewing hides, and chopping and salting cubes of meat. I successfully keep the Nile River from becoming too acidic. When Bill shows up in his chariot pulled by alligators, I greet him warmly, and we catch up on old times. At around 11:00 AM, I take a break and return home to Giza for my daily luncheon.
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