Brutalist Stories #48

There’s a giant in the room, and he’s staring at me. Huge sunken eyes, wide with fear that twitch and pulse in the dark.

I stare back at him and whisper, “I will make chaos for you.”

He closes his eyes. “You defeated me, what more do you want? Why can’t you stop?”

“Why should I?” My arms are by my side with clenched fists that whiten my knuckles and I growl low and hard.

He opens his eyes and looks at me again, “Everything in your nature is so feral. You, for just a second, glimpsed at something bigger, something greater, with the path to awe at your feet, and you decide to try and defeat us, all of us, to try and conquer everything?” He rests his gigantic face in his immense hands and quivers.

“What else is there? This is who we are. This is who I am,” I say.

“You can grow beyond that, there is potential in you yet.”

I shake my head. “For every leap we have taken, for every jump in our nature, there has been a thousand souls trodden on. There is no triumph without suffering.”

“There is the chance for you to come to realise that there is no need for triumph. There is no need for righteous victory. There’s so much more, we have seen it, all of us that you are purging, we have had it, we began our walk on the path to awe. We released god from our minds, we have seen the infinite. Your path, it is so short.”

“A path to awe? Our awe is your death.”

He shifts his gigantic bulk, the building shakes against it and a fine cloud of concrete dust falls on me. He’s almost there now, on death’s brink, on the edge.

“Compassion is not weakness. The awe that you avoid, on the path to the infinite, it’s what opened up your kind to us. Why did we have to accept you? Why did we not see this?” he begins to weep.

“We will bring your end,” I say.

“You’ll set the universe on fire and you’ll burn in it with the rest of us,” he says.

“This is our path,” I reply.

“Awe is waiting for you!” he roars with one final breath. “And you burn it all in favour for a fleeting moment. Overcome yourself! Overcome yourselves. There is a wider world with wider eyes and wider being.”

“No,” I say and shake my head. “There is only our momentum, and your end.”

He closes his eyes for the final time and a long, hollow breath creeps out of his gigantic mouth, the building shaking around us with the thunder of his lungs. I walk up to him and place a hand on his forehead, still warm, it will be for some time yet, I know because he’s not the first I’ve defeated and he won’t be the last, but I’m close now. We’re close now.

Building inspiration: Pilgrimage Church, Neviges by Gottfried Böhm