He is circling five times around the wooden temple where bells have already begun to chime melodiously, heralding his arrival. The rubber tires leave tracks as they roll through the desert dust.

A gate is posted at the entrance. Twin pillars are connected by a beam along the top. “The death canal,” Mephistopheles pronounces as he passes through, making those near enough to observe aware that this represents a portal between dimensions. Each time he completes a round he enters it, several times going in one way, a couple of times the other.

The clarion tune is climaxing as he dismounts and lets the simple machine drop on its frame to the ground among the many scattered around that have been ridden by the congregants to this place. The temple is located out in a desolate waste, hours by foot from the closest outpost of human civilization. Back there in the ersatz city he painted his face in a mirror and decided on assuming this, his current identity. ‘I am a demon,’ he thought, looking into his own eyes as he dabbed the cool white acrylic makeup onto his face, cheeks and forehead. ‘Or rather, I host some demon inside me. Yes,’ he went on as he chose the black to darken his brow and eye sockets, ‘that would be more accurate.’ He finished his mask by applying extreme red to his lips. He puckered and kissed the mirror, squeezed more red from a tube and replaced the paint that had been worn off, while leaving the moon-shaped smudge on the reflective glass.

He enters the sacred space and proceeds to step between seated bodies to the center. He drops his bag of tricks and sits down. He sloughs back a few gulps of water; grunts as the pure liquid infuses into his bloodstream. His blood must flow lightly as he brings about a state of religious ecstasy in which everyone present is to partake.

His head drops between his legs. His hair hangs. Wind through one of the five open archways blows in and rustles the dusty, golden strands. His head is bouncing rhythmically over his bent knees to the tolls of the temple bells.

He makes a mudra with both his hands; his thumbs touch his pointers. The rest of his fingers become contiguous and straightened. Mephistopheles throws his head back. The people in the upper tiers see his crazy Joker face. His teeth glint in a ray of sun shining in through one of the structure’s upper porticoes. Spine rigid, out his mouth flies the first vowel sound of the magical incantation: Aaa…

The bells as if by a tempest are thrown into a frenzy. He mingles the timbre of his voice with the variously toned tintinnabulations. They seem to respond by ringing more ebulliently.

Up the people’s sacral columns electricity dashes, sending shivers throughout their sensitive extremities. God, they feel (though no one cognizes it), is here.

After the first five-minute round of chanting, the bells slow. Mephistopheles closes his mouth. He continues humming, Mmm, with slackening intensity, until the temple goes silent. The bells cease. The wind declares itself: gone.

He opens his eyes and looks into those of the faces around him. His neck twists to get a gander at everyone within a three hundred and sixty five-degree radius of his center. He fixes on the gaze of one to his right immediately in front of him: a girl staring back in unabashed awe. He laughs; turns his eyeballs back to look as directly straight up as his forehead will allow. The blue that fills the open windows is magnificently dazzling.

He reaches into his bag, rummages around, finds and extracts his book of blank pages. He takes his pen out of his pocket and begins scribbling furiously. The words he writes remain unknown to all who gawk out of curiosity.

As soon as he fills up a page, he rips it out of the book and holds out the dithering piece of paper for the girl to try to grab. She realizes what she is supposed to do and goes for it. He jerks it away teasingly. She lowers her expression. He extends it back toward her. She is quicker this time. He lets her get ahold of it, but does not let go of his end. He rips it off and takes it back into his personal sphere.

He produces a lighter and sets fire to this piece of his poem. He keeps it until burning pain encroaches on his fingertips. When he releases it, like a scarab aflame, it darts about in the air, where it is soon extinguished. The ash dissipates.

He holds out his hand, palm flat, to the girl, indicating to give him the remaining piece of the paper. She shakes her head in refusal. He insists by cocking his and with the Joker’s trademark grin, smiling evilly. Spellbound, she does as be bids.

He rips the poem into many pieces. The stillness inside the temple is augmented by the collective tension of the congregants. The girl is scared, yet captivated.

Mephistopheles raises up his arms. His hands are clenched. In the left he is holding the scraps. He spreads his ten fingers suddenly. As if in response to his command gusts shoot through the space, taking away the paper. Some they send careening for the faces, the bodies of those who are seated, while most they exit and push into oblivion in the vast desert landscape. And in that very moment, the bells begin making music again. Also simultaneously, Mephistopheles sings out for the second time during this ceremony the sacred syllable. He screams it actually: Aaa!

The wind reads the words. This is the poem that the desert airs received, once everyone who had caught a line upon themselves removed that particular scrap and set it along with the rest to the winds: Aa…

“Www philoi! W deinon kakon! Www Hw Oiwww… You kill me for speaking truth? Let any lover of reason challenge me in an intellectual dual and we will see if I can’t convince him of my universal point of view. The youth know, by nature, my right, which we share especially when I unravel dialogues. Let one of them speak for themselves on my behalf. I give you my beloved pupil, the handsome stentorian orator Alcibiades, who you all know through his dealings in the profession of poesy.”

The following words range from open avowals to inner soliloquies: “They will not withstand my logic. I bring a blessing from the deity, Mind. She is my full-moon daemon, the director of my course of considered argumentation. In his present acquiescence to the death they administer to my master Socrates, I say, why stand frightened before such fantastic sunsets, sinking into the distant horizon? I am faithful knower of the secret that they seem to let no one in the Kingdom admit: that there is no such thing as End. So, Socrates spent his life asking, why stay stagnant against progression? To prove to the good people of posterity that he does believe in and stand by every word he has said…” Embrace the chalice you hand me vulgarly – the pewter consequence of spewing Truth – the hemlock to drain to the dregs!

In a histrionic act, Socrates picks up and drinks, doubles over and lies himself on a bier. Tears run on his beloved disciples’ cheeks. Alcibiades again takes the floor: “W Athenaioi! What in the world are you doing? putting down this holy thinker as if he were an abandoned dog? Shame on you and your Republic. You can claim no justice, no right to rule if you insist to advance this heinous dictum, that our teacher must die in middle age, so terribly unnaturally. And for what? the man’s ideas? I’m so shocked I can’t even speak (I write). I am biting my tongue to suppress a violent outburst of rage.”

“Brother, do not be so emotional,” Plato, the quiet one, whispers, “it is malign to the constitution. The master wants to die. Look at him lying there peacefully. Remember what he taught: there is a reincarnation that happens over and over again to every glint of soul in Father Zeus’s phantasmagoria of spatial eternity.”

“Yes,” the hot-blooded advocate counters, “I know, Plato. I agree that death is beautiful. No doubt Socrates’s example will do more for his far-flung fame than any singular act, capable of man. It is the system I inveigh against: this all encompassing mockery of Truth, this farcical freedom and human purpose, the State. Behold how they do not push the hemlock onto me, though I am directly insulting them. And yet they killed poor, innocent Socrates. He was, to me, the kindest philosopher.”

Scene. The actors freeze. The curtain comes down. Applause. The curtain rises. Socrates is standing, holding hands with Plato, Alcibiades, and the actor who had no lines. His direction had been to keep to the wings, wearing the tunic of the Senator of State. The four bow to further applause; twice, and exit the stage. After a standing ovation, the audience files out of the theatre. Some wise-guy shouts out, “Fire!” But no one finds him funny. “Huh,” he observes out loud, “I guess you people didn’t get the performance.” The actor playing Socrates, however, who had remained backstage watching from the shadows cast by the theatre’s ceiling and aisle lights, chuckled and applauded. The noise of palms being clapped together struck those stragglers who heard it as ghostly.