Somewhere out there, in the gentle summer night, there’s a pair of love-struck teens lying in a meadow. They’ve spent the whole day talking about how much they’ve missed each other, about how confusing the whole pandemic business was, about how for a second it seemed that the world was going to end. But now conversation has run out, all they have left is the warmth of each other’s bodies.
“Stars are beautiful tonight,” she says.
“They’re just far off explosions that happened millions of years ago and the light hasn’t reached us yet,” he replies, making his voice deeper than it is, hoping that he sounds smarter and more attractive that way. “They are beautiful though,” he adds, holding her tight.
He’s wrong. The things that shine above us tonight are not the result of some impersonal cosmic force light years away. Tonight the sky is a smattering of silver eyeballs. He’s watching us, waiting to see whether we are ready for His arrival.
Billions of people around the world are breathing a controlled sigh of relief. They keep on asking each other in hushed voices whether the world will slowly start returning back to its old shape, whether we have crossed our collective rough patch, whether life will go back to normal. It won’t.
After tonight things will never be the same. When He walks our streets they will weep, they will rage, they will despair, but once the dust settles they will submit.
They are not prepared for His arrival. They are not prepared for the judgment and force that will rain from the sky directly into each puny mortal soul. But I am. I have a carrot cake made with my sweat, blood and tears to prove it. Tonight, The Hundred Eyed God will feast on my offering.
Moving to the capital wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. The life I had back in my dusty town was nothing to scoff at; it was a peaceful existence filled with uncomplicated bar work, aged friendships and the occasional lover that I liked. But it wasn’t enough. I knew that if I didn’t get out while I still could I would end up getting knocked up and nailed down to an existence of watching trains rumble towards the capital.
No one thought I would actually do it. The grizzled old men at the pub would laugh say that leaving the town was a mistake, that the city was no place for a girl like me, that I should stay at home and away from all the foreign filth that had seeped into the streets of the capital. Those that would share my bed would take my plans to leave personally, as if me wanting to taste the world outside of our dead-end town was an affront to their masculinity, as if me wanting to leave meant I didn’t love them as much as they loved me.
And I guess they were right. After the inevitable argument, after the forced peace it was always difficult to sleep. As I lay on the edge of that uncomfortable mattress all that I could hear was the far off thumping of trains heading towards the promised land. Somewhere out in the darkness was a bright city; a place where people from all across the world rubbed shoulders and spoke of home, a place where poets and artists and musicians schemed works of magnificence that would take the planet by storm, a place where I could feel whole. When the stroke of midnight forced the planet into a new decade I made the decision. I was going to take the leap.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire died a shameful death in the early 20th century but its ghost still haunts the governmental offices of the capital until this day. In the eyes of every bureaucrat lingers a bit of that famous disdain for human life which made Kafka put pen to paper. The first couple of weeks in the capital were spent running around offices figuring out the details of my health insurance, of my transit card of my new permanent address. Each soulless face that hid behind plexiglass made me feel smaller and smaller until I felt like I barely existed at all. Yet I knew that if I made it through the paperwork, if I endured those never-ending hallways I would end up being a permanent resident in a city that bustled with life.
My permanent address was changed to an apartment in the old Soviet housing projects, I was set to start working the bar at one of those tourist traps that turn our culture into a sellable authentic experience, I had my transport card and my health insurance and everything else I needed. Every morning I would count down the days to the film screenings, to the language exchanges, to the lectures held in dusty basements that I so craved to be a part of. And just when it seemed like the life I had dreamed about for years was within the grasp of my fingers – the facemasks appeared.
At first it was a curiosity on the subway, among the crowds of bodies you would see someone with cloth over their face and think ‘Wow, here’s someone who’s scared’ but that fear spread. Before they became obligatory they became common. Every day on my way to work I would see more and more people with that baby blue mask. The customers at the bar started to dwindle. At first my coworkers laughed about how unpredictable the tourist rushes are but soon enough a pattern emerged. Soon enough the bar cut its prices in half to cater to the locals. Soon enough the bar closed down. The rice, the pasta, the canned goods, every bit of non-perishable food disappeared from the stores. A palpable panic drifted through the streets. We all locked ourselves at home, fearing the microscopic specter that plagued the outside world. We all watched the news conferences. We were told to stay home.
The first couple days of lockdown were spent in a daze. None of it seemed real. Back home, back in that fragile house by the train tracks, I remember watching the experts on the television talking about economics and foreign policy with breathtaking confidence. They knew what was happening, the world would move in a few select paths that could be predicted with the right knowledge and they had the right knowledge. When I was a kid I yearned to be like them, to be able to stand in front of a nation and speak with assuredness about facts and theories. Yet as the pandemic hit that illusion of intelligence and courage quickly dissipated. The same men and women that puffed up their chests and talked about statistics now mumbled through the cloth over their face about how unprecedented the situation was.
I kept on telling myself that I was not under any existential threat. I was young and thus safe from the virus, I might have lost my job but the stimulus checks would keep me afloat, I was going to make it through. Yet the more I assured myself of my personal safety the more I realized that the thought of danger wasn’t what was keeping me awake at night. I was going to make it through, yes. But I was going to make it through alone.
My only tie to anything remotely social was my newsfeed. Back home people were sitting around bonfires relishing the safety of the countryside, the pub that I had worked at was officially closed but still in full swing, every couple I knew was publicly declaring how happy they were to be stuck together. Some posted words of kindness, some talked about how they are there for ‘anyone who needs to talk’ but all the conversations I had through text-boxes were hollow. These people had lives. I didn’t. I was stuck in a cramped room on the top floor of a totalitarian housing block. After the initial shock of the lockdown wore off I spent every waking moment lamenting how alone I was. The neighbor made everything so much worse.
I had only seen her once before. She jumped into the elevator just as the doors were closing. She wore a blue hoodie commemorating her high school graduation. We were the same year, we were both from towns that you’d have to work to find on a map. I was going to talk to her, say hello as a fellow country bumpkin and try to make my first friend in the city but she was on her phone. She was crying, in the midst of an argument so heated that an elevator ride with a stranger wouldn’t put it on pause. She knew he was seeing other people. She knew he thought she wasn’t good enough. She would never forgive him.
But she did. She forgave him loudly on a regular basis. She forgave him so loudly that the mirror on our shared wall would shake whenever she was absolving him of his sins. She was being louder for him; letting him know that they had something special going this quarantine season, something that would continue after the world got back to normal. Within a week of the lockdown measures I had a new neighbor. Their relationship made it impossible to read.
The sex was loud and obnoxious but what was so much worse was the pillow talk. After the screaming was done all I could hear was his tenor murmurs on the other side of the wall. He’d speak, his words coming through my wall like a low droning rumble, and she would punctuate his senseless babblings with high pitched laughing yelps. She was laughing harder than she had to, but then again, she had her reasons. It was during one of their post-coital laughter lectures that I first heard Him.
I was lying on the couch, my hands covering my eyes, trying to get a grip. By then my loneliness had manifested itself into a tactile mental murk, I could feel my mind growing sluggish and dark with snapshots of home, of friends, of past loves. I could see the couple in the other room, naked and breathless, keeping each other company. All of those images just kept on repeating with dizzying force, my chest ached with a need to speak to someone, to connect, to feel like a real human being.
Bake a carrot cake. Suddenly all of the lonely wheels spinning in my head screeched to a halt. There was a single, distinct voice in my head. Bake a carrot cake and you will feel better. I sat up, trying to figure out if the thought was my own or if it was being forced into my head. For a second all I could hear was my neighbor’s forced screeching laughter but then, in a whisper, the thought came back. Bake a carrot cake.
The thought of baking seemed absurd. But with that voice in the back of my head the loneliness that was tearing away at me just seconds ago became nothing but a light annoyance. I thumbed out an inquiry for a recipe on my phone. I had sugar, I had flour, I had eggs and there was a handful of sad carrots nearing the end of their life rolling around in the back of my fridge. Bake a carrot cake, the voice whispered as I preheated the oven.
When I was eight I went through a phase where I thought cooking was the neatest thing. Every Saturday morning my mom would let me trail her in the kitchen and help out in whatever way my grubby eight-year-old hands could. My cooking career didn’t last long though. One Saturday my mother decided I was skilled enough to cut vegetables. I wasn’t. It wasn’t a big cut, but as I sucked on my finger my excitement for the Saturday kitchen adventures disappeared. A couple weeks later, while the parents were out at a dinner party, I decided I had seen enough cooking shows to make French toast on my own. I hadn’t. I somehow managed to give myself severe food poisoning. That put an end to my interest in cooking.
Yet as I grated away at the rubbery carrots that probably belonged in the trash all of my cooking related trauma took a back seat. It felt good to be doing something. All of a sudden I wasn’t some social reject clawing at her face on a couch. I was a woman with a goal. I was a chef. Careful about your fingers, graters are among the most common source of kitchen injury, my mind whispered.
I mixed the ingredients, piled the weird gray sludge into a baking tray and hoped for the best. The kitchen filled with the smell of carrots and too much egg. This carrot cake will not be good, the voice spoke with a bit more strength this time, and neither will the next one or the one after that. But you must keep on baking, you must keep on improving, for when the day comes His eyes shall fall upon your creation in judgment.
DING! I took out the cake, didn’t wait for it to cool down and burnt my tongue with a tasteless mistake. The voice was right. The carrot cake I had made was the equivalent of eating polystyrene covered in expired carrot juice. But it felt good to have made something. I knew I could do better. I knew I would do better. My neighbors were starting off another round of forgiveness but I had my facemask on and was out the door before the mirror started to shake.
The grocery store was filled with improvised face coverings and fearful eyes. People were picking up a year’s worth of pasta, a couple years worth of rice, lifetime supplies of toilet paper stacked like a misguided tower of Babel swayed from side to side in the carts of the most paranoid looking shoppers. Yet the produce remained plentiful. I picked out some healthy looking carrots, a variety of spices and another bag of flour. Everything seemed simple enough until I reached the check out.
Back home, at the pub where I worked, the jukebox barely worked, and even when it did it refused to play anything other than Frank Sinatra and hits from the Communist era. I didn’t know self-checkout machines were a common thing until I moved to the city, and even then I would always prefer to stand in line to make eye contact with a stranger. During the pandemic that choice was taken away. The machine refused to weigh my carrots, then it misidentified them as watermelons, then it informed me I had scanned in enough carrots to afford two months worth of rent. I struggled with the machine for what felt like an eternity. Then something snapped in me.
I was in a city where I didn’t know anyone, trying to negotiate carrot prices with a robot. I was going crazy. Back home all my friends were gearing up for a drunken bonfire and I was stuck under sad florescent lighting. Stop it, the voice commanded as my eyes welled up, this is just another thing you have to master in order to satisfy Him. You will learn how to operate this cursed machine and you will deliver a sacrifice worthy of His gaze.
“Who is he?” I said out loud. The screen of the self-checkout went dark. All I could see was my own reflection. All I could see were my watery eyes. Bake a carrot cake and you will feel better, the voice suggested. I started scanning my groceries again, it took effort, but eventually I walked out with a bag full of carrot cake ingredients.
Time in isolation doesn’t behave like normal time. When it is observed it drags with sluggish impossibility, yet when one looks back it seems as if it had passed instantaneously. One moment you are staring at the clock, waiting for a single cursed minute to pass but then Snap! It’s three months later and all that you have to remember the past by are blurry flashes of activity. My three months in lock up were one long stay in the kitchen.
At first the murmurs and moans and shrieks of my neighbors bothered me but soon enough they were drowned out by my own company. As long as I was grating the carrots, as long as I was mixing the icing, as long as I was baking the voice was there. Did you know that carrots were first discovered in what is modern day Afghanistan five thousand years ago? As I worked in the kitchen the voice would whisper truths into my ear with a soft rumble did you know that carrots have the same consistency as a human finger? Did you know that carrots were not usually orange until the 17th century? Did you know that carrots are over 87% water?
My first cake wasn’t good, my second cake wasn’t good, my third cake wasn’t good and the trend continued. Yet with every finished dish my chest swelled with pride. I was getting closer. With every twist to the recipe, with every experimental spice thrown in I was getting closer to a sacrifice that I could bring Him.
Did you know that the myth that carrots improve your sight was perpetuated during the Second World War to hide the fact the British Royal Air-force developed night radars? Did you know that carrots have the same consistency as a human finger? You can bite them right off. Did you know that a teaspoon can hold two thousand carrot seeds? The voice became a steady companion. I looked forward to hearing the smooth rumble every day, every moment that I could spare. Did you know carrots have the same consistency as a human finger? You can bite them right off. Did you know that a single carrot can give you enough energy to walk a mile?
My twentieth carrot cake tasted delicious, my twenty-fifth was godly, yet there was still something missing, something was still not good enough. After countless trips to the fluorescent-lit supermarket, after I mastered the self-checkout machine and could grab all of my ingredients with closed eyes I stopped; the trips were too long, the produce too unpredictable. I could not spend half of my days collecting ingredients across town. I started shopping online, finding the most exotic of spices, the most exquisite of carrots. One day I woke up to a blender being delivered to my apartment. I didn’t remember ordering it but my grater was blunted enough to warrant it. The next round of carrot cakes were smoother than ever, yet there was still something missing.
I continued experimenting with the recipe. I threw in pinches of ginger, teaspoons of vanilla extract, canned pineapples and the voice kept on whispering. Did you know carrots are a good source of fiber? Did you know carrots have the same consistency as human fingers? You can bite them right off. Try it! Yet it wasn’t just carrot related facts that the voice whispered to soothe my lonely soul. The voice spoke of Him. He was near. Soon enough He would walk the land and deliver His judgment. He was watching, waiting for the moment to lumber through our mortal realm. My offering had to be perfect. He would not accept anything less. And my carrot cake was not perfect, yet. Did you know a carrot has the same consistency as a human finger? You can bite it right off! Try it!
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was staring at a stranger. A stranger who’s unwashed teeth were filled with traces of that orange treat, who’s hair was matted with remnants of flour and egg and icing, a stranger with nails uncut for months. The various sweet messes from the kitchen had gathered beneath my nails to make a thick layer of black grime. Try it!
I put my dirty pointer finger in my mouth and bit down as hard as I could. A lightning bolt of agony. A spritz of iron in my icing covered mouth. The bite caused me horrific pain, but the finger was still attached. A carrot does not have the same consistency as a human finger.
Do not give up. You are so close to perfection. The Hundred Eyed God requires true sacrifice from those who serve him. He is watching. Do not disappoint Him. I put my finger back in my mouth.
Over the months I had forgotten the sound of my own voice; that whisper in my head had become so ingrained in my internal monologue that I considered it a part of myself, my own vocal chords had become a distant memory. Removing my finger reminded me what I sounded like. As I screamed my hands worked independently of my mind. They turned on the gas burner. They heated up a butter knife. They cauterized the wound. I collapsed on the flour-covered floor of my kitchen.
He can see you. He has seen the work. All you need to do is finish off the recipe. I put another finger in my mouth.
He can see you. He has seen the work. His eyes have followed your journey. I put another finger in the blender.
He can see you. He has seen the work. He will not spare you if you turn away now. Another helping of blood slipped down my throat.
He can see you. He has seen the work. You will never be alone again. I put another finger in the blender.
He can see-
A knock. I found myself standing in the middle of my kitchen, three dirty fingers in the blender and someone knocking at my door. I hid my hand behind my apron and made my way to the door.
“Heya! Was… Uhhh… Was that you screaming just now?” She stood there in her hoodie and shorts, a concerned smile on her face.
“No.” I replied. “Probably a different neighbor,” I added in hopes of making her leave.
“Oh, okay well…” She extended her hand, “I’m Alice. Can’t believe we’ve lived next door to each other and we never met.”
I could imagine us having wine together. We could sit in my living-room, burn through a bottle and talk about how insane the whole pandemic was, about how weird self-checkout machines are, about how strange it is living in the capital after growing up in the middle of nowhere. I could warn her about how men who cheat once tend to cheat in perpetuity, she could take me to parties and introduce me to people. We could have been friends. But in that moment I knew I couldn’t shake that hand.
“Stop having such loud sex. Everyone can hear you,” I heard myself say before I slammed the door with my stub of a hand. The Hundred Eyed God is the only company I need now. I went back to the blender.
I have not tasted this carrot cake, but I know it is exactly what He wants. Tonight I will meet him and I will not be alone. I know that all across the city, all across the villages and towns there are others like me. Men and women who have heard the call, who have heard the whispers and followed them to their inevitable end. Tonight we will all meet. Tonight we will meet beneath those shining eyes in the sky.
Somewhere out there, in the gentle summer night, there’s a pair of love-struck teens lying in a meadow. They talk of the stars as if they were beautiful, as if they were far off lights from explosions a million years in the past. But they are wrong.
Those stars are eyes and they are watching us. They are waiting for the arrival of the Hundred Eyed God.