And so, the chief of the mapinguari rested the ashes of his pipe onto a tray, removed the pipe from his stomach, rested those ashes too, and showed the visitors their beds, sardine cans made of soft gold, their lids rolled halfway. The sailors lined the bottoms of these cans with sheepskin and rested. The chief then locked the golden door by which his guests entered.
In his bed, through the gold-paned window, the grouch stared at the stars. After ten years, though he did not dislike his family, he felt he had changed so inalterably that he was ambivalent to seeing them again. Indeed, what was the purpose of life, and what happiness comes from living?
Andy scolded him. You are meant to do exactly what fate tells you to do.
Why do you say so? the grouch asked, turning his head, twilight glancing on his chin.
Because that’s what was written down. He then handed the grouch a stake and ordered the grouch to stab the chief through the eye.
The grouch was, reasonably, horrified by this prospect.
But Andy said: In every timeline every version of you climbs onto every version of the chief and stabs each and every one of them in their every eye; it does not matter if you are happy or not.
Homer, thinking Andy meant something mystical, reasoned: You have a beautiful wife, and you have a good child, and happiness comes from being a good husband, a good father, and a good lord to your vassals and securing your legacy ever after by your descendants; living with a giant and his giant fortune is less so a happiness. This Homer said because he did not have a wife or a child or land to administer.
But Andy did not mean this at all; he only meant, you are meant to do this because I know of no other timeline, ergo you can’t and won’t and shouldn’t do anything else, as in, there is no world in which you refrain from stabbing the chief in the eye with that stake and spilling all his eyeball blood on the ground.
And so the grouch approached the chief on his golden armchair within his golden library – the chief was still awake, despite every effort to sleep, because golden dreams would not descend upon him in his melancholy.
The grouch asked the chief what he had been looking at. Wordlessly, the chief put the grouch on his shoulder to show a golden-framed portrait of him, his wife and his daughter. The portrait was painted on gold canvas; I don’t know how that works either.
The mapinguari rested his head on the back of his armchair, closing his eyes. In this moment of vulnerability, he asked the grouch what his name was.
He answered, Nobody. For that was how he felt in the moment.
Then he stabbed his eye.
How did the grouch do so? He didn’t; he imagined someone else did it.
The eyeball, like a grape, exploded in a great flood of blood; really, an eyeball should not have so much blood; the chief tried to cover his eye, but blood seeped into the carpet, slashed the desk in red, and sprayed onto the golden books; blood spilled in rivers between the fingers of his hand; blood obscured the portrait of his wife and daughter; blood flowed and flowed, and stained the grouch.
Then, something unexpected happened.
The chief used that same hand to pick up his golden ashtray, and hurled it at the grouch; it struck the ground with the force of a thunderbolt.
Whether the chief was stung by betrayal; whether the chief rebelled against his constant misfortune; whether the chief, inexplicably, brought upon a shade of vengeance he was repressing; regardless of why he flew in a rage, he swore to kill all of his visitors.
This seemed unjust, as only the grouch wounded him; this seemed unjust, as he could not ascertain whether this was an accident; this seemed unjust, as death would not bring his eye back; but pain so transforms a man.
The mapinguari heard the chief’s cries of pain and asked what the matter was. The chief answered that Nobody had hurt him. Oh, they said, and went back home. They had seen the chief’s eye but didn’t want to interfere with his personal liberty.
The chief locked the door once more and, in his rage, groped in every nook and cranny for the crew.
Fortunately for the grouch and the crew, the machines had a plan.
The chief eventually tired of his search and mopped the blood off his eye socket. He rested, and in the morning after let out his mokele-mbembes to relieve themselves. The crew had clung to the mokele-mbembes' underbellies.
They were then washed away by the river of the mokele-mbembes' reliefs, which river led them back to their ship.
The mapinguari told the chief the guests were departing. The chief ran out of his home, a scarf holding the pulp of his sole eye.
The night had not relieved the chief of his rage. Over his head, hoisted by his two immense arms, he lifted his golden armchair high; he then threw the armchair, with all of his might, at the grouch and his crew. He expended an extraordinary amount of energy, to have one less armchair.
The armchair flew and flew, the crew’s mouths gaped wider and wider, closer and closer it arced towards the ship; then it slammed in the waters, some distance away from the ship, splintering into golden splinters, shattering into golden legs, its seat obliterated, its head smashed; luckily the ricocheting pieces missed the ship entirely.
But the grouch was dumbfounded. He did not understand how he could be the object of such anger, even though he understood exactly how that was so.
The machines comforted him by telling him that his actions were part of the timeline and neither good nor bad, and therefore he should be neither happy nor sad but, if he was upset, it was okay to be upset because the timeline said so, and it was okay if these words did not comfort him because the timeline had already determined whether they did or no, in fact these words and these actions were like sand swept by the waves even though it was absolutely critical, so they said, that these grains of sand comprised the beach of history.
© 2025 Jay Lee