Mansa
By Andréa C Mason
Beneath The Roots! What is one of the favorite sensoria artistry things you have done?
And The End Of Memory Lies Beneath The Roots
A challenging question. I like challenges. Centuries of art and work taunt me, looking through my mind's annals. The more intense and unique the experience, the more it sticks itself out to be chosen. Some of these I cannot describe to you in words, I can pass you them in sensoria, experiences that words water down to the point of uselessness, and that is not in your question's spirit.
What to pick among those I can describe? Do I pick what I did for my own joy or as craft for others? Do I pick my best work? The work I am most proud of? Which moved me the most? Happiest art? Sexiest? Most transgressive? Pastoral? Which one I repeat endlessly and joyfully? Which one I can never perform again?
No—-one grabs me. A man came to me. He stood tall. His shoulders asserted their broadness, and his chest barreled. His skin rivaled his hair in dark brown. His jaw cut angular. His short beard took sharp form from the nib of a fountain pen. His irises glowed a rosy silver. The deep green of his suit and shoes reminded me of brackish bay water in summer. No one intimidates me, but the singular kingliness awed me.
Apollo gifted my cocladist Slow Hours with prophecy, not me, but each time a regal man (sometimes a woman, sometimes any other gender or none at all, but usually a man) found me, I flipped a coin in my head. If one side landed, it predicted the man flouted his stature, sought me for the most banal of status things, and I either ran them out the door or charged them enough rep to fill an ocean. I bore as quickly as they do. They do not grasp art nor inspire much of it beyond satire, which they take as literal and bore me beyond belief. However, when the coin landed on the other side, it revealed the face of this seeker. Some god carved him out of idealistic mountain peaks. Legends made men like this one. They I adored. They and I tread the same pilgrim's path. We soaked up so much of the world, we need wonders of incredible singularity to fulfill us. Stature found no purchase here, only a higher pull of tastes so refined they pushed the boundary and nuance of possible to the conceivable limit. So far, the prophetic coin succeeds every time. I heard it land and it shined blindingly on my inner eye.
He spoke. His deep voice, booming but smooth, flooded my ears. “I am worried my request of you is too simple. You are a busy craftswoman, and I would hate to unduly waste your time.”
“A leaf flinging itself to the ground on an autumn wind ends an empire, with enough context,” I said, “so no presuming. What am I gifting you?”
He took aback. “I will pay you for this, I would not presume—–”
I spoke over him. “Experiences and art pay for themselves, and if I need Rep after I am done, we sort it out then. Lay out my canvas! Position my subject, as my paints hunger and my brush quivers for action.”
He nodded. “Very well. I was in life an adventurous man. I saw and did so many things. The only thing that ever held me back was my body.”
I said, “We live, and still live, in the System, not an afterlife.”
He smiled gently. “I disagree, but in the end I don't think it matters. It was a life before this eternal one. I was bound by the limits of nutrition and genetics then. I can make a temple of myself, as I have here. My mother told me that me and my siblings were descended from a great king, who a millennia before had brought so much gold on a holy pilgrimage it devalued gold for the entire world.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe it?”
He laughed. “I think it's something a mother says to her children when they live in a shithole and she wants them to have bigger aspirations. It worked, certainly—-those of us who survived got out and made some kind of life for ourselves—-but I never truly believed it. Still, she called me little Mansa until the day I died. I think she wanted it to be true of me, in her own way. Perhaps I'm just indulging her even now.” He waved a massive hand. “I'm getting distracted. My request. As I've said, my body was frail, and I've been able to overcome all the limits that plagued me in the physical world but one: food allergies.”
“Food cannot harm you here.”
Dismissiveness shaped his expression. “No, not physically, but I would hope you understand it's more complicated than that. I had many allergies, my whole family did. Tests caught most of them, but some caught a few of my siblings instead, very young. One or two, in front of me. Even as I know they cannot hurt me, I cannot bring myself to eat any of them.”
I nodded, said nothing. It required no reply.
He continued, “For all I love about this place, I hate that compulsions become so much more forceful here. This place gives the mind dangerous power, when memory is permanent and the past cannot fall away as it should. Do you have any allergies?”
“None. If I did, they never held me back here.”
“I think you know what I'm going to ask.”
I crossed my arms. “Say it.”
“I want you to eat every dish I'm allergic to. I want you to eat it as a regular meal, because to you it is a regular meal. Pass the whole sensoria to me, taste and sense of touch and whatever idle thoughts pass through your head. Make it no occasion, not as a favor to me, make it as normal as taking a walk or going to bed, something you have done a million times without any conscious awareness of it.”
“Why ask me to do what anyone could for you?”
He scoffed. “Do you think most people could keep that up for more than a few bites? What do you take me for? I sought you out because there is no one like you, And The End Of Memory Lies Beneath The Roots. You understand the senses like a sculptor understands stone. And not just sensations, but emotions, experiences, habits, physiology, posture...When someone came to you, asking if they could feel the experience of being an entire chamber orchestra playing a piece, you didn't just find musicians and take on their experiences. You forked a hundred instances of yourself, all of you spent a decade learning to play every instrument in the piece, and with yourself as the conductor, passed the whole fucking experience to him live in the concert hall. I've seen films of The Expulsion of Blood. I've been to your Sensoria Cinema. I read your paper on the potential of real-time no-fork transformation, and why it still may be impossible.
“Listen, I've tried. I've tried therapy, having it forcefed to me, every other possibility you can think of probably falls a few short. Part of me has given up. I've made peace with all of this. And I think that if I can just experience one normal meal with all of them, whether or not it fixes my phobia, I can finally let this all go.”
“Do you want me human?” I asked.
My words shocked him from his tunneling vision. “I...you'll do it? You seemed...I don't know. Does it make a difference?”
“I project to you every sensation. Those sensations come from the shape of me. You spend all your time human, yes? You carry no discomfort in your form.”
“I spent so much time making this body I've never thought about another. I hadn't thought about this.” he quieted a while. Then, “I think it has to be what you're most comfortable as, not me.”
“Skunk fits me. People expect skunk as well. Human functions but skunk suits.”
“I want you fully relaxed. I want you not to think about me as you do it, or at least as little as possible, anyway.”
“I will turn off my fur as well.”
He looked at me strangely. I stopped sending him the subtle sensoria that iridesces my fur constantly. He observed for the first time a simple white skunk, medium height and medium wide, naked not sensually but visually, canvas not sculpture. Various white objects around the room shift-shined no longer, dull without perisystem parlor trickery. He pulled a chair and sat down. The chair groaned and he sighed back, his mind turning fast enough the eyes show it. I no longer stole his focus. He saw around him the room, mixed from artist home and loft and studio and conference room and kitchenette and foyer. I radiated him some calmness. Panic gripped many when they realized how I steered them, here. I gave his mind awareness of the glass of water next to him, placed hours ago. This process smooths business. Seekers bring expectations, and in turn I exceed them thoroughly. I dried him out, left thirsty impulse. He drank the water. What I could not calm the water washed out of him.
I speak only actions. Act upon me. I act upon you. He acted. Stood. Filled the water glass. Handed it to me. Spoke without speaking or sensoria. I comprehended. I sipped the water. He accepted the sensoria, drank in my drinking. His face scrunched, nose twitched, Lips curled. His tongue licked the real teeth and the echo teeth.
He sighed again. We understood each other.
He followed me down the hallways and corridors and rooms of my studio workspace, following the nautilus shape further in to a drafting room. We planned. He conveyed his list of allergies, and it took half the draft table. It wondered me that he even survived to uploading.
We spent hours, finding every little detail, then went into the world to source supplies. We hired cooks, picked a venue, fussed over furniture. We procured a table large but not too large, chairs comfortable but not too comfortable, plates wide and plain, and I stopped him now and again to remind him this was for his sake, not mine. He laughed. He said if I did not enjoy the whole affair just a little it was wasting time.
He took on my senses two more times, enough to familiarize himself, but not enough to truly acclimate. I proposed a third, and he declined. He felt he stood at the line already. Two lines, in fact—-the first obvious and the second unsaid. Professionalism needs upkeep, lest it decay. Clients fall for me —-my work ennatures such—-and I fall for them less often, but enough. Sometimes one side or the other or both wise up and walk away. Sometimes it turns ugly. Sometimes beauty and passion win out and I fork for them. Part of me stays with them, loving, fucking, cohabitating. Very, very few last—-but I accept the merges every time, and my understanding expands into new territories of pain and heartbreak and disgust and sorrow and vicarious joy and that particular viscosity of air in a room where arguments happened. I did not want this here. He, in his own way, own understanding and history, did not want it either. That, in my experience, only raised the risk of it happening, and I still do not know how we hold out without.
The day came. I dressed to memories, not sys-side, but as the distant skunk-not-skunk that uploaded us, back when we stood a fractured one instead of an ode's worth of people, and this choice of dress made itself from some incomprehensible pull. I fought not; the mind reasons below our reason. Beneath, you might say, the roots. I arrived with little fanfare. He sat already in the corner, out of view from me when I sat. I dropped all other sensoria, put a bead on him, pulled my chair...
...and I feasted.
I ate normally at first, then with vigor. I kept my tether to my kingly companion but beyond that I lost myself in it. desperation did not grip me, but I starved myself a day or two beforehand, so fullness could not stop me. The food pleased the palate, but held no pretension, it remained food. I used utensils and abandoned them in equal measure. I appreciated flavors, I enjoyed cracking nuts in my molars, I licked sauce from messy paws and ice cream from metal spoons. I ate not for eating's sake, when any calorie is taken with disregard for what provides it, and I ate not for occasion or ritual or presentation, where serving the food and the food's composition, its narrative overwhelms nutrition entirely. I ate a hearty meal at the end of a workday, and I ate it ten times over. When the plates showed their bare faces and I slugged the last bowl of broth, I sat for a good 20 minutes before turning to my audience.
He wept. Joy brings the most beautiful tears, and they ran over the soft mountainside of his face, finding new runs and waterfalls. Sometimes joy fountains so thick in these rivers that it camouflages as sorrow, but I watched many faces like this one. Whether or not I succeeded that moment I did not know then, but it mattered not. I made art, and remembered then more than ever why I made it. Do not ask me to say. It spurns words, coherence. It fountains when it comes.
I do not, as a rule, become engaged directly with any patrons. The cases before, as I said, I meet with forks, never the core of me. Some individuate. All of them do, but the ones that last do it as an art in itself. The me that is me that is root and what lies beneath it, keeps a distance.
But I, the me-est of mes, still meets with Mansa every week for lunch. We meet at my studio and his estate in alternating fashion. This week, he brought a delicious seafood quiche lorraine with spinach and mushrooms, a bread made with peanut butter and 9 grains, topped with sesame seeds. A fruit tart with a delicious blend of almonds and pecans, and a strawberry-banana-kale smoothie with a delightful little straw made out of carrot. People enjoy role-playing servants and staff at his palace, but I do not need to ask him to know he made all of this himself.