Tarot Sour by Robert Zimmerman

me. The only messages I’ve come back with, will make the world hate me.” I tell him everything I have come to know, all of the intimate knowledge I have stolen from the sun, and he agrees that we will tell no one. In fact, we agree that I should make every excuse not to come back to that village again, a difficult conspiracy by which I loyally abide. I am old enough, I argue six months later as my parents begin preparing their next trip south, to stay home without their guidance, and they permit it.
    Of everything that seeps into my brain during those three hours when I stand like an Easter island statue gazing skyward as my skin crisps and peels, the most pertinent is a series of teachings by a thirteenth century Italian philosopher, Asam Cifezzo. Though he is unpopular during his own time, and in fact during all times after his, he maintains a small and thoroughly devoted cult following that serendipitously accepts his teachings for what they are. And what they are, in fact, is the knowledge of the sun. In his youth, Cifezzo studies ancient mythology from the furthest reaches of the world, and in a unique, some might say fateful, synthesis of otherwise disconnected strands of a greater truth that have never quite been glimpsed by any of the individual cultures who stumble upon the crumbs, Cifezzo makes the revelation all on his own. He spends four years standing on the peak of a mountain on the island of what will become Sicily, unmoving, staring into the sun. If what I gain after three hours is enough to redefine the most basic marbles of the grander universe, I can only imagine the horrid secrets Cifezzo uncovers after four years.
    Wars wage around him, with his skin as blackened with char as the rocks that stand sentry around him. Soldiers are afraid to touch him because, they will later say, his eyes are boiling pots of fire with the lids peeled wide, his skin that of a burnt lizard, and they think he has become a demon or, if possible, something worse. Even after four years, Asam Cifezzo does not manage to steal all the knowledge of the sun, but only a slight majority of it before, fearing that he will lose the way back permanently, he decides to prematurely sever the cord he has tethered between the sun and himself. Upon waking, he returns to his home, a small village in southern Italy where he was once a sheepherder in addition to his private hobbies of scholarship, and he transforms it into a church. He does not preach, he does not advertise. But slowly, by word of mouth from confidante to confidante, friend to friend, rarely between strangers—those who hear what Cifezzo has come back to say immediately take it for capital Truth, and nobody wants to risk setting the religious authorities on him as a heretic by alerting someone they don’t already trust with their lives—he gains a small following. They come to his home in the deep of starless nights, taking twisting paths and alleys that circumvent not only the most straightforward way to Cifezzo’s, but also the slightly inconvenient ways. There are times when his disciples, some of which live not five minutes away by foot, take upwards of two hours to reach the man’s home just so that they can listen to twenty minutes or so of dogma before treading another two hours home.
    Had he died a martyr, victimized for his beliefs, perhaps the world would have learned of him earlier. Perhaps he would be recognized, at least in historical texts, as a religious visionary. Instead, Asam Cifezzo, the unpopular mulatto child of a voluptuous Muslim spice trader and an Italian sheepherder, dies of what will later be diagnosed as syphilis, contracted from a local prostitute. He dies alone and raving mad, or seemingly mad as he professes the truths of the sun god, clawing at the walls of his bedroom even though his window is open and his doors unlocked.
    Chiefly among his tenets is the proclamation that the universe, and to a smaller extent, the Earth