Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

Pharaoh Seti I  offers to the Gods an image of Maat, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth and Justice. (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Ding-dong. The doorbell. Saturday afternoon, 3:00 pm, I am on my bed, reading unenthusiastically a medical article, on the edge of a little nap.

Ding dong. Hmm, this is the doorbell indeed. The guys outside did not use the interphone first. Maybe a neighbour from another step? All right, let's go and see...

Yikes. They are two people on my doorstep. One man and one woman. Pale. Thin. They have not greeted me yet, but they already smile, with some disquieting benevolence. He has a thin goatee, dark eyes and white teeth. She swept her whole being into her suave sky blue eyes. She has no body. She is only a gaze of disembodied and icy goodness.

I know who they are, and they know I know. They don't really care, they have a mission. He begins to talk, while she sharpens her gaze on me, slightly tilting her head. I feel as if I were Mowgli in Disney's The Jungle Book, when he meets the python for the first time. I am unwilling to let religious freaks hypnotise me that easily though.

— "Well, sorry but I am quite busy right now".

— "No, thanks. No talk. No Truth. Not today".

Under the goatie, two thin lips make the ghost of a tense smile. In the blue eyes, the storm remains under control. Such shades of pardon for my short-sighted incomprehension will make me lose my temper soon. I feel it, and they see it. He puts his leaflet back into his briefcase, whose zipping means both the loss of my soul and the saving of my nap. Truth is going away. I already love the untruthful nap I am going to take.