She had sometimes felt a cathedral hush, an ancient dread, when poking about the remnants of such greatness. But the ghost of indecision - the specter of unwanted intuition - had been ignored. One by one, the charges had been carefully placed within the key supports that held up the imposing monolith.
        There is always that lurid pause before the big ones fall.
        She waited, relaxing finally as she savored the moment. She took a painfully sweet pull upon her freshly lit cigarette and let the smoke escape softly between her open lips, feeling a keen thrill of anticipation mixed with unanticipated sorrow.
        There had been too much work involved in this one, too much digging and sterile analysis, too much double-checking and obsessive recalculation. She was a genius at her craft, but this particular bastion of classical glory had presented her with a high and lofty challenge. It had been the prenultimate accomplishment of a long and successful career. She had grunted and puffed and worn her fingers to the mandible, but now the moment was at hand.
        This was a public event. The crowd that hastened to witness the demolition was composed of typical urban gawkers: geeks, bozos, losers, winners, certified intellectuals, beautiful people, all straining to see and comprehend the fullness of her work. Replete with satisfaction and knowing with the prescience of genius exactly what was about to occur, she leaned casually forward. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she triggered the implosion.
        It was spectacular.
        The hoary edifice, crowned like Odysseus with ivy and honors, was at first jolted by the unknown power of her precise, powerful catalysts. The structure was strong, but could not stand up under her destructive assault. The dissolution which now occurred was sudden and complete. The mighty bastion quivered like startled pudding for one long, curious instant. Then, as if embarassed by its helpless state, it began a precipitous plunge to the earth that had once been its anchor.
        At first it fell slowly: thoughtfully almost, until suddenly, like the infernal spirits swarming upon Hercules as Hades opened its hungry mouth, the hot plumes of dust leaped into the air, flashing up the great walls like a surging flood of death-gray locusts that swarmed from hell toward the heavens.
        A mighty shock wave, like a thunderclap, rippled the sidewalks as if they were fish lines floating on a duck pond. The blast shook the city angrily, furiously, as for one last time the collapsing structure tried to say something significant to the denizens of the sad, dirty town. And then, hapless and spineless, the shambles of mighty Ulysses fell tragically upon its soft rubber sword with a tectonic whumph, blowing billows of dust that sprawled across the cityscape like black clouds of slate, rolling down the thoroughfares and alleys, surrounding the onlookers in a dense, darkening fog of particulate matter: a hot, dry, dusty, foul-smelling haze through which the light of day could scarcely be hoped for, or dreamed of, or ever seen again.
        The technician was relieved beyond measure. She was gratified beyond her expectations. The hours of scholarly study had, at last, been worth it.
        Her colleagues warned her, and they were right.
        Deconstructing Homer was a grim and thankless task.

        The technician sighed, glad that it was over. The Odyssey had bitten the dust, but it hadn't been an easy kill.
        She was a deconstructionist, a member of an elite cadre of published experts in the field. Over the years, she had become a skilled artisan of the language - or of the absence thereof - and proud of it. A deconstructionist was not an architect, per se, but was an anarchist who carefully wrote important-sounding, meaningless phrases, coercing confusion in the mind of the reader. She was a crafter of chaos and of the soundless spaces between the colors of speech, creating meandering paths in a wordy maze of carefully calculated emptiness, rendering an implosive, deliberately meaningless artistic display.
        Because deconstructionists questioned the value of expressed meaning itself, they specialized in demolishing the form and substance of classic works of literature. A skilled deconstructionist, like all true anarchists, was a worthy wielder of the catalysts of destruction.

        Several months after her imaginative annihilation of the Iliad, the deconstructionist was relaxing at the university when there was a knock on her office door.
        "Antonia, are you there?" It was her brother.
        "Come in." She was busy; she did not care to see him, but he was her brother, after all. Once he was a wunderkind, she considered, then he was a pothead, and now he's born again. She smiled wryly as he came in and slumped in a chair. I hate to admit it, she reflected, but I liked him better as a druggie.
        "So how are events on top of Olympus?"
        "Grand, dear boy. Simply grand."
        "I see that our friends at the Modern Language Association published your Homer piece. That's nice... too nice, maybe. Do the other professors get jealous around here?"
        "Of course not, dear Charles. They share my glory. My fame is their fame, and I exalt all of my learned colleagues when I put our dear university in the intellectual news."
        "Yeah, right. As long as you're not in the news because of a felony arrest."
        "Certainly," she purred, "I suppose that could be troublesome, if it's not an acceptable felony." She liked it when he teased her. It reminded her of happier times. "I've got a new project," she added.
        "What's that?" He was playing with a perpetual calendar paperweight that he had taken from her desk. He looked like a surf bum; his shorts and shirt were oversized, and a shock of blond hair hung over his eyes. Although he was almost forty, at this moment he looked like he was barely out of college.
        "I'm deconstructing Genesis," she informed him primly. She took out a cigarette and slowly lit it, then inhaled sharply. She hated the habit, but was quite fond of it. The silence was weighty, and lasted for quite some time.
        "Toni," he said, and then he stopped.
        Not fair, she thought, using pet names...times have changed, big brother.
        "Don't start."
        "Just one question?"
        "No." He paused after she said this.
        "Okay," he answered. She knew what he was going to say. After all, he was 'born again.' He had attempted to win her over once too often regarding his faith. But despite his many pleas, she did not care to be reconciled with any god, especially a Christian One. She was not interested in a patriarchal Creator. If the He in paradise were not a She, or even an It, Toni had no desire to know Him… and she certainly had no desire to serve Him. She waited for her brother to continue, but he didn't say a word.
        "You've learned something, big brother," she said slyly, watching him closely, "you've learned silence."
        "I love you Toni," he said softly. He looked pale, harrowed somehow.
        "Are you okay?"
        "Yeah. I've got to go. I just stopped to... I've got to go." He stood suddenly.
        "Call me."
        "Sure." He smiled at her wanly, and then he left. Supercilious twit, she thought. She felt wronged, although he had been polite...even kind. He was just too confident in his beliefs, and it angered her somehow, though she didn't know why it should. A shaman is confident, and I'm impressed. A fakir is confident, and I'm unfazed. One of my colleagues is confident, and I applaud. Why does my brother's faith bother me? Is it because of its patriarchal origins, or because he believes in life without death?
        "Life and death are wed. They dance like lovers at a wedding feast. I don't want to be rescued from death," she said it out loud, and then turned quickly to see if her door was shut. It was, and she sighed. Great, I'm talking to myself. Standing up, she put on her coat and left.
        The town was bustling, or as bustling as it ever was. She slowly walked down the polished stone steps, out of the College of Arts and Sciences and onto the worn, cracked sidewalk. The first snow of autumn had begun to fall while she had been inside, and the great clean flakes covered the street, the cars on the curb, and the rich city dirt, hiding it all under a pristine blanket of sparkling white snow.
        Antonia pulled the coat snugly around her ears. She was musing as she walked, thinking about Whitman's thrush, a notable bird from the poem of the same name. Whitman, like so many others through the years, had believed that death was intertwined with life. To him, as to the transcendentalists, the rich loam of the earth and the living human being merely represented different phases of the mystery of life/death, the symphonic interplay of the curious magic of the cosmos. Whitman's Leaves of Grass were a kiss, he had claimed, that would press up at barefoot travelers from the top of his grave.
        In the Whitman poem that she was now thinking of, a thrush was prominently featured. The thrush had a song, and the song had long bewitched her. "Death," the thrush had sung, alone in its thicket at night, "Death," the bird had whispered to Whitman, and to her. "Death," it had purled, crooning the words so softly, so sweetly, that the kiss of death, through the song of the thrush, had come dressed in dripping honey, immured as it were in the scent of sacred incense, sweeter than the taste of life itself.
        It was ironic, she thought as she stepped into the street, but apropos. The poet is buried, and the worm eats the flesh, and the leaves spring from the poet's mind once more. Homer feeds the grass, Whitman feeds the grass, and I'll feed the grass, as well. Eons pass, the grass becomes dust, but life and death go on, and on, and on. Flowers bloom, flowers are cut down, and die; lovers marry, and die, and marry again. Ice meets fire at the end of the void, and the flower is wed to the scythe.
        As she stepped off of the curb, she never even saw the truck.

        The technician probed deeply, carefully moving, deep in the heart of the structure. The catalysts were placed where the holes had been bored, and the work was almost complete. The task had been arduous, but it had been well worth the challenge. The technician's voracious appetite had demanded perfection. It yawned and the moist mouth expanded into a gaping, toothless opening much larger than the width of its soft, pliant head.
        Death had defied Antonia's preconceptions.
        She woke in torment, in utter darkness: amid a horror of stifling, palpable darkness in which she had no hope of ever seeing again. The dark, and the burning, lightless flames, and the cacophony of regrets that lanced her soul, were all that she knew immediately...and then she knew it all.
        There really was a hell, after all.
        Whitman was wrong, Emerson was wrong, Melville, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Dickinson were wrong, the Baal worshippers, the witches, sorcerers, magicians, pop psychologists, Freudians, Darwinians, transcendentalists, existentialists, feminists, humanists, deconstructionists...all wrong.
        Moses was right. Peter, and John, and Sarah and Ruth and Mary and Elizabeth were right. The ancient Hebrew holy men and women had been right, and their words had been preserved inviolate by an all-powerful, loving God, who would not do violence to her own free will. Over the years, He had reached out to her again and again, trying to save her from herself. He had even sent her brother at the end for one last try.
        And now, by her conceit, by her unwillingness to investigate the possibility that her brother might be telling the truth, she had consigned herself to condemnation. She had chosen her world of scholarly glory over the free gift of salvation, offered by an innocent God who had tried to rescue her from herself.
        She had been so sure in her beliefs. She had considered the viability of all manner of obscure doctrines, enquiring diligently regarding their claims.
        But she had not bothered to consider, much less to investigate, the possibility that the Christians might be right.