Look again—just shambling cops. They solicit one passerby after another.
I run from them.
As far back as I can remember I have always had a way of escaping, so that it seemed to me time and again that other people were subject to a type of gravity that bound them to places mentally, but which had no effect on me. They assumed they couldn’t escape for some reason, perhaps because that seemed an enormous offense. Who knows against whom? Either I wasn’t aware of offending, or it didn’t matter to me.
A woman raises her arm to point behind her. The one officer hails the other, they jog heavily off in the direction she indicated, and I persevere in the other way.
On the train I realize I am seeing her again, the woman who misdirected the police. She’s dressed with unbelievable smartness in a sky blue plaid coat belted snugly around her lean form, black skirt, and dark and purple argyle stockings. Her hair is dark red, her smirking face is pale and the bridge of her nose is crossed with a tiny bandage. Self-approbation radiates out from her like a powerful fragrance; she must be some kind of emissary from the Empress, dispatched to keep me out of trouble. As it adopts its superior expression, her face conjures huge pistons or walking beams I think they’re called, rising like the sea when it rolls in heavy weather, as if the ocean were a colossal set of bellows, expanding and contracting with measured regularity like the chest of a sleeper, whose sleep opens onto oceanic gulfs, strangely deep, and uncanny as a dream, like a mysterious light low on the horizon where there shouldn’t be one, or like the dark charisma of this young woman, whose face is so out of place here, and would be better suited to appear between the trunks of ancient trees in a calculating forest flooded by night, whose every meditating leaf is perfectly still, the sour air is perfumed with murmuring numbers, and the dim radiance of the fungous and the moonlight glistens on the walking beams, which look like water suspended in gleaming pillars, part of the machinery of the forest, rising and falling between the frozen, semi-mineralized trunks with a sound like distant surf, dashing itself on a wan howling wolf of a beach all warted over with tumbled peppermint boulders, and haunted by something like the sinister awe that I last felt when I saw the face of that woman in the blue coat, who misdirected the police, who was an agent dispatched, for my good, by the Empress. Do I know she’s called the Empress? Or did I just start calling her that? I don’t remember. I am beyond help. And grateful. The machinery is going to catch me, draw me in and process me, cut plates and cups out of me and pour me into molds to form bric-a-brac and toilet seats, make my brains into cheap little radios, grating ferociously, as if it would shriek “no mercy!” if it could, and now I do hear a faint voice—mine—crying out “Yaay... no mercy!” weakly but with wild enthusiasm.
“He doesn’t know who that’s happening to,” I say, pitying him. “Stupid fucker.”
And turn aside to follow dark passageways that lead like smugglers’ tunnels or monks’ secret causeways into the Castle of Beasts from below.
*
I can’t say how much time has passed, only that the time there’s been has felt long, between whenever my last lucid moment was and this moment, when I spot my presumed-lost orbiter again. It doesn’t make me sad or happy, but it fills me with an acquisitive greed to lay hands on it. The black wine bottle is caught high in the bare boughs of a tree. The lowest branch is still well out of my reach, nothing to climb on, the rocks I toss at the bottle fall short. No sooner have I given up and turned to go, or, that is to say, not a few dozen paces away, while I’m still half telling myself I’m leaving to find something to stand on, I notice the bottle again, perched on the peak of an awning. I lose sight of it as I draw near, not noticing whether there are any people in the streets. I assume there are, but perhaps I don’t see them. They might all be invisible, or it may be that my faculty of seeing is failing one type of object at a time. I was certain, when I set out, that the bottle was on top of this awning, the one marked STATIONERY. But there it is, balancing atop a signal light further on.
It goes on this way for blocks. Every time I draw within a certain distance of the bottle, something interrupts my view of it, no matter how determined I am to keep my eyes riveted on it. I catch sight of it again somewhere else, still in plain sight but at a greater distance. A greater distance, but not as high. As it recedes, it also descends. After the better part of the mile, it’s appearing on first floor windowsills, trash bins, window planters.
I want it. I have a terrible thirst. Just now. For a long while. There’s something in the bottle for that thirst. So that must be why I want it. I want to stop being thirsty.
The bottle stands on the street, in the middle of the crosswalk a few blocks away. Again I weld my gaze to and charge directly towards it.
I have it!
I kneel, stretch myself out to it, and jerk it back, absorbing it into my clothing like a sea anemone snatching up a morsel of whatever sea anemones snatch at, thinking that, if it shocks me again, I can toss it somehow into my rags and catch it there, perhaps insulate myself.
No shock. I inspect the bottle.
It might be dead; that could account for its having stopped here. The glass is cool, pitted, and transmits to my hand a very faint tremor that could be called a feeble shock without any serious inaccuracy. Shocks are sudden, ending almost before they begin, but maybe the shock in the bottle is resting. The liquid contents thud stiffly around inside as I turn it. The glass vibrates with each flop. I can’t see inside.
The scratches are just scratches. The neck is neatly jacketed in thick foil. There are no markings there either, apart from a few nicks, tiny holes. Nothing important, I suppose. The bottle bottom has no dimple, and none of the corrugations that are sometimes etched into bottles to keep them from sliding.
No more waiting. I claw off the foil and gulp till I choke.
The inside of my mouth stings, a cold burning sensation like mint. The stuff hits my stomach with a thump, starts to work on me. I don’t want spirits of pleasure or of pain for that matter; I conjure spirits of work. Come to me always in disguise always. Always in disguise.
I want to set the bottle aside but finish instead. Not one drop is left.
Thoughts come faster and faster. I want to smash the bottle against one of these walls, so as to be wholly finished with it, but then my punishing old craftiness intervenes and I keep it, thinking it might turn out to be important.
Accelerate the heart again, I hear a familiar voice say.
The starved, unrested heart in me begins to pound, but the purpose now is to force a volatile, weightless ether through my arteries and into my brain. There’s a huge red sail glowing on the horizon there between the low, featureless adobe buildings. That sail glows like heated gold, a red moon the clouds obscure. Numbers or reasons rise all around me like snow falling in reverse, still and silent, falling upwards on a planet that hurtles through space at fantastic speed, returning again and again to the same spot, which also is moving with the whole arrangement through mobile space itself moving that moves itself. There is a dim square of radiance on the ground not far away, the base of a soft light shaft that falls here from a source a building is hiding. I look at it for some minutes, feeling my thoughts speeding up even though they are empty, the empty frames of blank film stock. An empty tumult, for now, without knowing what I am seeing, actually I do know, and I know that, but it isn’t sinking in, maybe because my head is already full of zoom—it’s daylight sure—the light of a star that’s unusually close by. The light of day.
What’s that? A day is a day, bright and active. Good or bad, a day isn’t bad or good, nor either is it just a day, but it’s a day, whose light falls there and only there while everything else around me is the same neutral uncertain obscure time. I don’t want to see it. It interferes.
There in my mind I see the artifact as it is this moment, not the whole thing but a part that I somehow managed not to wreck when I had the chance. The Newest floats above the billowing tarps. As a wi
nd begins to lash the trees at the base, the Newest is settling down onto the top of the artifact.
A newer Newest is being manufactured. A dervish’s skirt siphons into the sky; it spins like that, elastic and rippling, spreading over the trees and canopying the artifact like a skirt thrown from the hips of a spinning dancer, a dancer who twirls, just like a dancer.
The former Newest is being disassembled and absorbed by the artifact. Its huge globes hover magically in the air like globes. The numbers are snowing upwards just as they did when that machine I see now disintegrating conversed with the forestmachine. It’s part of the same snow into which the universe crumbles itself, into flakes of ice, and falls in silence around another part of the universe; a number cannot be compared to anything, like the spells which are strictly three dimensional objects and hence outside time these cobblestones are fucking killing my knees. I’m smiling in a way Loring wouldn’t have liked he was a fucking human typewriter if he was human, incomparable numbers. A scintillant 5 is a gleaming, perfectly still five, and at the same time I see tenderness there—yes, I see her, framed in the ascending snow, the steps that lead through peppermint boulders. I’m the occasion, not the origin, of these words. The orbiter, I realize, is analogous to the fixed fraction of me that stays behind wherever I’ve been and continues to do whatever I’ve done in one spot or another indefinitely, over and over continuous, and which I can rejoin, taking up membership as it goes on and on. The orbiter is a member of Chorncendantra into which the game can lapse and member me right back again.
She says no one else was there. The expression, which has been spreading across her face for a second or two, suddenly freezes in its tracks, something like pain in all her expressions, an air of unintended, false falseness. The brightness of her brown eyes gives her a frightened look no matter what her expression. She, because she is completely silent, closes her eyes in the thrill of a morning of works and grace, while I kneel to her in the bud of the night of numbers and upside-down snow. She tells me we’re still in our insane old story, which has its own story, too, the old others, the old promise. That I should have found you floating among my redundant selves...
Weary disgust gets the better of her and she stops talking, although I can still make out the remains of the tight, waspish anger she shares with other people who have high expectations. It seems to do them more harm. The latest Newest has coins spinning on the pale upper surface it raises to the sky, like spinning coins; it is counting steadily to one, over and over counting steadily to one. It has coins spinning like coins on its upper surface, but no there are trembling coins on the undersurface too, I see them there at work. The former Newest is entering the artifact. The sound of steps. There’s a whir from the new Newest, made up of many other whirs, and the old Newest descends into the artifact, the sound of steps coming not however from it but from the artifact. Each step, well spaced out in time, is a crash that rolls away across the landscape and vaults into the sky. It looks like there’s a flash on the opposite side, like the blaze of an open hearth that casts long clear shadows for miles—
Why should my visionary point of view have one fixed position? What determines that, since my body is not there?
All along the top of the artifact, ragged, loping figures are silhouetted against the flashes. From time to time they leap into the air and are borne away on the wind, lit by flashes. The crashes are the footsteps of the former Newest as it descends to its crypt, the artifact, remaking it, plugging up the holes I made in it with material from the quondam Newest. Each crash is the earsplitting shout of a person at the moment of execution, the victim or the executioner or the avenging survivors or the onlooker.
Now I know exactly how stupid I’ve been!
The full extent of my stupidity outspreads! Yes! On and on! I would never have imagined I could have contained so much!
So much of anything—there are soft tendrils of gelatinous light, like elevated highways beaded with Operationals sliding towards and away from the artifact in their work shifts, all part of a single circulation system, sleepers and active workers mixed in the streams, braided with High Rational nerves, floating, resetting time with each crash of a machine—the edit—of which the artifact is only a moderately conspicuous outcropping, and which is altogether the machine that time is. No one intended that the artifact be a time machine, that isn’t it: the artifact is an expression of the fact that the machine is time, machinery is like the essence of time, that can appear in other machines without being what is normally understood as only a resemblance.
The artifact is a component of a larger time machine irrespective of its intended function, not that I know what that was. It’s a time machine by virtue of its being incessantly worked on, and the Operationals themselves are time. They are time, without excluding anyone else from it. The machine is time—time has no inherent coherence, any more than anything else, any more than experience, which just because it unfolds in time doesn’t necessarily have some uniform structure since the one unfailing trait of experience is incommensurability, the domain of the hermit, and that was what happened to me in the cloud chamber experiment when I saw the woman and experienced those emotions and memories edited into me. The experiment didn’t end and I haven’t since gone on from it in at least one literal sense, and it may be that I haven’t gone on from a point still further back and the wine, or whatever it was, in putting in me the element of recall of Chorncendantra has caused me to recall these moments, which would give me a reason not to question the discovery of the woman in front of me, who has been explaining things to me all this time and whose voice I haven’t been listening to since I have so much of my own to think about. She’s laid out the steps.
She hasn’t stopped speaking yet. All the same, she turns aside a moment and, when she comes over to me, she drops a canister into my hand, trying to hold my eyes with hers. But I only have eyes for the thing I’ve got hold of, for once without nausea. There’s a church key already in place and all I have to do is twist it, tearing up and coiling the steel ribbon. Opening the case releases a pungent odor, like feet, and the pallid spell is exposed, writhing in its parchment web like a pale worm. It unfolds into a document when I pick it up, and I sign the blank as quick as I can scare up a pen. I must be ready to take my own life at any moment—I feel this! “Don’t let the book change again!” she orders me, urgently. I see so rapidly each second as it escapes me. I want to die to stop the unravelling of time dictated by the arbitrary beat of a drum. I mean, I’m ready to stop playing, if you want me to. I don’t know what I want. I know I don’t want to go on this way, hemorrhaging my moments, and not ever to give up my speed. I have to go through the world fast, not hurrying, but with fastness—I don’t know what I mean, I only know I mean it. Speed is what I want. The mindless, onward plunging. Maybe leading me like this, into silent causeways. Where you find enticing stillness and silence so terrible to succumb to, a deadly illusion of rest. The castle of beasts, my childhood home, a canyon filled with animals whose majesty would encapsulate me whenever I would run across one.
One of my shaggy colleagues is watching me from a nearby rooftop. Our eyes meet, and we look at each other. The tiny crescents of its eyes jostle as they bubble up among the long purplish tapes. Another form of life altogether, that came through an archway in the artifact, with the same cetacean majesty as the animals and the Newest that induces a respectful lowering of the voice and shrinking of gestures.
A man crosses the street in front of me, precariously holding three toppling ice cream cones in his hands and repeating “the greater part of this will be explained again...” in a detuned shortwave radio voice. I could stay put and go on waiting until each one shows himself or herself here; as usual, it’s all up to me.
I hurry up the snow, using the flakes like a staircase. Never mind how I don’t know how I do it—it’s what I do, that’s all. The steps sink under my feet like chunks of ice floating on a pond; I climb up into a dull, smokey shadow that’s
spacious like dusk. The recallingfluid pools against the interior wall of my abdomen, so that my feet and legs feel lighter and lighter. I’m climbing through rose colored smoke without being engulfed at all myself, static lightning dangles everywhere, forking and reforking finer and finer into invisible hairs, or curling on themselves to form the luminescent skeleton of a nautilus and serifs on the backs of elongated, crag-like letters.
Solid ground. It looks like a grease-encrusted iron skillet. Judging by the soft ring my footsteps make, it’s possible it really is iron.
The air is frighteningly clear. There’s almost no color. The sky is choked with flat clouds like patches of solder. The light comes from the ground, shining up like the snow, and casting no shadows. There actually are riveted seams in the ground, which afford the scant vegetation here its only purchase. The planet is an upended ironclad.
Dun-colored weeds dry as old corn husks sprout along these long straight seams, reminding me of train tracks, and they look more like sheaves of wheat stuffed into the openings than living plants. Black, leafless trees claw the still air off toward the horizon. Foothills ascending into ever-higher mountains off to my left. Nothing but more of the same behind me. The iron is buzzing. I know there’s an ocean, rolling with heavy surf, off to my right, possibly hidden by nothing more than a low ridge of bleached rust. In the same way, I know the Lightning House is not far from here, but the planet may be so small that it isn’t far from anywhere. Nearby, always, the ancient giant with the lacerated face and arms painfully climbs the razor-sharp steps, up through one huge atrium after another, pouring his blood out and weeping for the inert young woman. After a long walk, I come to the foothills, where the iron plates of the surface begin to belly out, streaked with pungent tar. A long defile, like a glacier, of striped boulders spills from a ridge down here to the valley floor. Making my way up the boulders isn’t too difficult. Only a few are too big to get over on their own, and those I can get around.
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