A dream, in which I dissolve, bodily. I am rendered completely particulate, and scattered. Conveyed outward in a vast dusting, disseminated out over the Institute, over the deserts with their obliterated ruins, out over the glowing cities of the plains, and across the cold, teeming, tentacular oceans, until each perfectly atomic portion of me lands; each particle equidistant from the next. And then the Mysterious Woman appears, walking in her loping and uncertain way, thin as an ibis and harrowing of gaze. She brandishes a long, thin cable. She crouches, plugs it into a console the size of a mountain. I feel a sudden and inescapable jolt—a large sucking—and there is the whine of a printer coming online, the sound of its gears, and monumental spitting nozzles, as it prepares to work, these sounds are redoubled upon themselves as in a plainsong, and suddenly all my separate parts move in the opposite direction, toward one another that is, in a reverse diaspora, drawn in, and up now, and through that same cable, coiling around and around, until—with an improbable and unearthly noise (first a wet spank, and then a metallic ringing) my particles implode, come together in a shrill stream, ejected out of that nozzle, spritzed violently onto an endless white and fibrous surface, in a linear series of glyphs.
I dry, over time.
The Mysterious Woman looks down at me.
I would speak but, as is the way of these things, cannot.
She cocks her head, pulls out a small pencil from behind her ear, and says, “C’est un rêve bien connu.” I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. She winds out the thin, tensile lead, and I am glad that there is no ink here to surge out, spill, stain. In the margins of the printed page, she writes. But she writes nothing but nonsense: Alterburg, Alterburg, Alterburg…
Someone is poking me. From far away I feel jab after jab.
“Stop it, I’m awake.” I say. “Stop it, I am awake.”
Standing directly above me is an attendant in an orange jumpsuit. He’s wearing a cap, and holds a black plastic tube of extraordinary caliber in his hands, connected to a mechanical backpack of some kind. A snowblower. I recognize this man. I’ve seen him around the grounds, raking in the rock gardens outside the villas, mostly. He looks at me dully and offers down a hand, which I take. He tugs me to my feet, brushes me off with his enormous work gloves, then silently beckons me to follow him. He is adamant, and points, jabbing his hands over and over, to a spot just behind me.
“I can’t walk,” I say. “I may have frostbite.”
He shrugs, and turns, walks a couple of steps and climbs onto the escalator, not ten feet from where we are standing.
I heave myself to my feet, follow, and we descend.
16
A week (or, I want to say: weeks?) of work. With predictably unimpressive results.
The fruitless hours of work to be indicated by…by…
Aw, fuck it. Nm.
17
(“PROFITABLE IDEATION: TIPS AND TRICKS”)
Miss Fairfax has left this new brochure for me, the most recent issue of what I’ve come to think of as “The Literature.” It lounges there on my pillow, glossy, supercilious. I snatch it up and read it at a sitting, attempting several of the “Tips and Tricks,” but nothing comes of it. If anything, the intensity of my efforts has driven away whatever elusive but promising idea was, perhaps, due to emerge. Whatever was there though has now shied away from direct scrutiny—burrowed back out of sight. I’m left with nothing but my own exhausted zeal.
I lie on the floor on my back—one of my preferred work poses—when Zimzim the Tea Boy’s head begins to rise, a full moon in the flat’s darkening sky. I look up at him; his round little face looking down at me, blank as a page.
“I’m just fine, Zimzim. Thank you,” I say. He bends at the waist, slightly now, breathing audibly out of his nose. His face waxing enormous and looking puzzled.
“Yes? Listen, I just need to think. I need to think for a while. Projects like mine require a fair amount of deliberation. It’s not just a matter of making shit, you know—”
I do not know the extent of his English, but I suspect what little of the language he knows is confined to greetings and farewells. Whatever else I might say to him is presumably beyond his ken. Though I continue nevertheless.
“You see, to create something truly…unique—as I propose to do with this project—one has to, one must…get lost in a sort of…I know what I’m doing doesn’t look like much, but—”
(More of the same non-response here from Zimzim.)
“But let me assure you, I am hard at work right now.”
He blinks once. Twice. Mouth, a line. Breath, piccoloing in and out.
“The preparation of myself is the preparation of the project. The fact that I am being judged by the Institute (or by you, Zimzim) on my progress, or in any other way in the matter of my project, is intolerable.”
He straightens up—he has become bored (I’m guessing, as his features remain opaque) and he eventually withdraws.
Dammit. My Tea Boy was, at least, distracting.
So here, I disappear, stuck in a mental loop, tapping my fingers: tap, tap, tap, pondering stains and blots and suchlike. I sit, and get up. Seeking inspiration, I grab my book, the huge novel I’ve been laboring to read, and settle in, but I only get through a couple of pages before the words begin to blur. The writing is too high-minded and complex for me (though its protagonist, strangely, seems to be a simpleton of some kind). Either way, a chore. Thump, it goes back to its spot on the table. Bored again, I stare, and then clench my eyes closed, and then open them as wide as I can. I repeat this. I crouch and open my mouth and give out short guttural howls. I think through the Fundaments of the project. My Fundaments, the ones I can remember. I perform all the necessary conditioning. But nothing comes. Though, for some-or-little-to-no-reason, the word “Alterburg” enters my head, and repeats, over and over. Mr. Alterburg? Miss Alterburg? I don’t know anyone by that name. A place? Alterburg. Alterburg? Tbd. Tbd.
Either way, this word and its inane repetition are the only dividend on the day thus far.
By way of acknowledgment of this unfortunate fact, I leave the room, and head up the stairs of the Enclave, arriving at the door bearing the “Roof, no entry” sign and push on through it.
Nothing helps me think as much as a good height.
* * *
—
The roof. The view from here.*
The sunset cools, and now the sky is ashes, and now the sky is ink, and I amble amid the vents and cellular antennae and microwave aerials; in and among the shaftways and ducts, various other structures—forming, collectively, what seem like the reduced form of a skyline, as if the idea of a city reproduced itself on top of the Enclave in fractal fashion. I plop down next to a metal chimney or a water-cooling tower or air-conditioning unit, legs dangling like a kid in a grown-up’s chair; and I look out again, and I am, I realize, hoping for a star, but all is black, and everything beyond the planet is veiled and occluded. Occluded by what is unclear—sandstorms, or light pollution, or just pollution as in smog, or perhaps something more consciously man-made, like the metastructure itself, or a profusion of satellites, swarming about the atmosphere like bees swarming a hive. But I unveil my device to take a pic anyway—it is pointed straight up at the blurry darkness, and I squint at the sky through the device, through another double set of cataracts, and shoot my photo. The picture comes out a dark square.
On a whim, I post it immediately.
Like Share Tag Delete
Within moments, the device lights up, igniting with approval, disapproval, and commentary—whose is unclear, as I don’t recognize any of the names or handles—but all of it relates to my perfectly stupid square.
This square is, though, secretly intelligible to me. For I know that the lights of individual stars shine in that square. They are in there; in its pixels. The special signa
ture of each alien sun is present—their light reproduced, visible but for the noise. And I know that were I to have an instrument powerful enough to edit out this junk, the remaining information (I imagine) would render up a portrait of our original and unsullied firmament as the ancients once saw it. I could make a map to navigate by, and to hope, and to pray by—just as, perhaps, all that we’ve loved and lost in our lives remains in the tangled circuitry of our bodies, perhaps as bits of color, or small electric pulses, or in the glyphic configurations of our organs themselves, and that all this precious cargo, this information, is equally unavailable to us, though also, always present, hidden within our anatomy’s coiled and meaty confusion.
I consider for a moment what it would be like if, with regards to my project, I were to switch it up. Leave the proposal behind and, say, start fresh. Something easy. Tried and true.
But, it is too late for that, I think, and shudder.
My projects are always difficult. It is, perhaps, what makes them my projects. The strain that is required to produce them; perhaps it is even the case that the strain is the project. (Strain/stain; stain/strain.) Anyway, the opportunity for ease and facility is long gone. If only I could just take a well-paved path. Someone else’s. Maybe—
This thought is interrupted by a small white blur, migrating across the sky-black lawns beneath us. I wonder if I’d imagined it. Inhale, and my breath catches.
A ghost. Bird. Garbage.
I let my breath out slowly, audibly.
Paper. That was it. Don’t focus on it. Let it gestate in darkness.
I sit awhile longer, then rise, brush the dirt from my bottom, stride out across the microcosmic city of the roof, toward the light that shows me the way to the stairs down.
* * *
—
“How was the day, Percy.”
“Not too bad, Miss Fairfax.”
“Any more headaches?”
“One or two.”
“Concentration okay? Focus?”
“So-so.”
“Putting things off?”
“Not really.”
“The project is still moving slowly. That’s normal.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. There is a necessary, initial period of orientation and reflection. Though it shouldn’t go on indefinitely.”
“Roger that.”
“Have you made anything new at all since we last met?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Very good, Percy.”
“Just a few preliminary thoughts.”
“Fabulous. Can you share?”
“About that.”
“Sharing is, after all, what these sessions are for.”
“You won’t—”
“Nothing you say leaves this room.”
“Okay, but, that’s not it. I don’t have my work…on me.”
“I can wait if you need to go get—”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why? Where is it?”
“It would seem that it’s been…I want to say…misplaced?”
* The sky is sufficiently uninterrupted, and so attains its truest nature, which is half-spherical; this particular hemisphere slathered in red, in long troughs, though there are some cooler shades too, the holdouts, the last slowly shredding redoubts against an inevitable immolation, which is to say that the sun is going down in a holocaust. Picture perfect. Postcard perfect. Unreal. A holo-caust.
18
(THE PAPER CONTINUED)
The Same Same shop. A murky back room, and a light passes back and forth. Once, twice, in quick succession. Etc., etc.
(It’s happening once more.)
Information learned, stored, cached, transferred, read, copied, and transmitted, etc.
Paper.
Paper.
Paper.
More and more of it.
The paper whines and shuffles and whirs then clacks through a machine of some sort, and onto a feed tray, where a hand reaches down to pick up the stack.
The Same Same man reads what’s written there:
The Fundaments of My Project
He holds each sheet right up close to him, blocking his face from view. Perhaps he is nearsighted. He reads the whole thing. Each one of these numbered pages.
A little while later, the Same Same man opens the front door, and releases just a single sheet (eight and one-half inches by eleven inches) to the wind, and watches as if it were a trained falcon.
And it flies.
Satisfied that it is properly airborne, he returns inside, closing the door behind him.
The paper flutters away—buzzing, swooping down the dark alleyway, riding the urban thermals. Until it is discharged into the sunlight of the wider street beyond. It enters the complicated currents and cross-breezes of a large intersection. Here, it performs a little dance in the air. Jigging this way and that, up and down. Now it abruptly turns right, up a larger thoroughfare, and, along with a crescendo from the wind—its low tenor jumping up through the octaves—the shape spasms upward, until the wind blows its whistle full bore, and the paper explodes upward further, rattling into the air. It is many floors up, now.
A bleached blur, an obliterating agitation like an eraser taken crudely to the sky.
There it is now: shockingly bright, reflected in the glass of a nearby office tower.
Now there it is in the glass apron-wall of the next building, and the brassier glass of the next, copied from surface to surface, so on.
This sheet of paper.
Now it turns over once, lazily as if to rouse itself, and begins to wamble its way over the buildings, outward, over the city and away on the wind, over the malls and the roundabouts, the casinos, hotels, and mosques, over the outskirts and ring roads, past the gas stations and construction zones which are the harbingers of a sprawl not yet achieved but nevertheless inevitable. It flies ever upward and away. The piece of paper grows smaller and smaller and smaller until it is gone.
Time passes.
(More time passes.)
Where the paper is headed now is anyone’s guess. Though it seems to be making a beeline for the bay, and then, it seems, the desert beyond.
19
Anyway, it’ll all be fine. It’s fine. I’m not worried.
The project will advance when it is ready to. And I’m certainly not worried about the satellite images on my device. The weather bureaus are monitoring a severe front which, though still hundreds of kilometers away, is moving, at least for the time being, straight toward the Freehold. Things could change of course, but still, some sort of disaster-response preparedness appears to be in the works. These provisions, if nothing else, serve to indemnify the local officials from any future blame. Here they are, those very officials: at podia, giving conferences, holding shovels in depots. Back to the map, shortwave infrared images swirl in real time: a bright red, green, and blue smear, spinning in slow motion. Now, solemn looks on the face of our reporter. Gravitas. He does a lot of pointing, which signifies agency and competency. A bright red checklist of precautions takes over the screen’s bottom half. These measures could be observed, but seem foolish to me.
I mean, just look at it out.
Here on the roof of the Enclave, I can see all of the sky, unblemished but for the single silver airplane caught by the sun, so far up as to be completely immobile, a staple affixed to the perfect, bright sheet and the embodiment and cause of an inpouring of simply tremendous loneliness. I whisper my device to sleep and walk over to the roof’s lip.
I spend a fair amount of my time up here on the roof now; sitting alone between the exhaust pipes and antennae, watching the Institute from this height. Looking down.
Some solitude, literal and figurative perspective.
I gain a kind of perverse satisfactio
n from watching the tiny fellows—corpuscles in the Institute’s vasculature. You can see them now, transporting themselves, but also their contents—their projects, those wet little packets of information—from one space to another. And I wonder, up here, at these times, if perhaps the Institute itself is like an enormous mind, all of us performing ideational tasks within its perimeter which perhaps contribute to some greater process of thought, some collective mega-thought—a thought which, though entirely metaphysical here, might eventually lead to some large and tangible action outside in the world: like an arm, the size of an isthmus, being raised to scratch an itch an ocean away.
These are the kind of thoughts I have up here. Overarching thoughts. Masterful thoughts.
Regal thoughts.
If only this kind of thinking were profitable in any way.
“You are being given a fairly long leash here, Percy,” Miss F. reminds me, “but if you don’t meet a single benchmark—”
Ping!
“You going to pick that up?”
I push down, forcefully, on my device’s power-off button and shove it deeper into my pocket.
“Percy?”
“No. I get it. Back to work.”
But after looking around to see that no one is watching—I settle instead in a long chair by the pool, where I search in my pocket for my special bottle, and find there’s only a solitary capsule left. A problem, I think—one I contend with by rattling that last pill out into my clammy palm and popping it into my waiting gob.
“Bit warmer today, Mr. Frobisher,” someone announces to me, collegially.
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