The Wretch of the Sun, page 20
“Nobody’s seen him in days,” she goes on. “Have you?”
“No,” William says neutrally. “Are you going to wait for him to return, or will you carry on without him?”
“Yes,” she lies.
William nods and sets the box, which is made of dark wood, on the table.
“You will keep us up on your progress, mm?”
“Of course.”
He retires as decorously as a trusted family retainer. Trudy opens the box. It’s filled with shavings. Plunging her hand into these, she feels a hard ball wrapped in fabric and draws out something nearly the size of her head and swaddled in burgundy felt. She opens the felt carefully and uncovers a solid globe of optical plastic with a human eye in the center, trailing its nerve like a comet’s tail. This in turn is attached to a trim cube of brain, laced with silky wires. The wires are bundled together and become a pair of red and blue coils, connected to a steel jack protruding a few millimeters from the surface of the globe. The iris of the eye is whiter than the white of the eye, and weirdly impersonal; she can’t imagine it in a face. It seems like a machine part. Where does it go? Trudy looks around and finds out; there’s a conspicuous box of polished metal on a low wall, a little over four feet high and perhaps eight feet wide. The box lifts to reveal a cup-shaped socket in a wooden brace. That this wood is virtually all “eyes” is typical of Celada’s sense of style. Holding the ball with the felt cloth, so as not to smudge it, she first peeps over the rim, lined with black plastic fuzz, of the socket—there’s a plug of white metal, which could be platinum, sticking straight up from the bottom. Trudy turns the ball jack down and settles it into the socket. In this arrangement, the eye stares straight up. She then replaces the steel box with a snap. The box sits on rollers that permit it to slide to and fro along the top of the wall. There’s no telling what it’s for. The isolaton is the particle of force expressed in the extreme particularity of a general instance. This force tends toward a singularity without becoming one—no, a singularity is the tendency toward becoming one. There are no pure singularities in a static condition. The singularity is defined as the tendency of a force to become one in its ongoing expression. One does not proceed without one. One does not win without having won. The wan one is a winsome one. One won one on one. 111 and 1. One won one; each note is the same, the sequence and emphasis distinguish. Each note is an identical or near-identical moment whose meaning is set by its appearing again. This is both highly particular, being only one, and highly general, all being one, and it generates its own time by its rhythm. The revolution of the particle is the iteration of a new rhythm, and something of this kind is to be observed in the genesis ex vacua of the initiative universal particle, of which the universe is the sequel. The reader who is addicted to a serial goes back for a novelty that in its purest expression has nothing to do with the new predicaments and configurations of elements in the narrative and everything to do with getting back into a distinct time belonging to the serial. Time is mostly void, like space. Just as matter is sparse and cloudy from the putative point of view of an atom, so time consists chiefly of gaps that, though enormous, are still undetectable to our gross perceptions. Not that our gross perceptions don’t perceive time to consist primarily of loss; this is to say rather that this sense of time as loss is confirmed at every point at which it is examined. Thought is successive, as Kant said, and therefore necessarily in time. But there is no succession without interruption, any more than there can be something that is at once strictly segmented and continuous, and the scale of these interruptions is vast. The human experience is poised hypnotized on abysses of empty time traversed by widely separated stepping stones, the moments, bounding majestically from one to one as dreamily oblivious as a sleepwalker. The littlest thing escapes us, and everything we make gets away from us, and language most of all, most of all. The isolaton will be captured as it comes into existence in a sealed metal tank. Always tanks, always water, he’s obsessed.
( )
The face . . . the white hairs plastered to the lip . . . the eyes and the tone of voice . . . And he going on thinking about that; what word will he use for that, for what is impassive and indifferent, but a face is necessary for him to see this, and, because he does see an impassive and indifferent face, he takes this for a tactic all the better to encourage him. The weariness and pain of his interminable climbing of the stairs is transformed into victorious shouting, like the blinding glare of the sun. The noiseless noise and shadow of light are worthy unworth, worthless worth, growing out of him like a plant and flying away from him like a fly, drawn to him and ebbing out of him while he grows too weak to keep in his overflowing strength. He drags himself up a step at a time, with long pauses. They bite into him whether he moves or stops, for the steps are sharp as razors, even through the runner. You have worth you’ll never have worth you have it you’ll never have it you’ll have it you’ll never have it. Having it is striving to have it is not having it and never will be having it, so that, if he stops, even at the top of the stairs, even on the roof, he will have failed, and everything suffered up to then—this is the killer—will have been a waste. So if he reaches the top of the stairs he will have to throw himself headlong down to the bottom again, or roll himself, lacking the energy to jump, off the roof.
“No, my boy,” he only imagines her saying. “That would kill you, that would be quitting. If you reach the top of the stairs, or the roof, you must climb back down and resume as before.”
A head is there against the skylight when he next looks up. He can make out a slash of reflected brass-colored light on the throat, showing a little of the crease at the corner of her jaw, which is there because she is looking down at him, down her nose. In his icy stomach the trembling water churns up into his gorge and settles again, and a cold caustic thrill violently shakes him. Paralyzed, he keeps his eyes on her and feels like fainting, his hands turn to gas, his arms are frail as reeds. The reflections in the polished metal everywhere swim, the ore smashed from the far-away rock, liquefied in a starry furnace charred and groaning, and then shaped by blows, blended into brass, and bronze, and glittering steel, and stern gold. She is still there, waiting; invisibly she cracks the whip. He thinks it doesn’t matter what he thinks he’s doing, whether he says to himself oh burn away my human flabbiness and make me a blazing metal skeleton, scrub away my soft parts—why not soft parts? Isn’t it weak to want to do away with softness and suffering? Shouldn’t I pray to be all soft parts and to suffer correspondingly more? No I shouldn’t. He lifts himself onto his hands and knees crawls a step, and another step. The more outer weakness, the greater the inner vehemence, fumes of will steam out inflating him, time gaps suck up the froth—
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
(.)
Trudy has a drink before she goes back to Sanglade, and she must run, a little tipsily, to escape a sudden thundershower. Halfway between the front door and her “parlor,” she realizes drinking was a mistake, it seals up ways of escape.
Motion draws her gaze to the right. There’s a large mirror in a massive bronze frame hanging on the wall there, above a solid antique with a thick red and white marble top. Things are too speedy.
“Don’t you know better than to look in the mirror in a haunted house haunted house . . . ?”
This is a haunted house.
Like shaggy oxen, the boughs outside dip and plunge. She had a cousin who used to drive her nuts insisting on counting the seconds between the flash and the crash. This storm is an unwanted intimacy she shares with the house and a favor, shelter, incurring an obligation to repay. A faint whistling comes from one of the tiny niches in the lintel, just two notes, the first high and the second lower than the first, and repeated together twice.
This one has a face in the foreground looking out directly, with refined African features outlined in gold on the black and an eye, the face is cropped by the frame at top bottom and one side, an eye like a flat sinker of gold without iris or pupil.
“Oh good,” Trudy says chuckling spasmodically.
“Oh good! That’s great!” Both hands on the top of the jamb she looks down in confusion between her arms slicing across the door, wondering if this is the moment the chair buckles under her and she snaps her neck against the fender and lies staring at the ceiling forever.
She looks again and says “Sure!”
The image is no different from any of the others, after all. Naturally, there is no face, and, naturally, it’s not impossible, not possible she says feebly but really not impossible she means of course, that the miniature’s fine golden lines and shapes could have presented, to a hasty, disorganized way of looking, something like the face she obviously only thinks she saw.
She gets down from the chair sizzling around the ears with resentment. Witch books and their ordinary malice come back to her because it’s one thing being confronted; what chips away at mind and soul is the way it goes on and on in a thousand snipes a day, the brainless malevolence behind them that is so strong for being weak, that is so effective for being petty, that is so immune to exposure for being superficial, that is so impossible to argue with because it is mindless.
“I’m not going to stand for being teased by a house,” she thinks and catches sight of herself in the mirror. She thinks to look away, but walks toward the mirror, staring at it. Her face in the glass—her eyes flicker as they dial all around the surface. There is darkness in the backing that is visible through the silver.
It’s as though a plug had been pulled in her head, her vitality drains out and drowsiness pours into its place with a buzz. One at a time, four heavy flies appear on her reflection, although she doesn’t see them flying, one on her thigh, one just above her hip, one below her ribcage, one on her bicep. Each lands with a tap. They hum to themselves, but they don’t have the frenetic energy of flies. They seem too heavy for their own strength. They stay exactly where they are.
With each slothful tap, Trudy feels a dull spreading shock in the corresponding part of herself. Matterless coins jangle together low in her abdomen, jump up and spin themselves tiny glittering marbles.
There are no flies on the mirror, those are just black spots where the silver particles fell into the depths of the glass. The spots are, however, starting to move, follow her as she sways, hold their places one on her thigh, one just above her hip, one below her ribcage, one on her bicep. Black, limpid eyes. She turns from the mirror. Unreal light is flooding into the room.
( )
. . . and stopped watching my ribs come out, meaning death is the moment I stop talking to myself, while the conversation between her and me is constant.
In my dreams I never leave the house either, even to visit the grounds, which don’t really interest me. It makes exploring the house less tiring.
Every time I wake, laboring to breathe, and there is less of me, I have no more vitality than when I fell asleep, nor is it possible for me easily to note the moments in which I sleep and wake.
When did I last get down to the basement to drink? The distance is astronomical now. I must spend some moments preparing myself to lift my arm, to reach for that vial there.
The water quickens my thinking, and settles heavily down into me.
Even my clothes are flying away from me; I move inside them as though they were blankets. There is no sound but the birds that call after dark, I suppose it is dark. That and the oceanic sound of my panting, a brief drag and an even shorter exhalation. I can’t see well enough to tell if she is there by the window or not.
Where? I fall in love with “where?” I love my fear, romantically. But I’m not afraid; I’m too tired.
I know my dreams chiefly because in them I am moving effortlessly through the house, standing upright. I formerly dreamt of difficulties with my clothing, getting tangled in my belt as I tried to auger new holes in it and sleeves that wouldn’t stay rolled up, but now I wander naked in the house. No one sees me, or so I assume, because I never see anyone. I always wish I would hear singing. I won’t fail this time—How wan and far away that idea is now!
I’m not the first, either. I give my best, even if I am only imitating Hen . . . Haro—Herman. Here is the upstairs banquet room with the pillars swaddled in wind, and watery squares of light from the windows flailing all over the walls, as if the garden below had been strung with hanging lamps the wind throws around. She lied about it not hurting, but then again I don’t mind it, so perhaps that’s what she meant: it will be painful, but I won’t mind it. The water distracts. I can never find the gramophone in the infinity room, but it might be just as well, if I were to find I couldn’t manage to operate it. I’m easily stunned.
. . . and the stiffly vibrating infinity pattern on floor and walls stuns me this time, the colors reverse fields and the patterns detach in layers that rush over each other, stretching my attention thinner and thinner away from me.
I do hear drumming now, more or less steady and slow. It’s a dull reverberation coming from the basement, and as usual I feel it more than I hear it properly.
It persists as I circulate through the upper floors, and deters me from going to the basement now. The water seems to be brought to me anyway, although I don’t see who brings it. I never see anyone. The hall outside the banqueting room is intensely bright, much too bright, the gleams from the metal fittings all over lance my eyes, and seem to chime and clang like tiny bells.
The drumming is still slow and steady, not a migraine though. I no longer get those it seems. Just pounding in my temples and ears so that I wish it would quit.
The stairs.
Even in my dream, it’s beginning to be a struggle to breathe. The top of the stairs, with the dark skylight above it, is only a flight away, and she might be up there, for all I know. The wind might be stirring something up there, or that might be her, just out of sight, doing something. Doing what? Perhaps she’s getting her whip out, to goad me. It will sink through my intangible dreamform, but she would have thought of that. I can’t think. Why doesn’t it stop? It hangs on for dear life, slow as it is. Are they building something in the basement? Hammers don’t pound in that slow steady way, they burst in groups of prime numbers. I have to lie down on the stairs, I can’t stand beside them anymore.
A little rest. It’s an odd thing to want in a dream, I know, but everything about dreams is an odd thing I know, everything that I know is a dream, an odd thing about them.
About dreams. That was the subject.
Am I resting?
The drumming is getting tired too. It is slower. Than I remember. Look. Look. Look. She sits two steps above me. She is making a gesture with her hand, for me to climb. Another step. Never mind the drum. It’s all old drum.
Dear thing, my old drum. I’m
nodding, to say—
yes,
I’ll climb in
a minute, once I’ve, one
once I have rested, just for a
time.
Are you coming down?
Don’t.
You don’t need to come down.
I can come up.
Up.
I can too
come up
once rested I’ve
time one
one
(*)
Sanglade turns to Trudy again, obliquely, only half its beaming face. Trudy glares back with simmering distaste. Sanglade seems to revel in the sunshine, as though it were a particularly special day. Maybe it’s some tragedy’s anniversary today, she thinks sourly. The cool, twinkling gloom of the house opens to her again and she makes her way to her place, dropping her sullenness as a useless encumbrance now she will be cool herself, neutral and calm. She will concentrate, without straining or trying, entirely on her work, and Sanglade can bombard her with pink elephants in an avalanche of dead bodies singing the national anthem without distracting her, calling yes! in falsetto to all her suffering, she won’t bat an eye.
After an hour or so, Dr. Camatsura mews in the doorway to get her attention, and softly asks her if she will go upstairs and bring down last year’s borrowing ledger from the record room. Trudy arrives at the bottom of the long staircase already resolved to ignore whatever she might see there, keeping her attention loosely gathered around her hand, always firmly on the banister, and on her feet. If there is anything there waiting for her on the steps, she may or may not see it out of the corner of her eye, but these are all just appearances and whatever has nothing to do with her task has nothing to do with her. I’m not paid to see things, I’m paid to perform certain tasks. The skylight draws near, powdering the walls and streaking the wood with tissue. Trudy’s legs are strong, and she reaches the fourth floor without slowing her even pace. All the same, she feels momentarily out of breath the moment she stops climbing. The air is thin up here. The air is fine. The skylight is still further up, high in a socket. She will not pause, as she nearly did, with one hand on the ball of the banister, but walks swiftly to the record room.
Snapping on the light, she stands in the doorway reading the labels on the shelves that stand end-forward against the far wall. Without wasted movement, without shutting the door, she goes directly to the proper shelf and stands in front of it, hands at her sides, finds the right book and only then raises her hand to take it down. It’s a thin, narrow volume covered in dull blue fabric and LEDGER printed on the front. It goes under her arm, and she leaves the record room, closing the door behind her.
She goes back to the stairway determined to be especially careful going down. Coming up, she had been so intent on her task she had not even glanced to her right and so hadn’t noticed the attic door standing ajar or the man’s shadow that sits just inside it on the steps, almost hidden entirely in the dark.
Don’t stop she says to herself and freezes. It’s not a man it’s a bundle of some stuff that fell down the steps and knocked open the door or it isn’t there at all, things don’t just fall but they do settle or give way—it’s not a man, that’s for certain. Her eyes relentlessly draw the outline of a man, there, in the dark.
“No,” William says neutrally. “Are you going to wait for him to return, or will you carry on without him?”
“Yes,” she lies.
William nods and sets the box, which is made of dark wood, on the table.
“You will keep us up on your progress, mm?”
“Of course.”
He retires as decorously as a trusted family retainer. Trudy opens the box. It’s filled with shavings. Plunging her hand into these, she feels a hard ball wrapped in fabric and draws out something nearly the size of her head and swaddled in burgundy felt. She opens the felt carefully and uncovers a solid globe of optical plastic with a human eye in the center, trailing its nerve like a comet’s tail. This in turn is attached to a trim cube of brain, laced with silky wires. The wires are bundled together and become a pair of red and blue coils, connected to a steel jack protruding a few millimeters from the surface of the globe. The iris of the eye is whiter than the white of the eye, and weirdly impersonal; she can’t imagine it in a face. It seems like a machine part. Where does it go? Trudy looks around and finds out; there’s a conspicuous box of polished metal on a low wall, a little over four feet high and perhaps eight feet wide. The box lifts to reveal a cup-shaped socket in a wooden brace. That this wood is virtually all “eyes” is typical of Celada’s sense of style. Holding the ball with the felt cloth, so as not to smudge it, she first peeps over the rim, lined with black plastic fuzz, of the socket—there’s a plug of white metal, which could be platinum, sticking straight up from the bottom. Trudy turns the ball jack down and settles it into the socket. In this arrangement, the eye stares straight up. She then replaces the steel box with a snap. The box sits on rollers that permit it to slide to and fro along the top of the wall. There’s no telling what it’s for. The isolaton is the particle of force expressed in the extreme particularity of a general instance. This force tends toward a singularity without becoming one—no, a singularity is the tendency toward becoming one. There are no pure singularities in a static condition. The singularity is defined as the tendency of a force to become one in its ongoing expression. One does not proceed without one. One does not win without having won. The wan one is a winsome one. One won one on one. 111 and 1. One won one; each note is the same, the sequence and emphasis distinguish. Each note is an identical or near-identical moment whose meaning is set by its appearing again. This is both highly particular, being only one, and highly general, all being one, and it generates its own time by its rhythm. The revolution of the particle is the iteration of a new rhythm, and something of this kind is to be observed in the genesis ex vacua of the initiative universal particle, of which the universe is the sequel. The reader who is addicted to a serial goes back for a novelty that in its purest expression has nothing to do with the new predicaments and configurations of elements in the narrative and everything to do with getting back into a distinct time belonging to the serial. Time is mostly void, like space. Just as matter is sparse and cloudy from the putative point of view of an atom, so time consists chiefly of gaps that, though enormous, are still undetectable to our gross perceptions. Not that our gross perceptions don’t perceive time to consist primarily of loss; this is to say rather that this sense of time as loss is confirmed at every point at which it is examined. Thought is successive, as Kant said, and therefore necessarily in time. But there is no succession without interruption, any more than there can be something that is at once strictly segmented and continuous, and the scale of these interruptions is vast. The human experience is poised hypnotized on abysses of empty time traversed by widely separated stepping stones, the moments, bounding majestically from one to one as dreamily oblivious as a sleepwalker. The littlest thing escapes us, and everything we make gets away from us, and language most of all, most of all. The isolaton will be captured as it comes into existence in a sealed metal tank. Always tanks, always water, he’s obsessed.
( )
The face . . . the white hairs plastered to the lip . . . the eyes and the tone of voice . . . And he going on thinking about that; what word will he use for that, for what is impassive and indifferent, but a face is necessary for him to see this, and, because he does see an impassive and indifferent face, he takes this for a tactic all the better to encourage him. The weariness and pain of his interminable climbing of the stairs is transformed into victorious shouting, like the blinding glare of the sun. The noiseless noise and shadow of light are worthy unworth, worthless worth, growing out of him like a plant and flying away from him like a fly, drawn to him and ebbing out of him while he grows too weak to keep in his overflowing strength. He drags himself up a step at a time, with long pauses. They bite into him whether he moves or stops, for the steps are sharp as razors, even through the runner. You have worth you’ll never have worth you have it you’ll never have it you’ll have it you’ll never have it. Having it is striving to have it is not having it and never will be having it, so that, if he stops, even at the top of the stairs, even on the roof, he will have failed, and everything suffered up to then—this is the killer—will have been a waste. So if he reaches the top of the stairs he will have to throw himself headlong down to the bottom again, or roll himself, lacking the energy to jump, off the roof.
“No, my boy,” he only imagines her saying. “That would kill you, that would be quitting. If you reach the top of the stairs, or the roof, you must climb back down and resume as before.”
A head is there against the skylight when he next looks up. He can make out a slash of reflected brass-colored light on the throat, showing a little of the crease at the corner of her jaw, which is there because she is looking down at him, down her nose. In his icy stomach the trembling water churns up into his gorge and settles again, and a cold caustic thrill violently shakes him. Paralyzed, he keeps his eyes on her and feels like fainting, his hands turn to gas, his arms are frail as reeds. The reflections in the polished metal everywhere swim, the ore smashed from the far-away rock, liquefied in a starry furnace charred and groaning, and then shaped by blows, blended into brass, and bronze, and glittering steel, and stern gold. She is still there, waiting; invisibly she cracks the whip. He thinks it doesn’t matter what he thinks he’s doing, whether he says to himself oh burn away my human flabbiness and make me a blazing metal skeleton, scrub away my soft parts—why not soft parts? Isn’t it weak to want to do away with softness and suffering? Shouldn’t I pray to be all soft parts and to suffer correspondingly more? No I shouldn’t. He lifts himself onto his hands and knees crawls a step, and another step. The more outer weakness, the greater the inner vehemence, fumes of will steam out inflating him, time gaps suck up the froth—
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
on and
on
and on
and
(.)
Trudy has a drink before she goes back to Sanglade, and she must run, a little tipsily, to escape a sudden thundershower. Halfway between the front door and her “parlor,” she realizes drinking was a mistake, it seals up ways of escape.
Motion draws her gaze to the right. There’s a large mirror in a massive bronze frame hanging on the wall there, above a solid antique with a thick red and white marble top. Things are too speedy.
“Don’t you know better than to look in the mirror in a haunted house haunted house . . . ?”
This is a haunted house.
Like shaggy oxen, the boughs outside dip and plunge. She had a cousin who used to drive her nuts insisting on counting the seconds between the flash and the crash. This storm is an unwanted intimacy she shares with the house and a favor, shelter, incurring an obligation to repay. A faint whistling comes from one of the tiny niches in the lintel, just two notes, the first high and the second lower than the first, and repeated together twice.
This one has a face in the foreground looking out directly, with refined African features outlined in gold on the black and an eye, the face is cropped by the frame at top bottom and one side, an eye like a flat sinker of gold without iris or pupil.
“Oh good,” Trudy says chuckling spasmodically.
“Oh good! That’s great!” Both hands on the top of the jamb she looks down in confusion between her arms slicing across the door, wondering if this is the moment the chair buckles under her and she snaps her neck against the fender and lies staring at the ceiling forever.
She looks again and says “Sure!”
The image is no different from any of the others, after all. Naturally, there is no face, and, naturally, it’s not impossible, not possible she says feebly but really not impossible she means of course, that the miniature’s fine golden lines and shapes could have presented, to a hasty, disorganized way of looking, something like the face she obviously only thinks she saw.
She gets down from the chair sizzling around the ears with resentment. Witch books and their ordinary malice come back to her because it’s one thing being confronted; what chips away at mind and soul is the way it goes on and on in a thousand snipes a day, the brainless malevolence behind them that is so strong for being weak, that is so effective for being petty, that is so immune to exposure for being superficial, that is so impossible to argue with because it is mindless.
“I’m not going to stand for being teased by a house,” she thinks and catches sight of herself in the mirror. She thinks to look away, but walks toward the mirror, staring at it. Her face in the glass—her eyes flicker as they dial all around the surface. There is darkness in the backing that is visible through the silver.
It’s as though a plug had been pulled in her head, her vitality drains out and drowsiness pours into its place with a buzz. One at a time, four heavy flies appear on her reflection, although she doesn’t see them flying, one on her thigh, one just above her hip, one below her ribcage, one on her bicep. Each lands with a tap. They hum to themselves, but they don’t have the frenetic energy of flies. They seem too heavy for their own strength. They stay exactly where they are.
With each slothful tap, Trudy feels a dull spreading shock in the corresponding part of herself. Matterless coins jangle together low in her abdomen, jump up and spin themselves tiny glittering marbles.
There are no flies on the mirror, those are just black spots where the silver particles fell into the depths of the glass. The spots are, however, starting to move, follow her as she sways, hold their places one on her thigh, one just above her hip, one below her ribcage, one on her bicep. Black, limpid eyes. She turns from the mirror. Unreal light is flooding into the room.
( )
. . . and stopped watching my ribs come out, meaning death is the moment I stop talking to myself, while the conversation between her and me is constant.
In my dreams I never leave the house either, even to visit the grounds, which don’t really interest me. It makes exploring the house less tiring.
Every time I wake, laboring to breathe, and there is less of me, I have no more vitality than when I fell asleep, nor is it possible for me easily to note the moments in which I sleep and wake.
When did I last get down to the basement to drink? The distance is astronomical now. I must spend some moments preparing myself to lift my arm, to reach for that vial there.
The water quickens my thinking, and settles heavily down into me.
Even my clothes are flying away from me; I move inside them as though they were blankets. There is no sound but the birds that call after dark, I suppose it is dark. That and the oceanic sound of my panting, a brief drag and an even shorter exhalation. I can’t see well enough to tell if she is there by the window or not.
Where? I fall in love with “where?” I love my fear, romantically. But I’m not afraid; I’m too tired.
I know my dreams chiefly because in them I am moving effortlessly through the house, standing upright. I formerly dreamt of difficulties with my clothing, getting tangled in my belt as I tried to auger new holes in it and sleeves that wouldn’t stay rolled up, but now I wander naked in the house. No one sees me, or so I assume, because I never see anyone. I always wish I would hear singing. I won’t fail this time—How wan and far away that idea is now!
I’m not the first, either. I give my best, even if I am only imitating Hen . . . Haro—Herman. Here is the upstairs banquet room with the pillars swaddled in wind, and watery squares of light from the windows flailing all over the walls, as if the garden below had been strung with hanging lamps the wind throws around. She lied about it not hurting, but then again I don’t mind it, so perhaps that’s what she meant: it will be painful, but I won’t mind it. The water distracts. I can never find the gramophone in the infinity room, but it might be just as well, if I were to find I couldn’t manage to operate it. I’m easily stunned.
. . . and the stiffly vibrating infinity pattern on floor and walls stuns me this time, the colors reverse fields and the patterns detach in layers that rush over each other, stretching my attention thinner and thinner away from me.
I do hear drumming now, more or less steady and slow. It’s a dull reverberation coming from the basement, and as usual I feel it more than I hear it properly.
It persists as I circulate through the upper floors, and deters me from going to the basement now. The water seems to be brought to me anyway, although I don’t see who brings it. I never see anyone. The hall outside the banqueting room is intensely bright, much too bright, the gleams from the metal fittings all over lance my eyes, and seem to chime and clang like tiny bells.
The drumming is still slow and steady, not a migraine though. I no longer get those it seems. Just pounding in my temples and ears so that I wish it would quit.
The stairs.
Even in my dream, it’s beginning to be a struggle to breathe. The top of the stairs, with the dark skylight above it, is only a flight away, and she might be up there, for all I know. The wind might be stirring something up there, or that might be her, just out of sight, doing something. Doing what? Perhaps she’s getting her whip out, to goad me. It will sink through my intangible dreamform, but she would have thought of that. I can’t think. Why doesn’t it stop? It hangs on for dear life, slow as it is. Are they building something in the basement? Hammers don’t pound in that slow steady way, they burst in groups of prime numbers. I have to lie down on the stairs, I can’t stand beside them anymore.
A little rest. It’s an odd thing to want in a dream, I know, but everything about dreams is an odd thing I know, everything that I know is a dream, an odd thing about them.
About dreams. That was the subject.
Am I resting?
The drumming is getting tired too. It is slower. Than I remember. Look. Look. Look. She sits two steps above me. She is making a gesture with her hand, for me to climb. Another step. Never mind the drum. It’s all old drum.
Dear thing, my old drum. I’m
nodding, to say—
yes,
I’ll climb in
a minute, once I’ve, one
once I have rested, just for a
time.
Are you coming down?
Don’t.
You don’t need to come down.
I can come up.
Up.
I can too
come up
once rested I’ve
time one
one
(*)
Sanglade turns to Trudy again, obliquely, only half its beaming face. Trudy glares back with simmering distaste. Sanglade seems to revel in the sunshine, as though it were a particularly special day. Maybe it’s some tragedy’s anniversary today, she thinks sourly. The cool, twinkling gloom of the house opens to her again and she makes her way to her place, dropping her sullenness as a useless encumbrance now she will be cool herself, neutral and calm. She will concentrate, without straining or trying, entirely on her work, and Sanglade can bombard her with pink elephants in an avalanche of dead bodies singing the national anthem without distracting her, calling yes! in falsetto to all her suffering, she won’t bat an eye.
After an hour or so, Dr. Camatsura mews in the doorway to get her attention, and softly asks her if she will go upstairs and bring down last year’s borrowing ledger from the record room. Trudy arrives at the bottom of the long staircase already resolved to ignore whatever she might see there, keeping her attention loosely gathered around her hand, always firmly on the banister, and on her feet. If there is anything there waiting for her on the steps, she may or may not see it out of the corner of her eye, but these are all just appearances and whatever has nothing to do with her task has nothing to do with her. I’m not paid to see things, I’m paid to perform certain tasks. The skylight draws near, powdering the walls and streaking the wood with tissue. Trudy’s legs are strong, and she reaches the fourth floor without slowing her even pace. All the same, she feels momentarily out of breath the moment she stops climbing. The air is thin up here. The air is fine. The skylight is still further up, high in a socket. She will not pause, as she nearly did, with one hand on the ball of the banister, but walks swiftly to the record room.
Snapping on the light, she stands in the doorway reading the labels on the shelves that stand end-forward against the far wall. Without wasted movement, without shutting the door, she goes directly to the proper shelf and stands in front of it, hands at her sides, finds the right book and only then raises her hand to take it down. It’s a thin, narrow volume covered in dull blue fabric and LEDGER printed on the front. It goes under her arm, and she leaves the record room, closing the door behind her.
She goes back to the stairway determined to be especially careful going down. Coming up, she had been so intent on her task she had not even glanced to her right and so hadn’t noticed the attic door standing ajar or the man’s shadow that sits just inside it on the steps, almost hidden entirely in the dark.
Don’t stop she says to herself and freezes. It’s not a man it’s a bundle of some stuff that fell down the steps and knocked open the door or it isn’t there at all, things don’t just fall but they do settle or give way—it’s not a man, that’s for certain. Her eyes relentlessly draw the outline of a man, there, in the dark.
