City of Saints and Madmen Part 26

The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red. Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

"Rebecca?" he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gi from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his le . He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi ju ed from the walls. Bo le-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anch.o.r.ed to the floor. Hoegbo on's palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic pa erns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony's corroded railing. Beyond: the dark gray shadows of the city, do ed with smudges of light.

Rebecca was looking down at . . . nothing . . . her hands held out before her as if in supplication.

"Rebecca!" he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain spla ered against his boots.

"Rebecca," he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. "Come away from there. It isn't safe." She was s.h.i.+vering. He could see her s.h.i.+vering.

Rebecca turned to look at him and smiled. "Isn't safe? You did this yourself, didn't you? Opened the balcony for me before you le this morning?" She frowned. "But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs. Willis said we couldn't keep pets."

"I didn't open the balcony. I didn't send back the cage." His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.

"Well, someone brought it here-and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn't."

"Rebecca-it isn't safe. Come away from the balcony." His words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

"I wish I knew what it was," she said. "Can you see it? It's right here-in front of me."

He started to say no, he couldn't see it, but then he realized he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bi en into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca's sake melted away.

"Come here, Rebecca," he managed to say.

"Yes. Okay," she said in a small, broken voice.

Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. He met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, "You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs. Willis. Have her send for the Cappan's men." Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.

"I'm scared," she whispered back, arms thrown around him. "Come with me."

"I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave." He was trembling from mixed horror at the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.

Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.

The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The s.p.a.ces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.

Hoegbo on walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old ro ing chair they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the balcony railing, out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy-that he had never really le -because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?

The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer ma ered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca's eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosph.o.r.escent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin s.h.i.+mmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience that.

The thing held out its clawed hand and, a er a time, Hoegbo on took it in his own.

In the Hours After Death By Nicholas Sporlender Nicholas Sporlender has contributed more than a dozen fictions to Burning Leaves over the years, including such memorable works as "The Exchange" (since published as a stand-alone chapbook by Hoegbotton & Sons), "The Smoldering Eye," "A Nail, Driven Deep" and "The Game of Lost and Found." Recently, Mr. Sporlender severed his long professional relations.h.i.+p with the artist (and art director of this publication) Louis Verden. The editorial board of Burning Leaves would like to take this opportunity to express its wish that the worthy gentleman will reconsider and provide Ambergris with many more years of macabre delights.

I.

In the first hour after death, the room is so still that every sound holds a terrible clarity, like the tap of a knife against gla.s.s. The soft pad of shoes as someone walks away and closes the door is profoundly solid-each short footstep weighted, distinct. The body lies against the floor, the sightless eyes staring down into the wood as if some answer has been buried in the grain. The back of the head is mottled by the shadows of the trees that sway outside the open window. The trickle of red from the scalp that winds its way down the cheek, to puddle next to the clenched hand, is as harmless now, leached of threat, as if it were colored water. The man's features have become slack, his mouth parted slightly, his expression surprised. The wrinkles on his forehead form ridges of superfluous worry. His trumpet lies a few feet away . . . From outside the window, the coolness of the day brings the green-gold scent of lilacs and crawling vines. The rustle of leaves. The deepening of light. A hint of blue through the trees. After a time, a mouse, fur ragged and one eye milky white, sidles across the floor, sits on its haunches in front of the body, and sni fs the air. The mouse circles the man. It explores the hidden pockets of the man's gray suit, trembles atop the shoes, nibbles at the laces, sticks its nose into a pant cu f. A metallic sound, faint and chaotic, rises through the window. The mouse stands unsteadily on its hind legs and sni fs the air again, then scurries back to its hole underneath the table. The sound intensifies, as of many instruments lurching together in drunken surprise. Perhaps the noise startled the mouse, or perhaps the mouse was frightened by some changed aspect of the man himself. The man's chin has begun to sprout tendrils of dark green fungi that mimic the texture of hair, curling and twisting across the man's face while the music comes ever closer. The tendrils move in concert. The clash of sounds has more unity than raw cacophony, yet no coherence. It seems as if several people tuning their instruments have begun to play their own separate, unsynchronized melodies. Somewhere in the welter of pompous horns and trumpets, a violin whines dimly. The tendrils of fungi wander in lazy attempts to colonize the blood. The music rollicks along, by turns melancholy and defiant. The man hears nothing, of course; the blood has begun to crust across his forehead. The smell of the room has become fetid, damp. The shadows have grown darker. The table in the corner-upon which lies a half-eaten sandwich-casts an ominous shade of purple. Eventually, the music reaches a crescendo beneath the window. It has a questioning nature, as if the people playing the instruments are looking at one another, asking each other what to do next. The man's face moves a little from the vibration. His fungi beard is smiling. In a di ferent light, he might almost look alive, intently staring at the floorboards, into the apartments below. Bells toll dimly from the Religious Quarter, announcing dinner prayers. The afternoon is almost gone. The room feels colder as the light begins to leave it. The music becomes less hesitant. Within minutes, the music is clanking up the stairs, toward the apartment. The music sounds as if it is running. It is running. The tendrils, in a race with the music, have spread farther, faster, covering all of the man's face with a dark green mask. As if misinterpreting their success, they do not spread out over the rest of his body but instead build on the mask, until it juts hideously from the face. The door begins to buckle before a blaring of horns, a torrid st.i.tching of violins. Someone puts a key into the lock and turns the doork.n.o.b. The door opens. The music enters in all its chaotic glory. The man lies perfectly still on the floor beside the almost dry puddle of blood. A forest of legs and shoes surround him. The music becomes a dirge, haunted by the ghost of some strange fluted instrument. The musicians circle the body, their distress flowing through their music, their long straight shadows playing across the man's body. But for a tinge of green, the man's face has regained its form. The fungus has disappeared. Who could have known this would happen? Only the dead man, who had been looking into the grain as if some mystery lay there. The dead man lurches to his feet and picks up his trumpet. Smiles. Takes his hat from the table and places it on his head, over the blood. Wets his lips. He puts the trumpet to his mouth as all the other instruments become silent. He begins to blow, the tone clear yet discordant, his own music but not in tune. The faces of his friends come into focus, surround him, buzzing with words. His friends laugh. They hug him, tell him how glad they are it was all a joke; they had heard the most terrible things; please, do not scare them that way again. They did not know whether to play for a funeral or a rumorless resurrection. Unable to decide, they had played for both at once. He laughs, pats the nearest on the back. Play, he says. But he is not part of them. Play, he implores. But he is not one of them. And they play-marching out the door with him, they play. He is no longer one of them. When the door closes, the room is as empty as before, although the stairs echo with music. Over time, the sound fades. It fades until it is not even the memory of a sound, and then not even that. Nothing moves in the room. The man has been returned to himself. This is the first hour of death in the city of Ambergris. You may not rest for long. You may, in a sense, become yourself again. Worst of all, you may remember every detail but be unable to do anything about it.

II.

In the second hour after death, the man finds himself with his musician friends playing a concert in a public park. A crowd has gathered, some standing, others kneeling or sitting on benches. The trumpet is hot and golden in the man's hands. With each breath he blows into his trumpet, he feels the surge of an unidentifiable emotion and a detail from his past appears in his mind. The man feels as if he were filling up with Life, each breath enhancing him rather than maintaining him. He remembers his name- the round, generous vowels of it-but resists the urge to shout it out. A name is a good foundation on which to build. The members of the audience are cheerful smudges compared to the clear, sharp lines of his friends as they move in time-honored synchronicity with their instruments. Their names, too, pop into his head-each a tiny explosion of pleasure. Soon, he swims in a sea of names: mother, father, brother, daughter, postman, baker, bartender, butcher, shopkeeper . . . He smiles the radiant smile of a man who has recalled his life and found it good. This is the pinnacle of the second hour, although not all are so lucky. To some, the knowledge of ident.i.ty seems to be escaping through their pores, each exhaled thought just another casualty of the emptying. The man, however, is not so truthful with himself. He smells the honeysuckle, tastes the pipe smoke from a pa.s.serby, hears the tiny bells of an anklet tinkling through a pause in the music and does not wonder why these sensations are dull, m.u.f.fled. His friends' faces are so near and sharp. Why should he worry about the rest? The blur of the world shouldn't be his concern. The instruments that seem so cruel, all honed edges, the metal reflecting at odd angles to create horrible disfigurements of his face? Why, it is just a trick of the shadows. The quickness of his breath? Why, it is just the aftermath of musical epiphany. The fluttering of his eyelids. The sudden pallor. The smudge of green that he wipes with irritation from his cheek . . . When the concert ends and the crowds disperse under threat of night, the man is quick to nod and laugh and join in one last ragged musical salute. An invitation down narrow streets to a cafe for a drink elicits a desperate grat.i.tude-he slaps the backs of his friends, nods furiously, already beginning to lose the names again: pennies fallen through a hole in a s.h.i.+rt pocket. On the way to the cafe, he notices how strangely the city now speaks to him, in the voices of innuendo and suggestion, all surfaces unknown, all buildings crooked or deformed or worse. The sidewalk vendors are ciphers. The pa.s.sersby count for less than shadows; he cannot look at them directly, his gaze a repulsing magnet. He clutches his trumpet, knuckles white. He would like to play it, bring the jovial wide vowels of his name once more into focus, but he cannot. The names of his friends fast receding, his laughter becomes by turns forced, nervous, sad, and then brittle. When they reach the cafe, the man looks around the beer-strewn table at his friends and wonders how he fell in with such amiable strangers. They call him by a name he barely remembers. The sky fills with a darkness that consists of the weight of all the thoughts that have left him. The man wraps his jacket tight. The street lamps are cold yellow eyes peering in through the window. The conversations at the table tighten around the man in layers, each sentence less and less to do with him. Now he cannot look at them. Now they run away to the edge of his vision like a trickle of blood from a wound. The man's last image of his dead wife leaves him, his daughter's memory lost in the same moment. Even the dead do not want to die. Stricken, face animated by fear, he stands and announces that he must leave, he must depart, he must go home, although thoughts of the grainy apartment floor leave a dread like ice in his bowels . . . This, then, is the last defiant act of the second hour: to state a determination to take action, even though you will never take that action. The world has become a mere construct-a hollow reed created that you might breathe. You may hear echoes of a strange and sibilant music, coursing like an undercurrent through inanimate objects. This music may bring tears to your eyes. It may not. Regardless, you are now entering the third hour of death.

III.

In the third hour after death, all other memories having been emptied and extinguished, the repressed memory of lifelessness returns, although the man denies the truth of it. Denies the sting of splinters against his face, the taste of sawdust, the comfort of the cool floorboards. He thinks it is a bad dream and mutters to himself that he will just walk a little longer to clear up the headaches pulsing through his head. The man still holds his trumpet. Every few steps, he stops to look at it. He is trying to remember what he once used it for. The third hour can last for a very long time. After awhile, staring at his trumpet, an unquenchable sadness rises over him until he is engulfed in a sorrow so deep it must be borne because nothing better lies beyond it. It is the sorrow of lost details; the darkness of it hints at the echoes of memories now gone. Indirectly, the man can sense what grieves him, but the very glittering reflection of its pa.s.sage is enough to blind him. To him, it feels as if the natural world has made him sad, for he has wandered into a park and the sky far above through the branches seethes with the light of a restless moon. If the man could only see his way to the center of a single memory and hold it in his mind, he might understand what has happened to him. Instead, from the edge of his attention, the absence of mother, father, wife, daughter, leaves only outlines. It is too much to bear. It must be borne . . . In some cases, recognition may take the form of violent acts-one last convulsion against the inevitable. But not in the man's case. In him, the sorrow only deepens, for he has begun to suspect the truth. The man wanders through gardens and courtyards, through tree-lined neighborhoods and along city-tamed streams, all touched equally by the blank expanse of night. He is without thought except to avoid thought, without purpose except to avoid purpose. He does not tire-nothing without will can ever tire-and as he walks, he begins to touch what he pa.s.ses. He runs his hands through the scru fy tops of bushes. He rubs his face against the trunk of a tree. He follows the line of a sidewalk crack with his finger. As the night progresses, a tightness enters his face, a self-aware phosph.o.r.escence. When he leans down to float his hand through a fountain pool, his face wavers in the water like a green-tinged second moon. Pa.s.sersby run away or cross the street at his approach. He has no opinion on this; it does not upset or amuse him. He is rapidly becoming Other: Otherwhere, Otherflesh. His trumpet? Long ago fallen from a distracted grasp . . . Eventually, the trailing hand will find something of more than usual interest. For the man, this occurs when he sits down on a wooden bench and the touch of the grain on his palm brings a familiarity welling up through his fingertips. He runs his arms across the wood. He strokes the wood, trying to form a memory from before the sorrow. He lies down on the bench and presses his face against the grain . . . until he sees his apartment room and the blood pooling in the foreground of his vision and knows that he is dead. Then the man sits up, his receding sorrow replaced by nothing. Tendrils of fungi rise from their hiding places inside his body. The man waits as they curl across his face, his torso, his arms, his legs. And he sees the night for possibly the first time ever. And he sees them coming out from the holes in the night. But he does not flinch. He does not run. He no longer even tries to breathe. He no longer tries to be anything other than what he is. For this is the last phase of the third hour of death. After the third hour, you will never be unhappy again. You will never know pain. You will never have to endure the sting of an unkind word. Every muscle, every sinew, every bone, every blood vessel in your body will relax to let in the darkness. When they come for you, as they surely will, you will finally understand, under the cool weavings of the tendrils, what a good thing this can be. You will finally understand that there is no fourth hour after death. And you will marvel that the world could be so still, so silent, so clear.

Dr. Simpkin: You will find my (almost complete) decryption of X's numbers below. I did not enjoy tackling this a.s.signment. What began as a lark became an unnerving experience. At first, I fixated on two irritating thoughts: (l) that X had double-s.p.a.ced his story just to waste paper; (2) that he had written it just to waste typewriter ribbon. As I decrypted the first few sentences, I could not help but feel that X, from some distant place, was peering over my shoulder and laughing at me. (Such laughter was depressingly common during his stay with us.) My mood of irritation changed as I began to realize the discipline X had brought to his endeavors. The sheer persistence required to translate so many words into numbers impressed me. If the story was this difficult to decode--I began, for example, to experience blinding headaches--then how much more difficult had it been to encrypt in the first place? Had his escape involved the daily removal of a single fragment of brick from the wall of his cell, I don't believe X could have demonstrated greater patience.

As I continued to work, fatigue transformed my ba.n.a.l task into grim revelation. The shadows grew long; the light left the window of my cramped office. X's phantom laughter faded and the only sound was the dry scritch of my pen against paper. A belief at odds with the rationality of my profession colonized me: that I was creating the events uncovered with each excavated word. This sensation, so unexpected, made me s.h.i.+ver and suck in my breath. It brought my efforts to a shuddering halt. I literally felt that I was bringing into existence an entire future for Ambergris--a future so horrible I would not conjure it up for all the typewriter ribbons in the world. I threw down my pen; then picked it up and bent it until it broke, as if to guard against any possibility of continuing. That said, I could not bring myself to try to decrypt the final paragraph. I felt the ramifications would be too earth-shattering.

When I summoned the nerve to review my decryption effort (which I call "The Man Who Had No Eyes"), I discovered I had "mistranslated" at least seven words. I got up to retrieve X's book from the filing cabinet where I had quarantined it, intending to correct my errors, but immediately sat down again, terror paralyzing me. I could not move or speak for several minutes, frozen from the belief that the book itself had changed and was now writing me. During this negative epiphany, the shadows seemed to undulate like wings. The air was close and thick. When I emerged from my trance state, I knew that the results of correcting those seven words would be unthinkable. (Such an episode, had it originated with one of my patients, would have been the stuff of five or six therapy sessions.) As I type this note, I realize it is nonsense to believe words on a page can affect reality. It is just a story. It is just X's final goodbye. However, I cannot bring myself to send the book to you along with the other items. Yes, I do need it for my collection, but there are more important reasons to keep it here.

You should visit us. You could stay a few days, a.s.sist us in those areas where we lack personnel, maybe bring us some supplies. I do not think the text that next you read will much resemble what you may remember, but this place is the same, if in worse disrepair.

I wonder if there is already a name for my affliction.

Dr. V P.S. Some of the words I have translated seem to make no sense--in my haste I have made errors--but the last paragraph has escaped my efforts completely, for reasons I will touch on later.

The Man Who Had No Eyes There came a day when the gray caps changed the course of the River Moth and flooded the city of Ambergris. Abandoning their PLOTTED lair, they came out into the light, put the rulers of the city to flight, and took over the islands that were now Cinsorium once again.

At first, people found that life did not change much under the new rulers. It certainly did not change for the most famous writer in Ambergris. Born in the city, he used the city as his palette, bending every word in the world to his will. He could create paragraphs so essential that to be without their smooth, wise forms was to be without a soul. If his mood was grim, he would create suicide paragraphs: words from the almost dead to the definitely dead. He could, I tell you, describe an object in such a way that forever after his description replaced the original.

Perhaps if he had been less talented, he would have been less APED. For praise rose all about him as naturally as the fog that came off the River Moth and he came to think of himself as unbound by any laws other than those of fiction.

Thus, he felt a growing need to break the labyrinthine rules of the gray caps. He laughed at daybreak in front of the watery ruins of Truffidian Cathedral. After dusk, he distributed his stories on public streets for free. He read his work from a boat above the flooded and now ANONYMITY statue of Voss Bender. He wrote paragraphs in honor of the Lady in Blue (who, from the underground pa.s.sages of the gray caps, confronted them with the evidence of their own cruelty).

After the fifth such offense, the gray caps cut out his tongue and threw it into the now BONFIRES River Moth, for the fish had grown fond of such flesh. They plucked out his eyes and used them on their barges. They cut off his hands and used them as candles at their administrative offices. They mutilated his torso with their symbol, in fungus green. Then they sent him to the one-room stilt house of his birth, by the water, so that he could, in GORGEOUS, contemplate his fate where once he had watched swallows fly, s.n.a.t.c.hing insects.

For a long time, no one visited the writer out of fear. His own wife left him because she was not BLINDING enough. Every week, a Truffidian priest would come close enough to leave food and water on his doorstep.

The writer sat in a chair facing the wall as the stories built up inside of him until he was so full that he thought he would die from the SNARL of them in his lungs. But he had no tongue with which to speak. He had no eyes with which to see the world. He had no hands with which to write down his stories. He lived inside a box inside a box. What now could he do?

For many weeks, he thought about killing himself and might have done so except that one day he b.u.mped against the table on which he set the supplies and a pen rolled off the edge. It fell against his left foot. The touch was cold and sharp. The sensation spread up his leg and up into his torso until, inside the boxes inside his head, something awoke.

The writer spent the next three weeks feeling his way across every inch of his room much as you, dear reader, are feeling your way through this story. He picked up anything that lay against the walls until the table, the chair, the bed, and a few books all stood in the middle of the room. Then, holding the pen between his toes, he began to write on the wall.

It took many months to learn how to write with his feet. It was weeks before the visiting priest could read a single letter and much longer before anything more complex appeared on the walls. Words formed without form: "cras.h.i.+ng am worry depends on the continuing earth exists can Zamilon." Each letter became an act of will-a playing out in his mind of what it should look like and then making his toes, his foot, his leg, apply the correct pressure to the wall so that the pen did not break and the shape took form correctly.

Over time, the writer covered the walls of his room with the visions that blossomed in the dark gardens of his mind. Words formed sentences, sentences paragraphs, paragraphs stories. With each word, a great burden lifted itself from the writer and he began to feel like himself again. Later, with sheets of paper and more pens begged from the priest, more words spilled out in a jumble, his pages a flood greater than that brought by the gray caps.

I saw one of the stories the writer wrote on the wall--in red ink, surrounded by thousands of other, disconnected words. It read: There once was a cage in an empty room. A soft, soft sound like weeping came from the cage. After a time, a man entered the room. He was gray and sad. He held a small animal by the ears. It was battling to escape. The cage grew silent. The man approached the cage. He pulled the cage door open, threw in the animal, and slammed the door shut. As the man watched, the animal screamed, its paws sliding off the bars. A wound appeared in its left leg. A wound appeared in its left shoulder. Slowly, the animal was eaten alive until it was just a pile of bone and blood. The weeping became relentless. Everything the man placed within the cage died. Every time, the man felt a corresponding thrill of delight. But eventually the thrill died too. It became ordinary, something he had to do. Would it ever stop? He could not decide. One day, he grew so bored that he opened the cage to let the nothing out. He expected it would kill him, but it did not. It let him live. It followed him everywhere. Over time, it killed everything he held dear, weeping the entire time. When nothing was left to care about, it abandoned the man. The man sat in his room with the empty cage and made the weeping sound the cage had once made.

Before the gray caps had mutilated him, the writer had published dreams and long, absurd stories. He had published fake histories and travel guides. I cannot say I care much for what he writes now, although he became famous for it. Within a short time, readers began to come from far away to buy a page from him. The writer would be able to continue to do what he had always done. He just had no tongue. He just had no eyes. He just had no hands. Was that really so bad?

At least, this is the story the man wrote for me when, as a traveler to Ambergris--fresh from an encounter with the giant squid that had scuttled my boat--I visited him in his room. Later, others told me that he had been born in his current state and that all of his ideas came from old books by obscure authors, read to him by a friend.

When I first saw him, he sat by a window, his head thrown back as if to receive the light. (I now know he was listening. Intently.) The writer was a wiry man whose face, with its wrinkles and mouth of perpetual grimace, hinted at tortures beyond imagining. His arms did indeed end in nothing. His legs, curled beneath him, were tight with muscle and ended in muscular feet. His toes seemed as supple as my fingers. When I came in, he smiled at me. He uncurled his feet, stood, and held his leg up in a ridiculous position. I thought he wanted to "shake hands," but no: he held a piece of paper between his toes.

He nudged it toward me. I took it. What did it say? I could not read it. It was just a series of numbers. What do numbers mean to a man like me? Nothing.

LEARNING TO LEAVE THE FLESH.

I.

Browsing through the Borges Bookstore, on a mission for my girlfriend Emily, I am suddenly confronted by a dwarf woman. The light from the front window strikes me sideways with the heat of late afternoon and, when she upturns her palm, the light illuminates all the infinite worlds enclosed in the wrinkles: pale road lines, rivers that pa.s.s through valleys, hillocks of skin and flesh. A matrix of destinies and destinations.

Before I can react, the dwarf woman takes my hand in hers and stabs me with a thorn, sending it deep into my palm. I grunt in pain, as if a physician had just taken a blood sample. I look down into her large, dark eyes and I see such calm there that the pain winks out, only returning when she shuffles off, hunchback and all, out of the bookstore.

The walls rush away from me, the shelves so distant that I cannot even brace myself against them. I bring my hand up into the light. The thorn has worked itself beneath the surface and might even burrow deeper, if I let it. I examine the blood-blistery entrance hole. It throbs, and already a pinkish-red color spreads across my palm like a dry fire. The hole itself could be a city on a map, a citadel torn apart by the angry pulse of warfare that will soon spread into the countryside. A war within my flesh.

I leave the bookstore and walk back to my apartment. The boulevard, Alb.u.muth, has a degree of security, but only two blocks down, on graffiti-choked overpa.s.ses, young teenage futureperfects carouse and cruise through the night-to-come, courting pleasures of the flesh, courting corruption of the soul. Alb.u.muth is my lifeline, the artery to the downtown section where I work, buy groceries, and acquire books. Without it, the city would be dangerous. Without it, I might be unanch.o.r.ed, cast adrift.

As it is, I drag my shoes on the sidewalk, taking every opportunity to run my fingers along white picket fences, hunch down to pet c.o.c.ker spaniels, converse with smiling apple grannies, and stare into the deep eyes of children.

Even now, so soon after, the wound has begun to change. I manage to pry out the thorn. The hole looks less and less like a city in flames and more like part of my own hand. Rarely has a portion of my anatomy so intrigued me. No doubt Emily has traced the lines between my freckles, explored the gaps between my toes, run her hands through the sprawl of hair on my chest, but I have never examined my own body in such detail. My body has never seemed relevant to who I am, except that I must keep it fit so it will not betray my mind.

But I examine my palm quite critically now. The wrinkles do not share consistency of length or width and calluses gather like barnacles or melted-down toothpaste caps. Abrasions, pinknesses, and a few tiny scars mar my palm. I conclude that my palm is ugly beyond hope of cosmetic surgery.

I reach my apartment as the sun fades into the blocky shadows of the city's rooftops and scattered chimneys. My apartment occupies the first floor of a two-story brownstone. The bricks are wrinkled with age and soft as wet clay in places. The anemic front lawn has been seeded with sand to keep the gra.s.s from growing.

Inside my apartment, the kitchen and living room open up onto the bedroom and bath to left and right respectively. In my bedroom there is a window seat from which, through the triangular, plated-gla.s.s window, I can see nothing but gray asphalt and a deserted shopping mall.

In the kitchen and living room, my carefully cultivated plants behave like irrational but brilliant sentences; they crawl up walls, shoot away from trellises despite my best efforts. I have wisteria, blossoms cl.u.s.tered like pelican limpets, sea grapes with soft round leaves, pa.s.sion fruit flowers, trumpet vines, and night-blooming jasmine, whose petals open up and smell like cotton candy melted into the brine-rich scent of the sea. Together, they perform despotic Victorian couplings beyond the imagination of the most creative menage a trois.

Emily hates my plants. When we make love, we go to her apartment. We make such perfect love there, in her perfectly immaculate bedroom-a mechanized grind of limbs pumping like pistons-that we come together, shower together afterwards, and rarely leave a ring of hair in the bathtub.

II.

I suppose I did not think much about the thorn at the time because now, as I lie in bed listening to the dullard yowls and taunts of the futureperfects riding their cars halfway across the city, the wound's pulsating, pounding rhythm leads me back to my first real memory of the world.

Orphaned very young, my parents lost at sea in a s.h.i.+pwreck, yet not quite a baby to be left on a doorstep, I remember only this fragment: the sea at low tide with night sliding down on the world like a black door. Water licked my feet and I felt the coolness of sand between my toes, the bite of the wind against my face. And: the plop-plop of tiny silver fish caught in tidal pools; the s.p.a.ckle of starfish trapped in seaweed and glistening troughs of sand; ghost crabs scuttling sideways on creaking joints, pieces of flesh clutched daintily in their pincers.

I do not know how old I was or how I came to be on that beach. I know only that I sat on the sand, the stars faded lights against the cerulean sweep of sky. As dusk became nightfall, hands grasped me by the shoulders and dragged me up the dunes into the stickery gra.s.s and the sea grape, the pa.s.sionflower and the cactus, until I could see the ferris wheel of a seaside circus and hear the hum-and-thrum hollow acoustic sob of people laughing and shouting.

Whether this is a real place or an image from my imagination, I do not know. But it returns to center me in this world when I have no center; it gives me something beyond this city, my job, my apartment. Somewhere, magical, once upon a time, I lay under the stars at nightfall and I dreamed the fantastic.

I have few friends. Foster children who move from family to family, town to town, rarely maintain friends.h.i.+ps. Foster parents seem now like dust shadows spread out against a windowpane. I can remember faces and names, but I feel so remote from them compared to the memory of the wheeling, open arch of horizon before and above me.

Now I have a wound in my palm. A wound that leads me back to the beach at dusk, of my grief at my parents' death, that I had not drowned with them. Living but not moving. Observing but not doing. At the center of myself I am suggestibility, not action. Never action.

My parents took actions. They did things. And they died.

III.

Despite my wound-not a good excuse-I drive to work down Alb.u.muth Boulevard, turning into the parking lot where tufts of gra.s.s thrust up between cracks in the red brick. The shop where I work occupies a slice of the town square. It has antique gla.s.s windows, dark green curtains to deflect the gaze of the idly or suspiciously curious, and stairs leading both up and down, to the loft and the bas.e.m.e.nt.

My job is to create perfect sentences for a varied clientele. No mere journalism this, for journalism requires the clarity of gla.s.s, not a mirror, nor even a reflection. I spend hours at my cubicle in the loft, looking out over the hundreds of rooftops, surrounded by the fresh sawdust smell of words and the loamy must of reference text piled atop reference text.

True, I am only one among many working here. Some are not artists but technicians who gargle with pebbles to improve the imperfect diction of their perfect sentences, or casually fish for them, tugging on their lines once every long while in the hope that the sentences will surface whole, finished, and fat with meaning. Still others smoke or drink or use illicit drugs to coax the words onto the page. Many of them are quite funny in their circuitous routines. I even know their names: Wendy, Carl, Daniel, Christine, Pamela, Andrea. But we are so fixated on creating our sentences that we might well pa.s.s each other as strangers on the street.

We must remain fixated, for the Director-a vast and stealthy intelligence, a leviathan moving ponderous many miles beneath the surface-demands it. We receive several paid solicitations each day that ask for a description of a beloved husband, a dying dog, or a housewife who wishes to tell her husband how he neglects her all unknowing: He hugs her and mumbles like a sailor in love with the sea, drowning without protest as the water takes him deeper; until her lungs are awash and he has caught her in his endless dream of drowning.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

Of course, we do not create objectively perfect sentences- sometimes our sentences are not even very good. If we could create truly perfect sentences, we would destroy the world: it would fold in on itself like a p.r.i.c.ked hot air balloon and cease to be: poof!, undone, unmade, unlived, in the harsh glacial light of a reality more real than itself.

But I am such a perfectionist that, in the backwater stagnation of other workers' coffee breaks, in the tapa-tap-tap of rain trying to keep me from my work, I continue to string verbs onto p.r.o.nouns, railroading those same verbs onto indirect objects, attaching modifiers like strategically placed tinsel on a Christmas tree.

By my side I keep a three-ringed, digest-sized notebook of memories to help me live the lives of our clients, to get under their skins and know them as I know myself. Only twelve pages have been filled, most of them recounting events after I reached my fifteenth birthday. Many notes are only names, like Bobby Zender, a friend and fellow orphan at the reform school. He had a gimp foot and for a year I matched my strides to his, never once broke ahead of him or ran out onto the playground to play kickball. He died of tuberculosis. Or Sarah Galindrace, with the darkest eyes and the shortest dresses and skin like silk, like porcelain, like heaven. She moved away and became an echo in my heart.

These memories often help me with the sentences, but today the wound on my hand bothers me, distracts me from the pristine longleaf sheets of paper on the drafting boards. The pen, a black quill that crisply scratches against the paper, menaces me. My fellow workers stare; their bushy black eyebrows and manes of blond hair and mad stallion eyes make me nervous. I sweat. I teeter uneasily on my high stool and try not to stare out the window at the geometrically pleasing telephone lines that slice the sky into a matrix of points of interest: church spires, flagpoles, neon billboards.

A woman who has finally found true romance needs a sentence to tell her boyfriend how much she loves him. My palm flares when I take up the pen; the pen could as well be a knife or a chisel or some object with which I am equally unfamiliar. My skin feels itchy, as if I have picked at the edges of a scab. But I write the sentence anyway: When I see you, my heart rises like bread in an oven.

The sentence is awful. The Director leans over and concurs with a nod, a hand on my shoulder, and the gravelly murmur, "You are trying too hard. Relax. Relax."

Yes. Relax. I think of Emily and the book I was going to get for her at the Borges Bookstore: The Refraction of Light in a Prison . Perhaps if I can project from my relations.h.i.+p with Emily I can force the sentence to work. I think of her sharp cadences, the way she bites the ends off words as if snapping celery stalks in two. Or the time she tickled me senseless in the middle of her sister's wedding and I had to pretend I was drunk just to weather the embarra.s.sment. Or this: the smooth, spoon-tight feel of her stomach against my lips, the miraculous tangle of her blond hair.

So. I try again.

When I see you, my heart rises like a flitting hummingbirdto a rose.

Now I am truly hopeless. The repet.i.tion of "rises" and "rose" knifes through all alternatives and I am convinced I should have been a plumber, a dentist, a shoes.h.i.+ne boy. Words that should layer themselves into patterns-strike pa.s.sion in the heart-become ugly and cold. The dead weight of cliche has given me a headache.

At dusk, I ask the Director for a day off. He gives it to me, orders me to do nothing but walk around the city, perhaps take in a ball game in the old historical section, perhaps a Voss Bender exhibit at the TeelMemorialArt Museum.

IV.

I spend my day off contemplating my palm with my girlfriend Emily Brosewiser, she of the aforementioned blond hair, the succulent lips, the tactile smile, the moist charm. (My comparisons become so fecund I think I would rather love a fruit or vegetable.) We sit on a lichen-encrusted bench at the San Matador Park, my arm around her shoulders, and watch the mallards siphoning through the pond sc.u.m for food. The gasoline-green gra.s.s scent and the heat of the summer sun make me sleepy. The park seems cluttered with dwarfs: litter picker-uppers armed with their steely harpoons; lobotomy patients from the nearby hospital, their stares as direct as a lover's; burly hunchbacked fellows going over the lawn with gleaming red lawnmowers. They distract me-errant punctuation scattered across a pristine page.

Emily sees them only as clowns and myself as sick. "Sick, sick, sick." How can I disagree? She smells so clean and her hair s.h.i.+nes like spun gold.

"They were always there before, Nicholas, and you never noticed them. Why should they matter now? Don't pick at that." She slaps my hand and my palm thrums with pain. "Why must you obsess over it so? Here we are with a day off and you cannot leave it alone."

Emily works for an ad agency. She designs sentences that sell perfection to the consumer public. Before I ever met Emily, I saw her work on billboards at the outskirts of town: "Buy Skuttles: We Expect No Reb.u.t.tals" and "Someday You Are Gonna Die: In the Meantime, Buy and Buy-at the Coriander Mall." At the bottom, in small print, the billboards read: "Ads by Emily." At the time, I was girlfriendless so I called up the billboard makers, tracked down the ad agency, and asked her out. She liked my collection of erotic sentences and my manual dexterity. I liked the gossamer line of hair that runs down her forearms, the curves of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with their tiny pink nipples.

But her sentences have become pa.s.se to me, too crude and manipulative. How can I expect more from her, given the nature of the business?

So I say, "Yes, dear," and sigh and examine my palm. She is always reasonable. Always right. But I am not sure she understands me. I wonder what she would think about my memory of the arc of sky above with night coming down and the sea rustling on the sh.o.r.e. She did not argue when I insisted on separate apartments.

The circle on my palm has gone from pink to white and the way the wrinkle lines careen into one another, the scars like tiny fractures, fascinates me.

Emily giggles. "Nicholas, you are so perfectly silly sitting there with that bemused look on your face. Anyone would think you'd just had a miscarriage."

I wonder if there is something wrong with our relations.h.i.+p; it seems as blank as my life as an orphan. Besides, "miscarriage" is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the look on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through, but still . . .