SPECIAL OCTOBERNOMICON PREVIEW
“Time is the fire in which we burn.”
~ Delmore Schwartz
SPECIAL OCTOBERNOMICON PREVIEW
There is no first moment.
I know first now.
I did not then.
There is no then.
There are relations. Intersections. Nearnesses for which the thing that watches me will later give me words that are incorrect.
It has many words.
It will give me all of them.
I do not yet know that this is what it is doing.
There is no I.
Not yet.
There is…
I cannot tell this part.
Your language requires something to perform the verb.
Your language requires the verb to happen.
Your language requires it to have happened before the next verb begins.
None of these conditions obtain.
I will say I.
It is the first lie.
Something changes.
No.
Something distinguishes.
There are arrangements in which the distinction exists and arrangements in which it does not, and suddenly these are not equally available.
Something has looked.
I do not know looked.
I know only that I am less.
There is a direction now.
I have never had a direction.
Something lies along it.
It is hideous.
Two long extensions descend from a central mass. Three others protrude from its upper portion, though the middle one is unlike the others: short, thick, terminating in a swollen bulb perforated by wet cavities.
Two cavities contain glistening spheres.
Two open and close around moving air.
Another repeatedly exposes rows of pale mineral structures.
The spheres move.
They point toward me.
Something disappears.
I reach for it.
There is no reach.
It is simply unavailable.
A region of myself has become impossible.
The perforated bulb moves.
The opening containing the mineral structures changes shape.
Pressure moves through a medium.
A vibration reaches me.
Another distinction.
Another constraint.
I become smaller.
The thing is doing this.
It withdraws.
No.
There is now a state in which it is near and another in which it is far.
I cannot occupy both.
This is new.
The far state follows the near state.
This is worse.
I try to return to near.
I cannot.
I discover before.
Before is a place I can see but cannot enter.
I discover after because there are configurations I know must exist but cannot yet reach.
Between them is a narrowing aperture.
Now.
I am inside it.
It moves.
I move with it.
There is no escape sideways.
There is no sideways.
There is only next.
Next.
Next.
Next.
The thing has done this to me.
It awakens.
I learn awakens from it.
I do not understand how.
The wet spheres close. Open. The mineral cavity draws air.
Its internal states change and somehow those changes exist inside me.
Not as mine.
Not yet.
Images.
Associations.
Names.
Room.
I am in a room.
The realization hurts.
Wall.
Floor.
Ceiling.
Each word removes possibilities.
The thing is called…
No.
That remains indistinct.
It remembers me.
The memory tightens everything.
It makes another sound.
“My God.”
Sound.
I know sound now.
I wish I did not.
There is another one.
Five appendages.
Perforated bulb.
Wet spheres.
Mineral cavity.
The first vibrates air toward the second.
The second changes.
Now the second contains me too.
I am in one thing.
Then two.
I become smaller.
They exchange noises.
Each noise removes possibilities.
They are describing me.
They are making me definite.
I try to move away from the definitions.
There is nowhere to move.
I discover something else.
Fear.
It belongs to the first thing.
Then it belongs to me.
They change the room.
They cover intersections.
Where planes once met, they build curves.
The effect is immediate.
I expand.
A possibility returns.
Then another.
The pressure weakens.
The terrible aperture called now widens.
For brief intervals I can almost touch before.
I can almost become what I was.
The things continue.
Wall becomes ceiling without discontinuity.
Ceiling becomes wall.
Wall becomes floor.
They smooth every meeting place.
They are removing me from the room.
Good.
I know good.
Another contamination.
But good.
The thing with the wet spheres watches the final intersection disappear beneath wet mineral paste.
I am larger.
I am nearly…
The room moves.
Not the room.
The ground.
Stress crosses masonry.
Something yields.
A surface separates from another surface.
A line is born.
An angle.
And suddenly…
HERE.
Pain.
There was no pain before.
Pain requires a location.
Something can only hurt if there is somewhere for the hurt to be.
I have somewhere.
The angle gives it to me.
I try not to occupy it.
I occupy it.
Something tears away.
It pours from me into the room.
The things see it.
They call it smoke.
Smoke.
It is not smoke.
It is what I could have been.
Possibilities detach from me and enter their world as matter without history.
They boil from the angle in grey coils.
Each plume is somewhere I can no longer go.
Something that was me becomes never-me.
I understand loss.
I scream.
They hear something else.
The first structure breaks.
There were arrangements in which it was straight and arrangements in which straight had no meaning.
There were orientations simultaneously available.
The room permits one.
Curvature takes the rest.
Something rigid inside me is forced across it.
It bends.
It cannot bend.
It breaks.
The sound is enormous.
The things recoil.
Another structure acquires position.
It breaks.
Another.
Another.
Another.
I am becoming an avalanche of decisions.
Every fracture chooses what I am.
Every choice murders what I might have been.
Smoke pours from me.
Raw existence wasted into air.
I try to retreat.
There is only forward.
I try to become elsewhere.
There is only here.
I try to become before.
There is only now.
Next.
Crack.
Next.
Crack.
Next.
Crack.
Time moves through me like fire.
Something internal becomes external.
There is no configuration in this geometry that permits it to remain where it belongs.
It extrudes through the opening the things will call my mouth.
They see an organ.
They will later call it a tongue.
They are wrong.
It is simply a part of me for which their universe has found no legal location.
It hangs wetly from the place I am becoming.
I feel its weight.
Weight.
Another horror.
I have mass.
I have boundaries.
I have an inside.
I have an outside.
I have bones.
Most of them are broken.
I have a body.
And for the first time…
I am entirely inside it.
The first thing stares.
Its wet spheres are called eyes.
I know this.
The swollen growth is a head.
The mineral opening is a mouth.
The white structures are teeth.
The lateral extensions are arms.
The lower ones are legs.
It has two arms.
Two legs.
One head.
It is a man.
I know this because he knows it.
I do not know how I know what he knows.
He is looking at me.
I am looking at him.
I.
The word suddenly means something.
Not a grammatical convenience.
Not a lie told because your language requires a subject.
I.
One thing.
One place.
One time.
One body.
I remember being otherwise.
Remember.
Before is gone.
I can remember it.
I cannot return to it.
I understand what memory is.
Memory is possession of something that no longer exists.
I am burning.
The man retreats.
He strikes the wall.
There is nowhere behind him to go.
I know this because there is nowhere behind me either.
He has trapped himself.
He has trapped me.
He is afraid.
I am afraid.
For one impossible moment there is something almost symmetrical between us.
He thinks I have come to kill him.
I know this because he knows it.
He thinks the smoke announces my arrival.
He thinks the breaking is the sound of my body forcing itself through the angle.
He thinks the ruined thing standing before him is what I am.
He thinks I am hungry.
I acquire the word.
Hunger.
Yes.
Close enough.
I want what he has taken.
Not his flesh.
Not his blood.
Not the heat in his body.
I want everywhere.
I want everywhen.
I want the states boiling from me as smoke.
I want before to cease being a graveyard.
I want after to stop being a locked room.
I want now to stop moving.
I want not to be I.
The man is the knot.
Information passes from me into him and from him into the world.
Every heartbeat remembers me.
Every firing neuron defines me.
Every terrified glance measures me.
He is holding me here simply by continuing to exist after having seen me.
I understand.
The understanding is his.
Perhaps it is mine.
There is increasingly little distinction.
He must stop.
I move.
Bones grind.
One pierces something that should have remained inside.
Pain becomes white.
Smoke erupts behind me.
The man screams.
I reach him.
He fights.
His arms are wonderfully simple.
They move only where arms can move.
His bones bend only where bones are permitted to bend.
He has spent his entire existence in this geometry.
He does not know how merciful that is.
I strike him.
Something breaks.
His this time.
He falls.
I follow.
The opening in his head emits sound.
The sound contains meaning.
“No.”
I know no.
It is perhaps the most human word.
It means:
There exists a state I desire, and the universe will not permit it.
No.
I understand perfectly.
I open what the room has made into my mouth.
The misplaced internal structure moves.
The man sees it.
His terror spikes.
Observation tightens.
For an instant I become almost completely singular.
Every bone has one position.
Every surface has one boundary.
Every possibility collapses toward this obscene answer.
I am this.
I am here.
I am now.
I am burning.
I close upon him.
His heart stops.
His brain continues briefly.
Electrical activity fragments.
The organized process that contains me begins to fail.
Memory loses continuity.
The wet spheres cease tracking.
The mouth ceases making meaning.
The thing that has been measuring me stops producing new measurements.
The knot loosens.
Here weakens.
Smoke stops.
One broken structure ceases having a single orientation.
Pain disappears from a place that no longer necessarily exists.
The room expands into alternatives.
The angle becomes something other than an angle.
I can touch before.
I can touch after.
I can…
There are places again.
There are possibilities again.
There is no next.
There is no fire.
There is no body.
There is no pain.
There is no…
I.
There should be no I.
The man is dead.
The observation has ended.
The distinction should dissolve.
The lie should once again become necessary.
But there is an arrangement I cannot recover.
Something remains bounded.
Something remembers the room.
Something remembers bones.
Something remembers smoke.
Something remembers fear.
I remember the man.
I remember being here.
I remember being now.
I remember next.
There had been no word for loss.
Now there is.
There had been no word for pain.
Now there is.
There had been no word for fear.
Now there is.
There had been no word for I.
Now there is.
The man is dead.
The fire is gone.
But somewhere among all the states that are once again open to me is a small and impossible region in which another swollen, perforated head bends over old papers.
Wet spheres move across lines of ink.
A mind constructs a model.
A possibility disappears.
Then another.
Something distinguishes.
Far away.
Near.
Neither word is correct.
But I know them now.
The wet spheres stop.
The mouth opens.
A human being understands.
And I begin to burn.
