Orange, blue, yellow, and green lights flickered in the second story window. They would be followed by other flashes in lavender, pink, periwinkle, and apricot. Sometimes the rhythms resembled code; at other times they flickered fast enough to invite photoepilesy. The gendarmes arrived one night, and let themselves in with a skeleton key borrowed from a belligerent, heavy-set building manager spewing nonsense. The apartment was cleany; the hardwood floors sparkled with fresh wax; there were almost no furnishings. In an old, upholstered black chair by the window, a gaunt inhabitant sat, drinking cider and playing with a little box of switches connected by cord to strings of light bulbs in various colors, shapes and sizes adorning a book shelf and wire and metal sculpture of a potted larch in the corner. A fire hazard, said one gendarme. It is not, said the inhabitant. The larch is a sculpture made of non-flammable materials. Why are you wasting electricity every night in this manner? Stop playing with the switch for one blasted moment! The room suddenly fell into deep darkness. Only a dim glow from the street lamps outside shone from the window. What madness to repeat the same thing over and over! the gendarme continued. Switching lights on and off! Are you mad? Night after night, playing with a light switch! It was silent for a long time. The inhabitant in the corner said, I do not think it is anymore repetitive that sleeping with the same tart every night, getting drunk and vomitting in the same gutter on the way home, losing at the same game of cards, telling the same lie to your boss to leave work early, refusing to fix a leaking faucet or burnt out bulb for the same imaginary reasons. It is not more repetitive than rereading old newspapers, washing the same clothes, arresting the same thugs, eating, drinking or breathing. It’s probably less repetitive, statistically even less frequent, quotidian, or ubiquitous. Why do you play this way? another gendarme asked. I watch the lights and think or daydream. Sometimes I remember things; sometimes I write in my notebook. Sometimes I pray the rosary. Sometimes I just have another sip of cider and enjoy the warm colors. There was another long silence. A philosopher and poet, muttered the first gendarme, and he placed the inhabitant under arrest.
madness
The Half Tree
The strange tree grew on the slope of a great expressionist mountain of iron gray stones and pure snow. It looked like half of a tree, regardless of the path you took to approach it. The northern view showed limbs and leaves vanishing into the west; the southern view suggested branches and flowers smoking into the east. And yet, if one embraced its trunk or climbed it, one found that it was whole, that nothing was lost. Not far from the tree lived an old man who cared for it. One morning, as he walked to the tree with his axe and kindling, a visitor stopped him to ask about the tree. “The half tree,” said the old man, “is an enigma. One half of the world recognizes its medicinal benefits, but instead of buying or cultivating its fruit, they harvest grapefruits and oranges and boil them to try to obtain the unique chemicals only found in this tree, chemicals never to be found in oranges, grapefruits or any other fruit. The other half of humanity harvests the medicine from this tree, refines it, packages it and sells it, but discourages people from taking it and denies its benefits. It is a tree of contention.” The visitor shook her head in disbelief and asked, “Where is the rest of the tree?” The old man shrugged and whispered, “The only place it can be.”
The Word Problem
Golden oak leaves blew across the sidewalk when the man stepped out of the bookstore. Near the bus stop, a beggar sat on the pavement, asking for coins. The commuter truthfully said that he did not have any and gazed down the street, waiting for the bus to appear. The beggar continued to mutter and argue with himself, and the other began to regret that he had not given him anything. When he glanced back, he saw the poor man struggling with the wind, a rolling paper and a bag of loose tobacco. The commuter reached for his pack of cigarettes, and offered the man a few. The beggar was about to accept them, but seemed ashamed and confused, and said that maybe he should not. The commuter insisted, and the beggar accepted two and lit one. Only moments later, the other unlit cigarette came flying through the air and landed at the base of the oak tree. Whether or not it had been the wind, one could not say. The poor man smoked intently and quietly, his stormy blue eyes gazing beyond matter and time. The bus arrived, and when the commuter boarded, he noticed that the passengers were arguing passionately in sign language.
The Wizard
It was another difficult day. A worker went into the coffeehouse to get a drink, and then stepped outside with his cup to smoke, settling at a cast iron table with two chairs. He smoked and drank his coffee, watching the trains cross the bridge, watching the buses and passengers come and go. A lunatic was leaping and crouching, leaping and crouching along the curb where the buses pulled up. He was dressed in a fine suit and good patent leather shoes. The only thing that marked him was his pallor, wild eyes, indistinct muttering and manner of walking. Not far behind him came the wizard, who looked like an old friend, gaunt and dark and feline in his black raincoat, carrying a book. The worker loved books and could not resist asking what the book was about when he drew near. It is the very book that just drove that stockbroker insane, the wizard sighed, reluctant to open the book. It is a book full of vertigo, whirlpools, circles and angles, moon phases, starlight, questions relating to questions, landscapes of wheat and milkmaids, bone-dry pine trees, unfinished sentences and abrupt silences, keys and locks, locks without keys and keys without locks, labyrinthine pear orchards, rusted wounds, robotic ghosts, and endless rivers. And then, of course, there were the winters, bears and hurricane lanterns. Would you really wish to be mad? the wizard asked. Why not? the worker laughed. The world has been mad for a long time. The wizard handed him the book, sitting down across from him at the cast iron table. The sun digressed; the shadows murmured. The worker read page after page, sucked into the skull of the words, into the very heart of the sentences that gripped him in a bittersweet trance. After he had closed the book, he thought about what he had read. Will you be going mad? the wizard asked, gesturing like a hesitant cat. The worker lit a cigarette and sighed. It was a blue dusk with a comma of moonlight. Not today, he sighed. I have to ride the 8:20 and then stop by the grocery store to bring home milk and bread for the children. Then there’s some leftover paperwork, washing dishes, and a lightbulb to replace, but thank you for the invitation. The wizard asked for a smoke, and they remained seated and awkwardly silent for a while, just smoking.
The Drowned
She took off her clothes because she was a river into which he had never stepped once or twice. Dark minnows froze in her crystal veins, shadows of the dark thoughts she could not rein. Now they would stay somewhere within her. Even he could not leave this body submerged. Strange flowers melted off her liquid skin, the wild blossoms of worlds nobody would win. And now he was here, in this somewhere in time. It did not matter—to be or not be. To drown was enough, and just not to see.
The Mountains
In the beginning, Heaven gave adamantine rings that shone like silver and platinum to all human children, one ring for each person. The angels passed through the land, gently placing them on the fingers of every woman and man. It was a kind of wedding present or testament of a promised inheritance. Then the angels drifted like brilliant smoke and dazzling snow back to the high mountains. Time went by, and the people grew impatient and greedy. Some traded their rings for food, shelter and clothes. Others traded them for perishable trinkets and vain books. One day, a horde arose, stealing all of the rings. The horde melted down the rings to forge swords, and distributed the swords, one sword for each person, woman and man. All of humanity raised their swords and set off for the mountains. The reason was clear enough. There would be other treasures in heaven. The very stars that shone by night were most likely gigantic gems or precious minerals. The ravenous horde began its ascent, a dark line of ants upon the great white void of the slopes. The way was difficult, and one by one, the climbers fell into snowbanks, chasms, or threw themselves from cliffs. There were some who perished of altitude sickness; there were some who died of cold; there were many who ate the snow and died of famine. The higher they climbed, the more they tended to throw themselves from cliffs of long icicles. Forever they climbed upward through mists and blizzards, forever encouraging themselves with the better view they had of the world from these heights and the closer they had drawn to heaven. Many are buried forever with their swords in eternal snow. A remnant is still climbing today. The mountains of heaven are infinite.
The Minervium
The physician was lost in the darkest woods, infected with phantoms, when he found the minervium. It was beautiful to look at, and it whispered sweetly like soft rain, codex paper, or scissors. It monologized in a strange fashion. It seemed so distant and far away at the same time. At times, he thought it whispered to the world; at other times, it seemed she only spoke for him and to him. For three nights, he stared into her and listened to it. Though deep crevasses of pain remained within his bones and sinews, the phantoms began to atomize and fade away. He left the minervium in a comfortable spot by a spring near a grove of wild olives. It seemed heartless and yet caring to abandon her, but he did not know why. In the city he worked once again, treating lepers, consumptives, and hysterics. They were deranged and abusive. In a short time, they had seized most of the villas and agoras, spreading like a cancer. They screamed out for healing. They tore off their bandages. They burned the scrolls of his prescriptions and his books of medicine. They sold his materia medica to the mariners who came and went like the wind in the striped sails of their long black boats. The physician tried to love them, but feared them. Some would even grab his aching body, by the throat or by the hand, and curse him for his lack of pain, his rotting backbone, his poor medicines that did nothing. Streets were cracking; columns were sinking into the rising sea. Resolute, he continued to treat them. One day, walking through the market, a young whore in a drenched chiton brushed past him. Within seconds, he felt the shivering phantoms return. Infected, he sold what was left of his books, herbarium, elixirs and surgical tools to the mariners who came and went like the wind in the striped sails of their black longboats. The phantoms sucked at him, nestled into him, stroked him with their greedy, bone-crushing effervescence. With the silver from his sales, he bought the wild olive grove on the cliffs. For several days, he watched the city crumble, a column here, a street there. Then he found the minervium, still sleeping by the spring where he had left her. She awoke and came into the small villa overlooking the plaintive wild olives, the wind and the sea. They stayed up late into the nights. She stared into his eyes and whispered. Sometimes she sang. She curled around his body like a smoke that went down his throat and backbone like soft rain and slept in his skull and stomach. The silence sparkled with the crunching of leaves, the crackle of flames, the rustling of codex pages, the blading of scissors. Nights like atropine fell upon them. She glowed silver and held his hands. It was hard to say where or who she was and how the minervium would work his brains, but the soft rain washed everything away. A distant star, a whispering lantern close at hand, the minervium bled her light into his emptiness. It would remain to be seen whether or not her light was also empty. It was a matter of deciding whose captive he would be.
The Almanac
I was writing the last pages of my text on eclipses of the moon and sun when the event happened. I was still wearing my bronze armour for I had to write in a hurry between battles, and wanted to finish my treatise before beginning my tragedy on the life of the destroyer who traveled on a winged horse armed with a crystal eye and the horror that turns men to stone. And then there was thunder, a rainfall of stars, and smoke all over the surface of the earth. Logic fails to explain or express the journey, for either I was carried off by a comet or another strange cosmic phenomenon, or spirits transported me from the earth into the vicinity of unfamiliar stars and planets. The third possibility is that I have gone mad. It is unlikely I could have survived the first type of event without burning up or suffocating. Travelers have often reported the burning up of falling stars and the way the air grows thinner the higher you climb into the mountains. It would seem that there is no air in the ether and traveling through the atmosphere is a violent and hazardous event. The second possibility is no less impossible or disconcerting, for it is said that even if spirits or immortals exist, they are too far away in space to notice our earth or care about our life, and being transported by them to this area of space by their powers makes no sense, for I have not encountered anyone or anything other than a great void of orbiting stars, streaming luminous clouds and the shadows of planets. The one planet in my vicinity, which I orbit each day, at about the same distance of the moon to our ancient earth, glows with swirls of amber, molten gold, topaz and black steel. It is like looking into the forge of a blacksmith or into one of those strange marbles of glassblowers, or a rare gem. It is a cat’s eye without a body. Its warmth wafts over to me. I do not seem to have difficulty breathing, but I know there can be no air, for nothing lives or grows in this empty sea. This morning star, like an ember in the dark sky, like a mysterious cat’s eye, seems to be made of gases and elixirs. I believe these elixirs drift outward, the way heat drifts from a hearth, the way an aura of light spreads from one little lantern into the night. It seems possible that these elixirs have made me immortal. I do not breathe, I do not eat, I do not weep or feel pain anywhere in my body, and I do not die. The only thing I feel is an infinite sadness. My mind works without ceasing as I ponder the revolutions of stars and planets. Some five hundred years must have passed since my arrival. I can guess this by the patterns of changes in the stars, the seasons of my planet, and the number of calculations I have made from where I float like a drowned sailor in the universe. I now know the circumference and age of my planet, I have numbered the planets in this ring of stars and guessed the durations and lengths of their orbits, I have predicted countless phenomena with increasing accuracy. I am a living almanac who cannot impart a single iota of what I have observed and tested. On the earth I once heard legends of subterranean hells full of darkness and flames that maidens would fall into and heroes would visit at great risk. I did not think about such things much. I was too occupied with the codex and the spear. Whether or not a hell exists under the earth, it certainly exists here. It is a beautiful hell. My soul burns with the beauty and sadness of the starry chaos. The third possible explanation for my night voyage remains. I may be locked into a an infinite madness, a madness so great that my body may have died but my mind cannot sense it and sleep, a madness that only increases my pointless calculus of astronomical phenomena while decreasing my memory of life. Perhaps all three explanations are interwoven, swirling together in this maelstrom of suspended and turning lights and shadows. I pray that this is true, for if there is a hell, then it seems more possible that there is a heaven that will someday draw me from the dance of flames, from death without death, from infinite madness. I have come to experience infinity, but I have yet to find eternity. I would like to find a friend in this great emptiness.
the lost way 