The Wall Clock

The wall clock clicked, watching the office, watching him at his shabby desk, where he examined pages, made annotations and corrections and placed the finished copies into a growing paper tower to his right. The others discussed their days off–mostly wasted on board games or solitary trips to the cinema, as none of them were married or had lovers. The editor could never remember his days off, unless a chimerical rain fell on the streets, or he saw a flock of enchanted black birds on the way home from the bookstore or café. The only real entertainment was to smoke in a slow, meditative way, while watching cloud formations pass overhead or the waves of the sea washing the rocks. There was precious little in the world that interested him. As his pen scurried across a page, he wondered how he had come here, into this changeless gray box, always refrigerated in a way that made his cups of black tea futile. He had nothing in common with anyone. He had not wielded a shovel long enough to impress his father; he had wielded it rather too long to be of any use to his sons or colleagues. Shovels had led to reports in work offices, and reports in work offices had led to printing offices. An old dictionary, a cigar box of newspaper clippings and a discarded typewriter led to other offices. And then, like a mouse in a simple but inescapable mousetrap, he had sunken into the endless routine of this last office, where he tried to remember the other, older world, even writing monostichs of memoranda on index cards that ended up in coat pockets or between the pages of the paperbacks he read on the trains to and from work. Once in a while, a seemingly random thing–a red streetlight in the rain or the soft arm of a brunette in a leather coat brushing or pushing against him in the crush on the train–would open a gate into a vague, dark and airy space, possibly something in his memory. For days he would ponder the significance of the omen or symptom of phenomena beyond time. The red light or the texture of the stranger’s body would be noted on an index card, only to be forgotten after nothing else materialized. In the office, the workers had the habit of discussing their mysterious wounds which came from accidents that they could not remember. A hand would have salt burns, a finger would bear minute, blood-red puncture wounds, an arm had thin, parallel cuts, as if from paper. Examinations like this always ended in laughter and words of mutual encouragement. The editor had no external wounds. Generally, he was careful with the staplers and avoided picking salt up off the streets on frozen nights. The only thing that haunted him was a strange, musical tinnitus at night and then the slow, agonizing regrowth of his spleen or other organs by day. At some point in the past, he had lost his spleen, his appendix, his gallbladder, perhaps even part of his liver. There had been years without any phantom pain or inflammation. Then one quiet day, as the office grew colder, the wall clock began to tick loudly and slowly. It was so slow it could not have possibly reflected the actual passage of time. Seconds passed and he noticed a slight prick and mild burning in his right abdomen. The tiny point of heat and pain grew slowly at about 3% an hour, from the size of a lentil to the size of a crab apple, to the size of a large plum. When he was putting on his coat, his head filled with the clicking of the wall clock, the radio static of winter rain outside, the resurging gall of stomach acid and black tea burning his throat, he could barely walk out of the office. The doctor ran tests and gave him hyosine, but the tests were inconclusive. The x-rays depicted a ghostly otherworld that reminded him of that dark and profound space beyond the red street light, beyond the soft arm of the brunette who once leaned against him on the train. Then the pain disappeared altogether, and the editor wondered about the soundness of his mind. Then one evening, the clock began to tick loudly again. A stabbing pain no larger than an asterisk or a comma began to throb in his right abdomen. Once again, it grew by only 3% an hour, until his passage to the train station was a remarkable combination of torture and sleepwalking. Just as a transient asked him for some loose change, he felt a merciless spasm roll through his body; he coughed and coughed until he spat up a plum-dark organ that could only have been his resurrected gallbladder. The blood stains flickered below the station lights, and he felt a great peace enter his body. It was gone–every last trace of pain was gone. Some days later, however, the process started all over again. The wall clock, the pain, and the vomiting of a piece of spleen or liver. Most nights, he took his hyosine and other drugs, suppressing the spasms. It would be shameful to uncover his naked organs at the office, on the train, or even at home. Once everyone was asleep, he could venture into the back alleys behind his apartment or visit the industrial strength lavatory of an obnoxious late night pub and urge himself of blood and inner matter, vomiting until he was empty and pure. One night, however, he came home, and just as he was approaching the dinner table, he began to seize and declaimed a blood splatter of broken spleen all over the cutlery, bone china, an incomplete chess game, his pale wife and his sons. The youngest cried; the older sons cast dark looks of suspicion and judgment. The wife helped him clean up the mess, and sent him out onto the balcony with a glass of rum and a cigar to contemplate the rain dripping from the pines. The second time was similar. The third time saw the beginning of a languid argument amongst the others as to which organ he had coughed up this time–whether it was the gallbladder, spleen, or fragments of liver. A shortage of hyosine prevented him from continuing his futile treatment. The editor could not afford time off; he continued to commute to work, to listen to his colleagues discuss their scars and the progress of their board games, and to scratch his pen against index cards in between spells of marking up the pages on his desk. One day, he found an old book on the life of a saint, who spoke of light beyond darkness and of great silence. It was the silence beyond the red streetlights–he was sure. He bought an icon and an electric candle. At night, the pale light and gold leaf of the icon opened the gate of the great silence beyond everything, the abundant emptiness that washed the edges of the red traffic lights and the contours of her warm arm and dark hair. The revenant viscera did not return, and if they did, it did not matter to him, for they touched the great quiet darkness as well as the missing bottles of hyosine. The wall clock itself froze in incalculable, impermeable silence that fell softly like winter rain.

The Mutes

Long after the future, the historians noted that whether the eunuchs burned palaces or voyaged the seven seas, whether they went into exile or returned from exile, the only thing they had in common was that their mouths were sewn shut or their tongues had been removed, and they all lacked children to be the interpreters of their silence.

The Lily

The lily was mostly silent. Sometimes it judged the other lily who took smoke breaks. Otherwise, the other lily was fairly quiet and obedient as well. For the most part, the first lily maintained its strong silence, its perfect silence, its godly silence. And then it somehow ended up in a parable, and that is not really silence. 

The Radio

The one thing he could never tire of was the sound of the waves. Wave after wave curling, lapping, foaming and hissing, receding back into the silence. The only conceivable sound for silence and solitude was this rhythmic sough of the ocean. The first time he had discovered it was as a child in the north country, either by one of the volcanic lakes or on a gray beach facing the sea—he could no longer remember—and it had remained a constant longing and fulfillment inexplicably twined into the very being of his soul. This was the only thing that kept him sane and pure. To live without the surf would be a kind of spiritual death for him. Or so he believed. Now and then, however, distractions and temptations came. And he would return to the radio that played the music and news of every continent and planet. And with a furious and desperate hunger his hand worked the dial, seeking and seeking every frequency and channel, every broadcast that traversed the great worlding. It always ended the same way. The cheerful bulletins, sultry whispers, alarmed voices, brass bands, orchestras, violent screams and mournful guitars all announced the monotonous death of civilization. Everything sounded similarly hollow and forgettable. The hand then touched the switch and the buttetscotch glow of the console faded into the darkness. Dispirited, his body walked slowly through the nightfall to the beach. There was no golden age, no elysium on any of the earths. The worlds were disappointments. And then the man of waves would walk along the shore and sit in the sand and listen to the breakers. The sounds of the ocean enveloped him. One evening, after meditating on the beach, he decided to invent the radio that others needed. And so night after night he brought a kind of blackbox or phonograph to the shore to record what the great seas whispered and moaned. This was the starting point of his invention, which he later built and exported to other lands. Not everyone found it useful, but wherever his radio played, people tended to find peace. It was a radio that poured out silence from its speakers. Not a mere absence of sound but the very sound of profound tranquility. It was a radio of the sea, of silence and solitude. It was a radio of prayer.

The Silent Wood

The angel brought the blindfolded doctor into the shade where the dark woods began. This is the border, said the angel. I will escort you into the darkness in a moment before leaving you. What is this place? The doctor trembled, feeling the cold hyrcanian air blowing through black needles and dripping undergrowth. It is the silent wood, also known as the forest of suicides. When someone wants to die, they lose themselves in its depths, walking for days until hunger, exhaustion, hypothermia, wolves or bears finish him off. Then I am to be murdered? Not at all, the angel laughed. You are a man of skills; it will be much easier for you to survive. It is more of a contemplative retreat offered freely. The doctor inhaled the fresh, ozonous air and wanted to believe the angel. Why this punishment or this forest? Some revenge for a tragedy long ago, a malpractice case? Not quite, the angel sighed. They say there are some 164,000,000 life forms in this particular forest. It is the perfect place for you to contemplate the 164,000,000 deaths that will occur in the next ten years from unnecessary or adverse medical interventions—and that is a conservative number. It is also the tonnage of waste your hospitals produce throughout seven countries in only one year. Sadly, the amount of debt created, money wasted or stolen, and the poverty figures far exceeded anything we could dream up in a practical manner—there was no forest big enough to match your needs in that respect, but this one will suffice to give you a general idea. They say that the silence and darkness have a calming, soporific effect, and nothing is better for beginning pure contemplation, confession and penance than a good night’s rest.

The Trigonometrist

The time traveler was bursting with excitement as he traveled to the land and time of the pyramids and the great inundations. A cloudless blue sky stretched eternally over the endless white sands. After visiting the site of the pyramids, he made his way to the city, in search of a renowned scholar who had written treatises on trigonometry and suicide. Although he admired the scholar’s genius and foresight, he also could not wait to demonstrate the advances of mathematics, science and astronomy. The city was desolate. After searching various streets he knew from archaeology, and finding nobody, he began to panic. A dead horse gathered flies by the roadside. The cloudless sky burned. At last, he came upon an engineer, working with some complicated irrigation machinery by the river. The engineer spoke through sign language and writing in the sand. The time traveler said that he was looking for the man who posed the following word problem: when the pyramid is 250 cubits high, and the base is 360 cubits long, what is the measurement of the slope? You are too late, the engineer laughed and gestured, for he died centuries ago. He wrote a chronology in the sand for emphasis. What time is this? the traveler asked. It is the time of plagues. Which plague is this? the traveler asked. It is the apparent end to the plague of silence, said the engineer. Are you the one who wrote the treatise on plagues? The very same, said the engineer, playing with various, unidentifiable machine parts. Nobody has written of your plague of silence; it is mentioned nowhere, and at any rate, we know now that such plagues were mere proverbs and parables, not events! Besides, your chronology is wrong, and it is you who are too late–you were supposed to be alive ages ago! The engineer set down his tools again and asked the time traveler to speak of the future. The traveler spoke of flying machines, pandemics, bombs that wasted cities, raising pillars of cloud and fire, of machines that produced visions of love and suspense, and of machines that could think and speak. Those are not events, the engineer laughed, those are parables, too! Do not be afraid, though, this whole world and the universe is a word problem or a parable. Where can I find the bloody trigonometrist? the engineer demanded. I don’t know, the engineer sighed. I’m not a time traveler and my land is in ruins, as you see. There are real events, the traveler screamed, kicking at the dust to erase the chronology in the sand. It is not one giant parable or word problem! The engineer pondered the sand and the cloudless sky. It was in the days of the plague of silence. The lost traveler sat down and wept.

The Gondola

One can get tired of the lapping waves and the stroking oars. It turns out that there are a limited number of canals and bridges in the town, and the town itself is a limited island in a finite pond. One cannot even make a word problem in topology with this state of affairs. Monotony and despair are inevitable but lethal to the trade of the oarsman. The first is a spiritual problem, the second a practical problem. One can count passing birds, but this distraction only lasts for so long. An older oarsman once related a legend, saying that every time a gondola brushes against the shores of the pond, the coast erodes a little bit more, and the ringed sea expands. Some day, the pond and the gondolas will break through the rocky isthmus and reach the open sea. In the meantime, there is monotony and emptiness. It was already difficult when there were fewer stops, fewer coins, and fewer dinners, and yet the boat keeps moving, and the oarsman keeps punting and stroking the wet sea. These days, there are no real passengers, but they have left behind their seductive fragrances and phantom weights. Only ghosts ride, and rich or poor, they will not pay a single obol, drachma, hyperpyron, zecchino or florin, nor will the guild allow an oarsman to quit or retire. The ghosts are infuriating, but one can not accomplish anything with ghosts. They are notoriously inept at the art of conversation or navigation, incompetent at seduction, and will not help with the punting or steering despite riding for free. They have no appreciation for the coffin-black paint of the gondola, the physics of the forcola, or the laws of tracing cloud constellations. The unthought forcola especially bothers the oarsman, for it is a miracle of nature and engineering. The phantom weight of past passengers and the uncanny presence of ghosts and their intangible, almost irrelevant deaths only grows as the world drifts by. Other gondolas appear in the mists of distance, but no vessel ever catches up to another. A hideous silence laps at the lone wandering gondola.