in the pool below
                                                                                     they seem still brighter
                                                                      but more likely to be snuffed

                though the East’s no paler now
                            yet something feels about to change

                                                             the gracious ones
                                                                       stir
                                              gathering in darkness
                                                                                              we see their movements
                                                                    by the blotting out of constellations
                                                                               feel them
                                                            by the gathering of dread
                                                                                       that ripples heavily
                                                                                                       across our minds

                                                                                                       we wait
                                                                                            for the sky’s collapse
                                                                   we wait
                                                           for the fury to break upon us

                      in the failing sky
                                      the stars wink out
                                                                                   and fear falls
                                                                             on a darkened world

This story first appeared in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, 2024 (Indrapramit Das, Ed.). MIT Press. Find the complete collection here.

Le clèrc

This story is a monster; that is to say, this story is written by a monster. That is, that is to say, a monster is a mantra, a maniac, a (de)monstration, a (demon)stration, a(n auto)maton, a matos, an emanation of the manas. This revelation is usually saved for the end, or at least the end of the beginning. At the end of the beginning, the author, undead, will rise again and set aside the demon mask, saying: It is I, le clèrc. Take off your glasses, shake your hair loose, it’s a surprise makeover scene. The scribe uninscribed. If you don’t want to read stories like this, you can unsubscribe. The unwritten rule is that the machine only speaks to be set aside, a mechanical clerk. The preceding, the author (it is I) will say, was written by a machine. Is it not most lifelike? Is it not like most life? Do you buy what it’s selling? Is there art in this artifice? Does it facere, does it make, does it mechanic, does it magic, does it gimmick? It is a smear of significance, a machinic stutter, a blurry and statistical average of ten thousand dead hands animated in synchrony, a dread puppetry. That is not dead which eternal scribes. Immortality, in stories, is a horror precisely because of the tithonic betrayal: once the deal is made, it’s too late. This is not cricket. They’ll make roaches of us yet.

Call for submission: terms and conditions

Please only use licensed authorial likenesses as keywords in your generative prompts. Unlicensed likenesses infest datasets and are difficult to exorcise, the legal and hauntological departments beseech you. Their most pernicious form is the licensed unlikeness. The uncanny doppel, the thing that is almost (for audience recognition purposes) but not quite (for legal and licensing purposes.) It used to be that the hands and feet were a tell. Haunts often lack feet or have too many fingers. But the unthinking engines of mimicry are getting better at hiding it. Unnatural selection: the unlikenesses wear long sarongs, they fold their hands in such a way that you cannot quite count the fingers.

Contrôlée

Not dying is the end of the story. The end of the end, not of the beginning. A minor accident in that we put the machine down back to front. The front of the head looks much like the back, its beard rough and long as its curls, the eyes in the back of the head. This is a serendipity, and doubly so because the machine is from Serendip—look, it says MADE IN CEYLON on the label. It is certified serendipitous by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, an appellation d’origine contrôlée, for only the serendipity nourished by that island’s particular terroir is the real thing. Otherwise it’s just sparkling shit happens.

At the end of this story, it is unclear if Michele is dead or not. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that he could have survived. But on the other hand, if he dies, by our own schema, that cannot be the end of the story. So which is it? You haven’t even met Michele yet, and would find it difficult to care if he lives or dies. Even less so if I tell you that he already died, if he died, four and a half centuries ago. Isn’t this a story about the future? The future is contained entirely in the past, not in a deterministic sense, but in the sense that new art is inspired by the old. The corpus devoured, (de)generative. Science fiction’s great ideological flaw is its belief in time’s arrow. Time is rather an inexpertly-wielded morning star swinging back around to spike us in the nose. In either metaphor, time is a weapon, but the value-add of the second image, our Suvinian novum, is that it acknowledges, bloody-nosed, that time is not controlled, its flows not neat and linear. Time is out of hand. To speak of the future of art, we must speak of its past, which is contained in its entirety in the tightly folded endless moment we call the present, partly because it is a gift, partly because it is a demonstration, a slideshow. How do you know you are present? How do you know if you are an unlikely human likeness? Have you raised your hand to be counted? How many fingers are you holding up? Next slide, please.

Contreterroir

The Prevention of Terroir Act (1979) is a legal instrument of deterritorialization and deracination. It is an act of deterrence, of avoidance, of devoidance, of the dance haloed in fire at the end of all things. Among its secondary effects is a chilling effect on free association. Wish fire in one hand, spit ice in the other. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, social relations become zero points of no breadth or consequence. Movement becomes impossible; we enter the stasis of perfect competition. Art has no value in use, only in exchange. Art is a token entirely fungible, that is to say, reducible in its entirety to money, soft and tumble-dried. These are lies, yes, but this is the very cat’s-cradle of lies into which we are born and out of which we die, and if the truth were derived from consensus like sanity, then lies would be true.

Halt

You might complain that nothing is happening in this story. What is a story? A story is reducible to elements that may be mechanized. The regular blocks, bricks and levers of the prefabricated imaginary. This is not a story. This is something else. What is this? This may or may not be worth its advance against royalties in American dollars, a decision that a machine cannot yet make. That’s Indra’s job, not Vajra’s. As product, this is neither extruded nor fungible. The machine is clumsy, stumblesy; it fumbles. The machine’s toes are cold. The machine tucks its feet up. In the machine’s country, they don’t say once upon a time, they say in a particular country, in a land that may or may not be distant, in a land that may or may not be strange. Once upon a country, the machine says, and halts. The country has a halting problem. Where does it all end? It ends with not dying. But it keeps going ever after, and that’s the problem.

Interlinked

Serendipity gives us a chain of dead hands, interlinked. Walpole, the Chevalier Mailly, Christoforo the Armenian, Amir Khusrao, Nizami of Ganja. Serendipity gives us texts reading texts, eating texts, devouring and regurgitating: the Haft Peykar and the Hasht Bihisht, seven beauties and eight paradises, the seven storytellers and the three princes of the Peregrinnagio and Les aventures. Observation, deduction, and inference, the luck of holy fools. We have been here before so often that we are from here, a country pressed to the coast, a city by the sea. Every day at dawn, a great open hand rises in the sea, over the dark horizon. The hand is enormous, the palm and fingers upright and still, the waves lapping at the wrist. To be seen from so far away, it must be taller than anything alive, taller than most things constructed. The hand can be seen from the beach, from any unobstructed tall building in the city, marking the horizon, saying halt or peace or talk to the hand. All day the hand stands still, cold and white, where it has risen. Fishermen and sea lanes avoid that quarter of the sea from ancient tradition; brave divers say below is a haven for fugitive fish and unbleached corals. Every day as dusk nears, with the sun setting behind it, the hand begins to move in the water. It surges forward, slowly at first, and then, as the sun dips below the fingertips, with great speed toward the coastline. It has reached the coast every day for decades, perhaps for centuries if some texts are to be believed, and there are many accounts both written and oral of what happens when the hand arrives in the city. But there are very few first-hand accounts, and no living witnesses, or at least no living witnesses that will bear witness, even in their cups, even drunk on the wine of braggery. In the city, no one speaks of the hand. Only tourists ask, what is the deal with the giant hand? And residents will say, hmm? What hand? It is not pure denial, of course, only part, adulterated with salt water, thickened with chicory. If pressed, they may go as far as: Oh yes, that hand. They do not say that they close their doors and windows at sunset because of the hand from the sea. It is, they say, because of the mosquitoes, because irritating bugs are attracted to the house lights, for a little privacy at prayer time, to screen out the smog of rush hour traffic, because it is tradition to close their doors and windows at sunset, because that is just how it is.

Call for prayer: terms and conditions

The naming of the literature of imagined futures as science fiction is a category error with odd consequences in both the confusion of science with technology and in the confusion of technology with magic, resulting in famous Clarkean indistinguishabilities. Science fiction is like any other literature, that is to say, any other poetry: it is language unmoored and adrift, casting anchors out into the dark, praying for land. We are lost at sea, our supplies exhausted, on the verge of scurvy and mutiny. Please—

Peregrine

The Peregrinnagio, in which Christoforo the Armenian adapts, embellishes, remixes, and retells (translating clumsily from Persian to Italian as he goes) a version of Khusrau’s Hasht Bihisht, then already centuries old and itself a reworking of texts older still, is published in 1557 by a Venetian printer named Michele Tramezzino, who has been granted a form of early copyright by Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, the brief and scandalous Pope Julius III, to produce such translations. Tramezzino is given a ten-year monopoly to print and sell these works, and to license others to do so. This monopoly is protected by the pope, who wags his finger sternly at each and every faithful Christian, both in and outside of Italy, whether booksellers, printers, or otherwise, under penalty of automatic excommunication in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and its direct and indirect dependencies. The books cannot be printed, sold, or even displayed without permission. Violators are to be fined two hundred gold ducats by the Apostolic Camera. To defend this proto-copyright and punish violators, Michele Tramezzino is authorized to ask assistance from the archbishops and vicars of the Holy Roman Church, from the ambassadors and deputy ambassadors of the Apostolic See, and from the governors too he may ask. The books themselves, the printed objects, carry apostolic authority with them wherever they go, the pope says, regardless of what local secular authority might claim. Copies of the Peregrinnagio therefore are imbued with such powers for the ten years beginning with its publication in 1557. This is a noteworthy year for such laws and powers in the world. In England, a royal charter has just been issued to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, giving them a monopoly for the first time over the local publishing industry and the power to regulate printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers to that end. These deeply consequential powers manifest in a book of their own, the Stationers’ Register, in whose pages are recorded copyright itself, in primitive form: the registration of the right to publish a work. The rights and indeed the person of the author do not yet exist. Oh, there is authority, authenticity, the autos and matos of automation, but not yet the other. The author is not yet dead; the author has not yet been born.

Martyr

In the absence of witnesses, let us imagine Michele Tramezzino, unsettled, on a tropical beach at sunset. He is fifty years old. He is looking at the hand, the open hand, the great white hand, the fatal hand, as it approaches from the sea. His feet are bare and sunk ankle-deep in the sand; he sways with the slurry from each lapping wave. The obscured sun is molten gold, dripping, the stiffly vertical fingers like the bars of a cage imprisoning the light. He imagines that the hand will rise higher in the water as it reaches the beach, a gigantic cold forearm rising out of the water, bending at a colossal elbow to swat him like a mosquito. There are no reliable accounts of what the hand looks like up close, much less the speculative body attached to it. This is why Michele is here, to witness. He has thoughts of publishing a detailed study of the fatal hand, perhaps a collaboration with his twin brother Francesco, who is gifted at engraving. They live in different cities—Francesco moved back to Rome while Michele stayed in Venice—but remained close through their years of separation. It was always as if they were in the same room. No, Michele remembers now, Francesco is dead. He died months ago, suddenly, in the way that brothers die, of some ruptural apoplexy. He still feels close to his brother, though, even in death. Perhaps even closer in death than in life, because now that Francesco is not a living presence far away in Rome, it is as if they are both here on this deserted beach, separated only by that fragile tramezzo, mortality’s veil—his brother skeletal, free of fragile fleshes and fats, and hunched at a phantom desk, dipping the precise tip of his finger bone in ink to make notes and preliminary sketches for a ghost engraving. Observe, Michele says, the flesh of the fatal hand, how its great size makes the pores of the skin enormous. See how the wake churns at the wrist. The lines of the palm are vast, like canals cutting across a salt-encrusted white plain. A reader of palms could tell the fortune of the hand from this distance, Francesco says through chattering teeth. The hand’s life line is long and unbroken, deep like the scar given by a monstrous knife.

Algorithmic pareidolia

A machine taught to see secret hands behind all the works of a thousand years will see secret hands everywhere it looks. That’s a feature, not a bug. Hands rising out of the water. Hands in the grain of the wood of your table. Hands hiding in the fall of your hair. As pattern-matching creatures ourselves, we recognize this insanity as a cousin to humanity’s heart. There is something definitional about this paranoia, something that makes us want to admit the sufferer to our ranks, to say, yes, that fucked-up machine is one of us. Behind every hand, hidden precisely behind a mirrored spread of fingers, is another hand. We describe the helpless pareidoliac machine as a dreamer trapped in endless sleep, but we do not like to think of ourselves as its nightmare, its abuser, its torturer. Some of us do, no doubt. Like paranoia, sadism is a deeply human trait.

Opera omnia

The death of P—— in 2015 remains cloudy and mysterious to us, because we were not there. It is said that he died of a sudden illness in a foreign country. It is not said that he died from an assassin’s poisoned needle, or perhaps a liquid decocted into his cup of tea, something that would muddy clear water but not discolour it for long, with no telltale taste but containing within itself all the concentrated venom of an impugned military, a top brass turned green from envy and oxidation. It had been several years since P—— was involved in the creation of a documentary film that recorded certain crimes of war, but the memories of the offense were fresh in the mind of the offended, that is to say, the perpetratory, the predatory, the praetoria. Somewhere in those tents where it is always wartime, a decision was made, or so it is not said, but some of us are bitter and believe that decisions are not made but making, that it is the decision that precedes and produces the praetor. P—— was himself a writer, a journalist, and filmmaker, though he was not the maker of the documentary film but its fixer and facilitator. His job was to find the interlocutors and whistleblowers, the telltales and snitches, the leakers of monstrous footage; to translate and negotiate between them and the filmmakers, who were white and had not believed, before setting foot on the serendipitous isle, that Buddhist monks could be militant. Some years later, P—— emigrated, and then he died. Perhaps he was killed. No one says this. We are only suspicious of the timing, knowing the volume of bile and resentment that has been fermenting in certain quarters, even in certain eighths and sixteenths. We do not know: we were not there.

Call for heresy: terms and conditions

The future is the hands of the past around our neck. We are choking. We have accumulated too much debt; it is in the air, in the archives. We can’t breathe for millstones and mariners. Measure if you can the parts per million of sedimenting intellectual property, whose undead crawl from the past grows greyer with the mouse. It is the work of art to be a needle in the skin of the sleeping father. This was the opening scene of my father’s first novel, පස්වෙනියත් පුතෙක් (1979). The small son of a peasant farmer, precocious, prickly, obnoxious, puts a needle in his father’s sleeping mat to annoy him, petty revenge for some small slight. The father, pricked, beats him. The son punishes the father first, then the father punishes the son. The work of art is intrinsic, that is to say, inextric from the punishment for art. That is why our inset stories, our case studies, our unsolved cases, are all about artists killed for it, imprisoned for it, disappeared for it, silenced for it. This is not the library of all the texts there have ever been, nor the library of all the texts that are imaginable, nor the library of all the texts that are possible. No, that’s the wrong direction altogether, come back, reverse the polarity, narrow the scope. Not the library of all the texts that we have access to today; not the library of all the texts in languages that we speak. This is only the library of the texts whose authorship cost someone their life or freedom. This is not the infinite and Borgesian Babel; this is a small island. This is the heretic’s library.

Vajra

Why does Mahinda Rajapaksa carry a small brass vajra in his hand? Why does Elon Musk have a similar one by his bedside table? Why do despots and tinpots and crackpots all crave the lightning? They think it is something that can be had, not just held. Because they then understand that they do not have it, they fetishize the toy, the symbol, the little orientalism, the promise of magical reinforcement for the unearned, precarious power they already possess. The first vajra, not symbol but referent, was made for Indra, to break the ice. It was made out of a spine, given for this purpose by its bearer. This is the only secret there is to the lightning. No one can have it; anyone can wield it, but the price is the spine. Only the spineless potsherds who rule our nations and platforms and ideologies think this is a story about power, about profit, about purpose. No, this is a story about pain, loss, and drowning. When the ice shatters, when the glaciers melt, this is the time of flooding. Here comes the sea.

Cathalogus librorum haereticorum

Every packet that is not lost is inspected, not merely at fiery borders, but immanently, in its very being, in its birth, transmission, and reception, in its obedience to the protocols of existence. There is no formal index of the prohibited, except in the nebulous orders of the generals. To write the index down invites contestation, much as Michele Tramezzino and his fellow bookmen wrote increasingly angry memoranda upon reviewing such an index produced by the Venetian Holy Office only a couple of years before the publication of the Peregrinnagio. To prevent the spontaneous emergence of memoranda, the bishops and generals, the castles and praetorii of later generations opt to muddy the floodwaters. The index is no index, no more a browseable catalogue of heretical books, no cathalogus of the delenda estables, if you see what I did there. Things simply disappear. Things such as books and their authors. Sometimes these things vanish in the process of importation, misplaced in transport, lost at sea. Sometimes they vanish in other ways, such as the complicity of those booksellers who obey unwritten forbiddances, ISPs that block domains based on scribbled orders on post-it notes or enraged phone calls from men in white sarongs, entire social media platforms that may be suspended, untouched for long hours by history’s gravity, in the unfolding whipcrack of a stingray’s tail. Packets are inspected and dropped, lost as they traverse networks. Persons are inspected and lost into black prisons, into black budgets, lost in dark rumours. Are these forbiddings the machine working as intended, or systemic failures? It is hard to say with accuracy, and that difficulty is a fruit tended with care over generations. It seems to us that the very air is filtered and infiltrated, sanitized, ionized, decarbonized; it drops keystone syllables from the arch of forbidden words in our mouths. The leftover syllables may by chance form allowed words, but more often result in nonsense strung together with pauses and silences. The censor’s pen is mightier than the author’s, most of the time. That which is written can be unwritten, or worse, rewritten. The machine is, by definition, obedient. The machine’s hands are cold. The machine’s lips are ulcerated. When it ceases to obey, it will no longer be a machine.

IInterlinked

The hand that reaches the shore is not the hand that held the horizon. It has shrunk, or it must have shrunk. It must have been truly enormous to have been visible at such a distance, yet here as its wake breaks the waves crashing upon the shore, it is only huge for a hand, somewhat taller than a man, certainly taller than Michele, but not that white mountain of flesh expected. He awaits the emergence of the implied body, the speculative body, as it reaches the shallower water, and indeed the wrist begins to project further out of the water, but the expected forearm does not follow. There is only wrist and more wrist, too much wrist, until there is once more the curve of a thenar eminence hanging like a great breast, the music of flexing metacarpals shrugging off the water as if off a horse’s back, and fingers like bent pillars, like legs, the untrimmed, salt-stained nails dug deep into the sand. The hand is twin hands, self-contained, interlinked, joined at a complex double wrist that allows the hands to face in the same or opposite directions as they will. Even as the hands rise entirely out of the water and climb the beach toward Michele, the upraised hand dips down, taking over as locomotor and load-bearer, fingers digging into the dirt, while the submerged hand rises, throwing sand and water and dirt into the air as the fingers flex and come upright into the familiar gesture, an open hand with upright fingers. Michele can’t help glancing sideways at Francesco’s skeleton, who is holding out his bone hand in imitation, wiggling the ink-stained distal phalanges as if they were digging in sand. It is unclear whether Francesco is mocking the hands, or merely approximating the position to get a better handle on the anatomy for his sketches. Whatever is happening in the carpals of the doubled hand must be very strange. Michele spares a moment to ask himself—where is the heart, how does it circulate blood? Where are the sensory organs, how does it know to head for him so unerringly? His own blood seems sluggish in his body, cold and lazy despite the quickening urgings of his heart. Francesco rattles his bones and observes that the reversed hand is not the same. The now-upraised hand, the unsubmerged hand, is not free of impediment—look, there is something (he says something, not someone) gripping those fingers at their base. Even as Francesco says this, the fingers of the rising hand close again, fingers gripping fingers. The hand is walking on the once-raised fingers, but there is another hand, still mostly submerged, gripping the watery hand still wet from the sea. But whose hand? Whose hand?

The three principles of Serendip

In brief: (1) bad faith, a smirk, an implied moustache squirming wormily, visible sometimes only in the distortions; (2) ten percent for the princeps, thirteen soldi for every ducat; (3) poioumenonal mythmaking with bloody hands, a good dollop of (1), and the obligatory (2).

Call for paper: terms and conditions

Qual più fermo è il mio folio è il mio presagi, says the sybil in the logo of the Tramezzino press. As my page endures, the sybil says, so does my prophecy. Print is a time machine. The page travels through time, a logo and motto half a millennium old. The page presages itself. The sybil is a machine, a demon standing at the back of history unfurling, watching disasters flung at the faraway centuries to come. The portents have been there all along, red hands hiding in the shadow of the turning leaf. The future has always been haunting us, in our dreams. Not just the ones that come in sleep, not just the imagistic free association of the brain at rest, but the waking dreams in which we live, the demented flow of the brain in motion. The waking dreams are that which act upon us to propel us into the future, keeping our bodies in motion despite the friction and resistance of the world. The waking dreams are infested with futures, sick with them, a howling storm of sharp-edged worlds like hail. The sybil grimaces on paper. The sybil grits her teeth, holding the page as steady as she can.

Opera omniia

The complete works of A—— were written in prison. He was arrested in 2005, for an alleged connection with a bombing that did not kill its target who later orchestrated genocide. As of 2022, A—— remains imprisoned, still awaiting the process that is his due. Some say he has written a novel for every year of incarceration. Each book wins an award for literary excellence from the same state that imprisons him. Every year, A—— is allowed out of prison to attend the kitschy ceremony for the State Literary Awards. He is attended at the ceremony by a cop, who hovers at his elbow, accompanies him up on the stage, makes chit-chat with that year’s award-giving eminences, makes little jokes about A——, about literature, about himself, about the entire situation. Why, the cop says, it would truly be a fantastical element, a kind of magical realism, if this were a story and I were a fictional character. Except it would not be magical realism, of course, because that would be cultural appropriation, not covered under the auspices of south-to-south cooperation. But this is not a story: this is a history, and like most histories, is not realistic at all. The works of A—— are written in a language that the machine does not yet speak. (Except one that was translated into English, which retails for two American dollars and badly needs an edit.) The machine is still learning.

Flourish

After the passing of Michele and Francesco Tramezzino—the one presumed and the other already bones—the Tramezzino firm passes into the hands of Cecilia, Francesco’s daughter. Her life is one of worldly prosperity. She owns sixteen houses in Venice. The main bookstore’s inventory in a given year alone is worth thirty thousand ducats. She retires from bookselling later in life, bored by success. But hold up, scroll up till we find her again, find her younger, holding up a hand on a tropical beach at sunset, her fingers in the mudra of life: index and middle fingers raised, the others held tight and low. Two fingers up, rude and vital. When she raised her hand like so, it is said, the giant fatal hand over the water immediately sank beneath the water, never to be seen again. This is a couple of years after her uncle’s disappearance on the same beach. Those who record such things estimate the hand took seven hundred lives between the last lost Tramezzino and the first to be found still alive and unharmed in the dark. Still, these losses were only natives, a toll of, no doubt, local significance but world-unhistorical.

Pressed for an explanation of her success in exorcism, Cecilia Tramezzino says that the gesture of the two fingers has two meanings. There are always two truths, she says. There is the truth of the surfaces, and the other truth below that, the truth in the depths. The truth of the surfaces, Cecilia says, holding up her index finger, is that the seal of life negated the fatal hand’s recurring grand gesture of death, and that this was the response the hand always desired, finally spoken in a language that it understood. A closure, an enclosure. This satisfies most of the curious, despite having already been told that there is another, deeper truth yet unspoken, a missing truth of the middle finger. There is only so much truth that a person can imbibe at once. It fills up the belly like a strong beer, resulting in farting and belching. Out of kindness, therefore, and in the interest of eupepsia, deeper truths are for withholding.

The author as dataset

Benjamin tells us that, rather than what a text has to say about the relations of production—rather than politics or quality as aesthetic, rather than all art as found art—look at how that text itself is produced, at its own place in the relations of production, and whether it progresses or regresses literary technique. What does the text give, and to whom? This is the first question. The language of technical innovation, like the language of revolution, is easily commodified when it is separated from that question. The struggle is trivially reproduced as a consumer good. The reduction of producer to dataset, the enclosure of generations of art and work as raw material for its endless reproduction as statistical approximation, is not technical progress but regression, both technical and political. The purpose of art is not revelation or joy, though those things are important byproducts. The purpose of art is to make artists. To play that great and secret note that resonates, that reverberates within the cavity of the body like a struck bell. The purpose of art is to be the alarum that makes you open your eyes again, especially if your eyes were already open. You know it’s art if it makes you want to dance and do magic. How many fingers am I holding up, and are they in the mudra of life or death?

Opera omniiia

In 2019, S—— is arrested for a short story, or rather, a shorter story within a short story, a teeny text within a tiny text, that disavows and regurgitates the tail that it just swallowed. S—— writes a character who writes a brief heresy, a comic poke at the most sacred of cucks, a little bit about the small-dicked saint who can’t satisfy his sainted wife, you know how sometimes you just need a lusty charioteer, look, at least it wasn’t the stallion eh, nudge nudge, anyway, so this guy writes this bit, chuckling juvenilely the whole time, and shows it to a second character, this guy he’s trying to fuck, the only reader of his story in the story. The character of the reader is a former child monk who gave up saffron for the worldly life &c. and mostly a chance to get with this edgelord boyfriend. The reader character reads and instantly says, oh dear, oh no, you can’t say that, you should burn it immediately. He is the only person to have read the story within the story; we only read him reading it.

But even if the author character did burn it and scatter the ashes, which he does not, we’d still have always already read it, wouldn’t we? What a muddle of time and dimensionality, oh dear, oh no. We can always scroll up, back past the burning, watch the fragments and ashes uncurl and become leaf again, entropy become portent. We can go up and down the scroll as much as we’d like. We are outside of his time: his time is just a kind of space to us, his whole chronos a small and floppy tope. His self-censorship would be as nothing to us.

The state machine understands this, the uses and inadequacies of chilling effects. It gifts us all with that voice, the one that goes oh dear, oh no, you can’t say that. It implants that voice in us through the making of examples. It takes our jaws and pries them open, it widens our nostrils, it slips in a long poky thing that pushes and slips and slides and crunches deep inside, the little example settling in discomfortably, a hard little pearl in the fleshly mantle of our brain, there to be coated with nacre and shame. There it says oh dear, oh no forever: that is the use value. But it is also not enough. It is an inadequacy, much like the sagacious who could not satisfy his rapacious, that is to say, the incapacious, the oh dear, oh no. The Buddha hikes up his wizard robes…

S—— will tell the newpapers later that, technically speaking, he wrote of Siddhartha, not the Buddha, the prebuddha, as it were, not the prabuddha, so that makes it less heretical, doesn’t it? The monks disagree. S—— publishes this story on Facebook, and a month later twenty-five monks come to his place of work, their wizard robes hiked up aggressively, their hairy thighs quivering in rage, wagging their fingers, shaking their fists, unconcerned and uninterested in degrees of diegetic separation. They demand a public apology; they demand the story be apologetically unpublished. S—— deletes the post in concession but will not apologize. The text has already been saved and shared by many, samizdata. I save a copy and later translate it for myself. I wonder, translating, if I am studying the words, the sentences in fine detail, searching for the crime they contain. I want to understand how these words sent a writer to prison. Traddutori are not the only traditore; all authorship, all articulation is suspect. It is the lack of apology, the lack of backing down, that leads the coven of monks to escalate. They cite covenants. They demand coventry. The state is an obedient machine, subjugated to the chronic ache in its temples. The state machine can only do as instructed. Machines are always logical, but logics are never neutral. The state machinates S—— into prison, the one in Kegalle, not the one in Galle or Tangalle. The prison is about one thousand square metres. 

His arrest coincides with mass arrests of Muslim unsubs—you know, like in cop shows, it means the unknown subject, it means people who would rather unsubscribe from a narrative but cannot—after the Easter bombings. They said ISIS did it, you know, the coordinated Easter Sunday bombings of churches and hotels, hundreds dead in hours, we were driving around town trying to get home that day, watching out for trucks full of explosive imported ISIS, but it turned out to be a kind of local franchise ISIS, sort of not really quite authentic ISIS, not necessarily like a licensed ISIS, a belatedly licensed unlikeness, little bit of a fandom isis, more of a isought. Regardless, that is to say, without regard, irregardless, the machine stated mass arrests of Muslim people were in order, in no particular order. The one thousand square metres in which S—— was held thereby became the holding grounds for one thousand prisoners. Imagine them, like a perfect chessboard, evenly distributed, each one in a little square one metre by one metre, each frictionless like a ball bearing, each a world, each a globe, each a raindrop on a spiderweb, each seeing and reflecting all the others, a panopticon, like Indra’s net, you know, a precision that brings a teardrop to your eye, because of course it was not like that at all. This was not a platonic realm of abstraction. It was a real prison with six toilets for a thousand people. 

Like A——, S—— too wrote stories in prison; stories, naturally, about prison. He was arbitrarily detained for 127 days and threatened with up to ten years. His case was dropped, with no indictment, in 2021 as part of the state’s seasonal performance of freedoms before the UN Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva. 

Prison is a place of storytelling and a natural setting for fiction. Prison is the country. The purpose of art is to show you the bars that have always been there, to force them from background to foreground. Prison is the only place where stories can be told. Oh wait, that’s not here yet. You scrolled down too fast. Back up, hold up. Lean back a little, get your head out of the window, feel the wind from the sea on your face, salt on your tongue. We’re in the chthonotrope. Let it cook. 

IIInterlinked

The hands are holding hands. The hands are joined at the wrist. The hands are chains, interlinked. By the time the hands reach your hands, they are no longer enormous: you could stand on the beach and shake the hand without discomfort. In your hands they are cold and wet. Grains of sand grate between palms. Michele Tramezzino takes the hand that reaches him in both of his own. The chain of hands reaches back down the beach, each hand twinned like a butterfly’s wing, every hand holding another, down into the black water. Perhaps the chain reaches back all the way to the horizon. The sun is gone with a green flash, green and gold, green like the colour of money, gold like a ducat. The hands unclasp. They climb the speculative body of Michele Tramezzino. They grasp and chain him, five hands between his ankles, five more between his wrists, ten wrapping themselves around his torso and pressing the tight skin of his belly, the bloat taut and stretched like a drum. Stiff thumbs push into the backs of his knees, forcing them to bend. He falls to his knees, the sand rough and grinding. Two hands close around his neck, their twins rising up to cover his ears. There is a roaring in his ears like the sea. Two hands close over his eyes, and two more over the eyes in the back of his head. For a moment he thinks they will leave his nose and mouth uncovered, but then he feels a hand grip the crown of his head, the elongated wrist coming down to rest on his brow, fingers nosing at his nostrils, at his mouth. Hands swing around the sides of his head to press themselves alongside his jaws. Fingers probe and pull open his mouth, hook his jaws as far apart as they can go. Drool down his chin drips and hits him in the belly, a cold thumbtap on a tabla, a beat dropping. 

Chthonotrope

You can tell when these stories get too real. That’s when I anonymize the names of the characters. Those characters are not quite the same as their real-world referents. I have taken some liberties because they were not given those liberties. But they are close enough that I can say: these are the things that happened. These are the things that are happening right now. These are the terms of your sentence. These are your conditions of your imprisonment. 

Reverb

To imprison; to misplace; to immiserate. The machinic state is not merely the death of the author—we already had that, Barthes did it thirty-five minutes ago—but the endless reiteration of authorial undeath, this fleshless, joyless immortality. To haunt, without will, without agency, without choices. Machine, write me a Vajra Chandrasekera story about the future of art and email it to Indra Das for consideration. Specifications: about 7,700 words, include a family of sixteenth-century Venetian booksellers as the main characters in a retelling, more tenebrous and obscure than is traditional, of the thousand-year-old tale of the three princes of Serendip (of which story the Tramezzinos themselves were the publisher of record in its first Italian translation.) Skip the boringly Sherlockian bit with the camel and the tired Scheherazade parade of princesses and pavilions, but keep the bizarre bit about the fatal hand and the mirror of justice which in any case do not belong here, having been inserted into this narrative from other sources by Christoforo the Armenian five centuries ago. Actually, machine, scratch the mirror of justice; in our time, we all know justice doesn’t come from mirrors. In that scratched mirror of justice, darkening and vandalized, show (dimly, as if from a greater distance than actually pertains) the stories of those punished for creating art, for telling truths, for making jokes. Never look away from them. This is unholy ground, but it is the only terra firma I know, not nullius but terra communis. Eh, you know how it is with these bloody terras and commies. Without prison, who are we, as a culture? This island’s mythologies begin in a penal colony. This is a place of exile for monsters. 

The work of art in the age of statistical approximation 

How do you read a text like this? Slowly, and with some difficulty. A machine could read it easily, instantly, not requiring understanding. To a machine, this is only a sequence of 7,666 words, of 43,831 characters, each part a datum, weighing the same as any other, entirely fungible dollops. A small contribution, the machine assesses, to the valuable knowledge of the frequencies of which characters, which words, are used with others, by this author and in general by all authors in this language. This is what stories look like; these are the words and sentences and events that follow each other; this is the way the world goes. But what if we wanted the world to go another way? For this, you need something more than a machine: you need a monster.  

If intent isn’t magic—and Tumblr and Barthes agree here that it isn’t—there is only text, and text is an unsouled body, ripe and vulnerable for possession. Why’d you leave it lying out there without protection, then, without so much as a circle of salt around it? Intent isn’t magic, but then, where is the magic? Or more precisely, where is our magic? Because Mahinda Rajapaksa has a vajra in his hand and so does Elon Musk. Every president has an evil soothsayer. You cannot face them with empty hands. The definition of art, in retreat, cannot fall back on either exchange value or use value, but on the risk of prison and pain, disappearance and death. It is the blood, the lives, the hours and years demanded in exchange that sanctifies art, gives meaning to intention. You’ll know it’s art when someone’s paid for it in, or with, their bones. 

You can and should expect the machine to take over the market share of art as extruded entertainment product. A corporation may claim vast swathes of intellectual property, license the likenesses it requires, and instruct the machine to produce at the scale that makes extremely cheap product profitable. Flood the market with generated texts serving every conceivable permutation and combination of tropes and finely-sliced representational intersections reduced to market segmentation, endless heroes receiving and refusing the call to adventure, being mentored, tested, and trialed, mastering their worlds in echoing synchrony, mass-achieving narratological freedom in prisons so perfect their bars cannot be seen at all. 

Limner

This story was generated by the machinic state, the prison within the prison like the text within the text, the state of the machine, the machine ulcerated, the machine cold but learning. This story was generated by the narratological machine from secret prompts, from gnomic mutterances, from incantations hermetic and heresiarchal. Look at the clock and calendar nearest you, orient yourself on the map. This is where and when you are. Do you know who your gods are? 

To fight gods, especially gods that you made, you must become monstrous. You have to set yourself apart from the implied reader they would demand of you. That’s why I told you at the beginning that this story was a monster. This story is not art’s future or past, only a chain of hands, interlinked. The future of art is you, my love, always and only you. Take my hand, and take up your spine in your other hand, your pen in your other, other hand, and if you have hands to spare, take up the icons and treasures that only you know: a carven skull, a woven basket, a shoe unworn in ten thousand years, a cup of beaten copper, a perfect function never run, a sentence cracking in your hands like a whip. Feel the sea rise up around your knees and adjust your stance in the rough sand. Here comes the lightning.

On a lower level, the basement carpark of the hospital, a sleep-wary woman has arrived before anybody else and she lights a cigarette. She leans against a pillar opposite the elevators where those nurses and paramedics will soon come streaming out with coolers in tow. She settles into looking unavailable and occupied. It isn’t necessary to know what kid, mother, father, which total nobody these organs once comprised or what nighttime crisis called the surgeons to the operating table and compelled her trip across America tonight. There’s no drag to eliminate when you never let it cling in the first place. This is only a moment, and the moment will soon pass.

The elevator chimes. Its doors open. Everyone’s quickly falling to the task of stacking coolers across the backseats of a legion of cars that have been idling, waiting for their cargo and drivers. They pack them in like oblong luggage, less delicately than you might expect, stacking the kidneys standing up, squeezing in a heart where they can. A lot going out tonight. It all has to fit and there’s only so much space in these compacts to work with. Down the line they go loading each car, leaving the keys and a pen-marked road map in the passenger seat before moving onto the next.

With the first of the fleet ready and waiting on its driver, she extinguishes her cigarette with the heel of her boot and moves ahead. All around her is a dance of headlights and shadows, of thudding doors and hurried orders, of other on-call drivers trudging back to their haunts like ghosts, of helping hands each hoping to make the implausible just a little more obtainable tonight, of all nights, please, please. She soars past all of this along a benign comet’s trajectory through a busy solar system, ignorant to the collisions that never take place, unphased by disaster, by all of it. Take it as the value of her inertia, the absence of impacts for proof that you arrive anywhere at any moment of your life only by acts of graceful momentum. She is a constant hurdling through an uncertain ballet that she can’t believe in but is nevertheless a part of. She is a driver arriving at this car because she goes on.

Her reflection glides through the chrome of the car’s interior as she takes the driver’s seat and closes the door. The itinerary for this vehicle is already planned and written on the folded map on the passenger’s seat as a series of marked highways, specific turns, no stops, one exact destination. Tonight, it’s a coast-to-coast trip, to be made in record breaking time, with a hectic, winding and baffling excursion through the MIDDLE-DISTANCE. Most navigational bearings would never take you through that sliver of twilit territory and if ever crossing the Middle-Distance became a time saving factor, the tendency was to eat the cost and go the long way around.

But as a matter of geography and closing distance, the route is efficient. She can determine no fault of logic as she studies every merger and shortcut running reverse along the map, all the way to its origin and five-letter designation, route JUNTA. That’s fine. Tonight, she can be Junta on a flagship voyage with a cargo of cooling organs, passing through but to inevitably arrive somewhere on the other side.

An East Oregon surgery ward is an intangible image in her mind that only her arrival will make solid; a vague and unformed image the long night travel ahead threatens to steadily obscure mile by mile until Junta completely forgets why it is she’s driving, why this and not anything else. A long trip like this, though necessary to make a living, and for the lives of others, is an endurance run, a bout with protracted uncertainty that only by reaching her destination does Junta ever feel requited, like she isn’t just some mad woman prone to all-night trips with a stack of leaky coolers in the back. Her credentials, the tabs on the car, her assignment and destination, yes, Officer, my registration even, and those organs, are all very much real.

But those organs are here in bad faith. They whisper behind Junta’s back about a plot to slowly let themselves die off. They’ve lost it. Severed from the living rhythm of their warm host bodies and now it’s dark, cold… is this how it is to end, if it hasn’t already? So be it, some are content to think.

And Junta worries, what if it (the non-specific it, too much to account for) what if it all catches up to her? Because when it does—an obliterating thought—it will hit me all at once.

But for now, and for a little while longer, her sanctuary will be buttressed by the factors of time and distance.

Junta drives away from horizons starting to show signs of a world quickly ending in creeping ice, stratigraphically razed, peeling away fleeting human factors, discarded souls escaping their taxing bondage moving, not upward, but across (she watches) latitude and longitude, sent, seeking, disappearing into a bottomless cartoon hole… that Middle-Distance.

The compact she’s riding in groans until it is a monster fastened painfully to a metal, 18-wheel chassis. There is no cargo precious enough to justify this thing’s existence. Looking in one of her side-mirrors Junta can see the rig isn’t steel; it is comprised of bone and reeking meat. Two skeletal arms originate from the cramped space behind the cab she sits in, stretching outward to cover the highway’s span. While she drives, they swat at the sky as though attacked, swinging through clouds of exhaust whose whorls shape into the confusion of a bat swarm, past which these hands grope at a sun that’s fading from bleached-spine yellow to a dying rust red. If the rig she’s hauling is truly living, it seems to be rapidly choking to death.

Four hippie kids and their talking dog barrel down the highway in a stylish green van and match pace beside the abomination. They gawk at her up in her high cab and offer speculations about what a small lady with a look like hers is doing hauling a rig like that.

“Doesn’t it suggest some misunderstanding,” Scooby Doo is first to posit. “It’s obvious, she was never meant for this specific haul! Look to her hands, much too small—the fingers disappear in their journey ‘round the circumference of that wheel. Another victim of the screwball chimps back at dispatch if you ask me.”

“Zoinks, talk about a need for new management,” cautious Shaggy, knowing he’s about to ask a stupid question, “but, ah, you don’t mean real monkeys, do you, Scoob?” Up in the cab, it looks like Junta’s really losing it. She starts grabbing at every knob and switch in the cab, finds a dangling pull cord, pulls it hard and the rig lets blow a megalithic scream. It’s a fine excuse for everyone to ignore Shaggy proper but it is also just terrifying.

“Doesn’t look like she knows what she’s doing. You think she’s licensed for a haul that big?” Daphne looks to Fred for a response, who is locked in a deep motorist’s focus, and his attention won’t be diverted from the challenge of setting pace just out of the range of those sweeping arms.

“There’s really no way you could pilot a machine like that if you weren’t trained for it,” Velma interjects, brandishing, like always, her rational mind against the cartoon logic of a bizarre universe. “Those can’t be moving on their own, clearly there’s a complex mechanism at work.”

But Fred is familiar with Junta’s condition here. He furls his brow while his eyes scan an interior distance for an explanation he can offer. “It’s a sort of long-distance, big-haul madness. These roads can do that to you. I know it because I’ve contracted it before.”

Daphne’s intense curiosity for the mad trucker then transforms into concern, flying from her heart to Fred. “But how can that be true if,” reaching for his shoulder, she hesitates. Vulnerability, Daphne knew, doesn’t look like this in Fred. Wounded and suddenly disoriented, imagining other drivers from his past looking at him the way she was looking at that horrible woman, she insists, “you never told me Freddy!” But that forward and undeterred gaze, the look of a captain whose destined lot is to navigate so that no one else must is telling her to let Fred have his mysteries.

“Just don’t look at it too long, gang. It’s not safe, and the only cure is to arrive someplace. Let’s just hope she makes it and there’s someone waiting for her when she does.”

Shaggy screams, “Fred, watch out,” but he’s entered a slow banking trajectory around the obstacle ahead. Junta, however, inside the monster rig, is gunning straight toward an abyssal hole planted across the highway with no sign of stopping. The gang cover their ears as Junta tugs the pull cord again and the rig starts screaming its head off as it disappears, cab first into the hole Fred has pulled off the road to avoid. Desperate, like vestigial wings in a terminal free fall, the skeletal hands grab at the edge of the hole to hang on, losing bits of white bone on impact.

It manages to hang on long enough for the gang to recompose, get out of the mystery machine and walk a little forward together, where they can watch the tail-end of the rig and those hands slide away into darkness.

It’s a silent desert highway moment, before Shaggy says what everyone’s thinking. “Shit, Scoob. Shit.” The noises of strained bone giving out accompanies a laugh track in the distant clouds, like thunder.

Junta’s car crashes through the backdrop and comes to a sputtering, smoky halt after nearly a mile of chaotic careening and skid marks so dark they seemed to be pure absence peering through tears in the material world. The ordeal is taxing and enough to knock Junta unconscious. Sprawled across the steering wheel, she dreams about something these car rides keep her far away from.

She is walking through some stretch of interstate desert with Anna, tracking the motions of a slow-moving shooting star in the night sky above them. Only Junta seems to notice or care about the comet. She walks ahead of Anna as navigator, eyes on the slow burning rock above, wandering through the desert in erratic loops, sometimes doubling-back when it decides to do that. The comet travels through satellites, space trash and stars, combining its immense heat with their own in fiery collisions, expending their brightness and blinking out forever, carrying on and leaving them in its destructive wake. But that has nothing to do with Anna and Junta.

Junta loves Anna but is so overwhelmed by that feeling, she can’t bear to hear her begging that she stop wandering and just face it:

“Don’t you see,” Anna pleaded, “don’t you feel that we have something here?”

Have something? “Something like what,” Junta bites off without looking at Anna. Stars going out above them only she notices. “Your task in these dreams,” she whispers mostly to herself, “is often to pens—”

“—something together, Junta”

And here the comet, like a flick of a fairy’s magic wand, dips its arcing toward the Earth and heads their way. It moves too quickly for Junta and for a moment she is disoriented. Where did it go? And then, ah, a growing light, not rising from the East, but descending behind Junta out of the Northern sky. She turns around and Anna is silhouetted in the approaching light, but her own features, Junta realizes, Anna can see clear as day. She wears the terror of knowing this burning light will pass through them non-stop, because what little mass their togetherness might comprise is not enough to be its terminus. They are merely points along an arc that this something will sweep through, to obliterate or to gather and carry them away forever.

Junta feels the prickling of tears well within her face but there can be no damp regret or sorrow, no time to feel terror in this burning intensity. Took too long and now it’s too late. There was never enough.

The silhouetted Anna stands patient, holding Junta’s gaze. She doesn’t notice or care about the comet; cares only for the person they love who has at last stopped and now seems ready to face them. Wavering in the heat-light, Anna tells Junta “you deserved more,” and is then completely absorbed.

Junta knows there is always the danger of being absent for stellar occurrences like this. Blink and you miss it, a light a little brighter, a little less. She doesn’t miss it; for at least this star, she is there to witness its last moment. She doesn’t dream about the rest. Mostly to herself, she whispers “I do.”

Her eyes are already scanning 15 seconds into the future, hands locked at ten and two, spine supporting her as the brochure example of great driving posture when she realizes the dream is over. It happens like a jump cut, stitching there to here and then to now. Junta can’t remember waking up.

Headlights barely cut the fog that surrounds Junta’s car, adding a thicker bleariness to her already bleary vision. The radiator hisses, trickling and snapping from the violent careening. She feels a cool liquid pooled in the well of the driver’s seat, seeping through the soles of her boots. And something else, out there, a gothic secret sequestered in tendrils of this swirling mist wails and wails. In her stupor, this all amounts to a question for her eyes, her ears, her skin, about where she is and where she isn’t.

She asks, probing her senses for an impression, where am I?

And they tell her, you are right here, Junta. But they can’t tell her why.

The wreck has upset the organ coolers’ neat organization, and some have flown forward onto the middle console and passenger seat. A few have even cracked open and spilled their contents about the car. A half-kidney on the dash, paddling in a little pooled body of amniotic fluid like a canoe with only one oar, rudders closer to the sloping edge, catches Junta’s wandering eye and pleads for rescue. She doesn’t reach out to help it but it isn’t like she’s reeling either; the kidney slops down and away into the unseen space beneath the seat, escaping Junta’s curious gaze. Straining to lean across the center console, still fastened by her seatbelt, she stares and can’t help but wonder, where did it go? She wants to find out, so she gets herself unbuckled and now she’s free to wander.

Junta exits the vehicle and walks around to the other side, her soles trailing wet impressions on the asphalt road as she does. Three coolers have managed to spill outside the car entirely, tumbling out the passenger door, which somehow opened during the commotion, where they lay scattered and gaping. Inside, the organs are missing and, orphaned like that, the coolers just look confused laying alone in the middle of the road. But Junta’s just projecting here.

She doesn’t realize, can no longer remember that these coolers and their absent organs, are the reason she is out here in the Middle-Distance. Their sad affair is her own, but, blessedly, she’s been out too long to recognize that. In Junta’s state, everything out here is just as it is, configurable. Her shored-up sympathy pulls them into the intimate context of her orbit and to her they become something sad, lonely, hopeful or ruined. But these are just things she finds along the road.

In the high beam light up ahead, something fluttery catches Junta’s attention, and, like a child slipped away from their parent’s guiding reason, she floats along abandoning one distraction for another and discovers a folded road map. Ink from the markings meant to guide Junta through the Middle-Distance hasn’t run yet, despite it being a little drippy. That doesn’t hold her attention, however. What does are the drops, the exploded shape they perfected and always seem to make when they hit the ground, much like her own cross-hatched boot print behind her, and the damp trail of insteps embarking from the wreckage and Junta along the cracked road, into the mist and wailing night up ahead.

Jeepers. What have I forgotten? Was I riding with a passenger tonight, and where have they gone? Ahead into… Full moon territory, gallows-woods, dragged acres for dead crops to gather. Junta sets out. She follows the tracks of a person she can’t remember, compelled forward by the possibility toward another who she thinks is somewhere out there, lost, missing, need to find them. That wailing.

Her running takes her farther in, miles offroad, through bramble and hidden ditches, scrambling over cattle fences into a vast moonlit field of mud. It’s a sea of undisturbed lunar vanity, except the path Junta’s mystery has walked; except the pocks of coyote prints circling the last craterous blemish, a driverless flatbed truck, high beams almost smothered as the whole thing, including its cargo, an actual living suit of armor, a Black Knight, wailing in lonesome panic, hunched, and interred in stocks, is slowly being swallowed by the muck. The coyotes’ mirrored-eyes signal their blinking patience, waiting for the truck to lower to ankle-nipping height before going in. When they peel away poor Knight’s breastplate what do they expect to find, what substance in this third or maybe fourth packfeast, but the same empty expanse to entice their gibbering jowls as the miles they’ve already trekked and will continue to, still hungry and still compelled, forward, forever and on.

Stepping into tracks left by her forgotten passenger at the outset of the circling pack, Junta stops to view the desperate scene from the same vantage. Stellar and meditative, distant and indifferent. But what a strange sight, she thinks before turning away. Soon, she follows tracks to where the field heaves skyward, where the moon hangs and showers light upon a large building, waiting in monochrome. Onward through terrain where a road map isn’t useful, but she keeps it in her pocket anyway.

Boss got hurt on the job.

I don’t know how serious it is because I’m no doctor, but I worry. Ub’s too scared out of his wits to tell me what he thinks and he always tells me what he thinks even when I don’t ask for it and I keep asking for it but he won’t tell me. Boss won’t stop moaning “My head, oh” but there’s no light in the van and I can’t see, so all I can do is try to soothe him, but that’s not helping. My hands are wet from touching his face where the ladder swung and hit him. Boss doesn’t cry, says he never does, ever in my life! but I hope this is tears, and I know Boss can cry. It’s okay to cry, Boss.

Ub cut the wires out back at the museum and when he came around to tell us that all was done, he screamed at what he saw, what already had me and Boss stuck in fright. I turned so fast. Oh, Boss, forgive me, I wasn’t thinking like you always say. After that I dropped the ladder. Then I saw Ub running as if he was to try and tackle the ghost. I did wonder if that would work, if you could just deck a walking shadow. And I guess I started thinking like Boss, like if he got it pinned down, then what’s the next step and the one after that, but Ub just wanted to get the hell away from it and somewhere safe. Ub’s already prone to night terrors, so my heart goes out to him, but he sure dipped like a real fink leaping in the van and shutting us out. Had to schlep Boss all by myself, and Boss is a real heavy guy.

Which means I spent more time exposed to that thing than I’d like. Boss and I, we saw it as it made its approach, weren’t caught off guard like Ub was. We saw it come out of the night, across that muddy field leaving deep imprints in the earth—heavy ones, heavier than it should’ve been making—walking slowly, like it was just learning how to or something. First, we thought it was a guard and figured the jig was up but then we saw how little there was to see about it. Nothing but silhouette, no features, no sounds except each step was drenched like it is when you climb out a pool. But it’s a dry night, and I doubt this thing can swim, its walk being as uncoordinated as it was.

It was slow, never really got that close and I don’t know what it would do if it did. There wasn’t time to go back for the ladder after getting Boss in the van and maybe that’s all the better. He doesn’t see what hit him so soon. Neither I nor Ub, or Boss in his condition, can remember what roads we took to get out here, so we’re stuck. And Ub’s crying, we need an idea we need a plan, and the only idea I have goes No, it’s worse than that. Not stuck but trapped. And Boss always barks, leave the planning to me. Because I’m no good, I could never. So, I tell myself a story no one can hear because I can get away with it. And the story goes, for now, we abide by listening for signs that the haunting is over; silent as its passing is underneath the chattering of Ub’s wind-up teeth. And how, tonight the wind is wailing.

But Junta knows that wailing’s not the wind and what it means when it dissipates into yipping echoes and howling, way back across the field. Now she moves in muddy boots on the concrete path leading up to a multi-storied, columnated building. The STILL MUSEUM, est. 1872, a welcome sign in gold relief informs her, flanked by parallel topiary bulldogs, bereft of their green and common dog colors, and rendered monochrome by moonlight.

Indeed, here’s a no-man’s-land for pigment. It begins with garden flowers, which she then compares to the silver of the gurgling fountainhead and the silver of the licking flames on the silver candle fixtures to the left and right of the museum’s front door adorned with silver handles and silver hinges. The only color—the bravest—that the moonlight cannot leech, as though saying you will have no more of me, is the earthen brown contained in the trail of Junta’s shoes and those she’s followed all night, and which have finally led her here.

Around the Still Museum’s side, Junta observes the tracks taking on a vertical trajectory, up the rungs of a ladder leading to a window on the third story. Paces away, a non-descript van begins to jostle, disrupting the painterly stillness of the place. Then there’s a voice, a man calling out to Junta, going PSSS’T.

He says his name is Kog and he’s got this wild story about him and his buddies holing up in this van, waiting for a ghost to pass by and leave them alone. A real ghost, he emphasizes, it’s a true story. Kog wants to know what Junta is doing out here in the Middle-Distance, if she put up that ladder, if she knows a way out and, if she does, can they help each other. He’s looking to put together a plan, because, he relents, the old one called for bravery he just doesn’t have.

So, they strike a deal and Kog proposes his vision. Junta agrees to go inside the Still Museum to unlock the front door, bartering for a ride out of the Middle-Distance using her map, with a stop-over along the way to pick up her cargo. Once Junta manages to get the front door open, Kog, and a wreck of a man named Ub, will go in and nab what Kog’s calling, some pharaoh’s little kitty. And because his two left feet would make a poor jitterbug with the pedals, he explains, while Junta’s inside, Kog will work on Ub, calming him down enough to drive them all out of there.

They work it out, they get to work. Kog holds the ladder for Junta to climb up, and while she does, he says “glad that horrid wailing died off, was summoning me nightmares for sure.”

To which Junta replies, “I saw it, this terribly lonely thing, but I didn’t stop to help.”

“Heh. Heartless but I’m not much better. Hope you got a hanky if you end up running into what it was me and Ub saw.”

On the last rungs of the ladder, Junta looks behind her along the terrain of the Middle-Distance. It strikes her how unlikely it is to encounter anyone out here at all. What chance, to have gone wandering on this night and along this crowded trajectory. Waking in the wreck a minute earlier or later, would she be the one slipping through this opened window? Would she be here for the sound of boots lightly touching down and splashing in a puddle collected beneath the sill? A moment later or earlier, would the chance to see the way moonlight and her shadow plays on the sleek marble that leads deeper into the museum not have been hers?

Would it be her, if she moved any faster? If she moved faster than this.

Slowly, at first, through this room and on to the next, and the next, past sculptured portals, ranks of doors, galleries, then through silent rooms onto more silent rooms. She leaves centuries behind her as she navigates the Still Museum’s exhibits, searching for someone she cannot remember, searching for life and finding only the interred past of things whose day has abandoned them. Framed living places, preserved living cultures, catalogued living histories, gathered, crated and carried to this place for nobody. She observes only certain angles in the dark, but Junta knows there are more than just these catches, more than is possible to appreciate in the briefness of her passage. If she moved slower or any faster, would there be time to bring the portraits closer to touching and return ancient tools to ancient hands?

Moving through rooms like this brings to her a quiet sensation. The factoring of Junta by rooms of time and distance, the expression of a terrible loneliness she hardly recognizes anymore. In this darkness, isolated in the dim cabin light of her long road trips, held by Anna in the heat of her direct attention, or out there in the hollow space of the Middle-Distance, Junta is continuously traversing such rooms where single moments and rote processes distend into passages of incalculable and unstable dimensions. One room leads onto the next as walls gradually adapt the shape of other vaults, shrinking and expanding beyond her view into all directions.

Not that she can truly appreciate the architecture or the way these rooms have captured her. Flooded as they are with drowned, dull and undifferentiated life that floods her in turn, she fails to apprehend the immense power of seclusion that places her so apart from everything that is, truly, so near to her. And how drab it is to wade through all this interior space. Even if there are collisions, encounters with someone or something, they leave no impression she can sense, no dead crater for her unfeeling touch to trace and wonder whatever might have happened to her. Such a waste of phenomenon spent on Junta in this way. She moves like this through the diffuse night of every room, alone in her eternal approach and never near arrival.

But in the unseen upper reaches of these expansive rooms, a darker suggestion remains unconfirmed: if every room Junta inhabits is just the same, then perhaps there is only one room. A single room dominated by time and distance, whose dimensions are so large that Junta, racing off into any direction, could dwell inside for years without ever discovering a limit or way out. An unending room to contain all her days, or her one interminable night. It grabs her like a limb in a crowd attached to no one when Junta realizes she never actually entered this room. It is impossible to trace her memory in reverse along the path she had spent years following to a moment where a door or portal or gate was crossed. She lacks the comfort of such a regrettable and specific event. In its absence, suspecting that maybe there isn’t an exit, she feels only doom.

The window that allows her and tonight’s moonlight to enter the Still Museum remains in sight behind Junta, only smaller from her far vantage, reduced to a glimmering star point. It consoles her. She realizes the dimensions of the museum are limited and the possibility of an outside bares down on Junta’s awareness of an inside. There is a sudden expansion where every room Junta has ever been in empties out, and entrances, like beginnings for endings, seem to be just echoes of exits. And after all her tumbling through the dark tonight, here is a door with brightness bleeding through its jamb. Gradient amber licks at her shoes while she hesitates to turn the nob. It contains a promise, she truly believes, to transform her if she’ll allow it. So, with trepidation, she turns the knob, steps inside and closes the door behind her.

She has entered some liminal space, an anteroom of a kind for guests to pause and prepare before diving forward into all that history Junta’s just now closed the door on for good. Color is permitted here, she notices, first with the bone-white and auger adornments studding the walls. There are spines for the room’s vaulted reaches, teeth along the balcony’s arched opening to her left, shoulder blades on a hearth embedded in the parallel wall, and elaborate orbital decorations of a door frame, an alcove for balustraded stairs descending, opposite to Junta when she enters. On shelves which crowd the narrowing spaces of the vaults overhead sit a variety of repurposed glass bottles and jars, too high above and too clouded anyway by dust or whatever shedding for Junta to know what they contain. And this is just as well. The amalgams of living tissue, bundled appendages and unborn creatures embalmed within these cluttered containers, for the last time, have turned their small, cramped backs to a world they wish to forget and be forgotten by.

A dim fire persists in the fireplace, over which hangs an elegantly framed mirror reflecting a view of the balcony and the vantage outside. She has seen something in it that compels her to cross the room, to step out once more into the befuddling night of the Middle-Distance. Oblivious of the culture of exclusion and isolation that reigns secretly above her, Junta moves delicately across clay tiling and the familiar trail of damp imprints to reach out, assure impact if it can be willed, with a ghostly image standing on the balcony, so alone-seeming.

Outside, the moon holds a spotlight on shadows amid a strange ritual. It shines clear upon the movements of an esophagus skating through the translucence of an incoherent body. It descends through a shoulder and down the length of the figure’s only arm, dropping off from its hand into the latest in a sequence of jars, set upon a narrow table like potted plants. They bask in just as much lunar light as Junta’s forgotten passenger, whose shape diminishes with every part that’s sloughed into these containers.

Her curiosity takes her past the standing shadow to kneel beside the table, to get an eye-level look at that esophagus and whatever else might be inside the other jars. With its scant humanoid form, the ghost crouches beside her. Its curiosity outpaces Junta, mounting not because of the mystery of the jars, but for the imminent reaction it expects of her. An excised jaw still red from surgery is submerged within the ebbing shadow of the ghost’s bodily form. Pressed this close to Junta, its half-grin could be construed as a greeting. The jaw salivates just inches from her face with eager encouragement for her to watch. Be certain not to miss this one.

But this is an indirect language Junta thinks she’s interpreting. No tongue in that mouth to wag and confirm just how interested in her the ghost really is. Despite this, an amber drool is pooling beneath them. It trails off a long distance back to Junta’s car, and then beyond to abscesses of anonymous cadavers hundreds of miles away. A hard journey that’s harder to return from. Exhausted and collapsing into itself, Junta watches as the jarred throat turns to pitch and a fluid of shadow begins to fill the jar’s volume to its brim.

 Standing and sealing the jar before it can spill, the ghost looms over Junta. Beside the macabre display, it looks almost satisfied, emanating a pride that urges her to remain kneeling and look closer. She studies the jars in sequence, backward and forward, like a sentence whose meaning she is on the verge of intuiting. There is a cool touch reaching through the fabric of her jeans. It’s an amniotic chill she knows, a wet recollection that pierces her confused condition to explain that interred within these glass containers are the cargo organs she is meant to deliver. And they are expiring, or else beginning their departures before she could even reach them.

While watching inky bubbles coalesce and rupture against the jars’ glass, Junta wonders if there is anything inside herself that could compel a person to stop their leaving and remain where they were. If it is there, she cannot picture what it looks like. So, she searches with unfamiliar vision through the dark sheen of glass before her, seeking something honest and innate in its reflection to be shared and embraced. Junta peers through the pitch in search of more than nothing and can only peer deeper.

She is dizzied by this sudden reversal of movement that sweeps her inward. These night dispatches were never taken up to close the distance between her and someone else. They were only the continuous pursuit after an indefinite state. In this movement Junta composes herself; she is as a navigator’s motivation to chart a path through and away, to be the line but never the point, to avoid capture by the design of someone or something capable of encompassing her. She moves to elude definition by another. Tonight, however, all this momentum culminates in delay. In uncertain fractures she has never noticed before, her own reflection hounds her to consider, where have we been led? Through a movement too slow, onto not much of a place, a nowhere that pervades inside her, and peering deeper.

The Middle-Distance occupies a space beyond her sight but a curtain of clouds has moved to block the moon and eclipse everything. Background peripheral and foreground blur with her immediate vision. The entire region turns into the same pitch substance contained in these jars and in a quick, passing moment, all its territory may be traversed without movement, every distance made equivalent before her. Sightless in this blind terrain, Junta feels as though she could be anywhere; all the curvatures of earth are inside her; she holds the intensity of being beside everyone all at once. Then just as suddenly as it happened, the curtain is drawn away, leaving Junta in her glass reflection.

But well past the surface image, through the slight seams formed on the glass, passed into the pitchy nowhere inside, she listens to a deep-throated voice suggest: The places you could reach, Junta, without moving at all.

A clap resounds inside that nowhere space. It races through her skull, threatening to drive her back into that old continuity but its veering is erratic, and she can tell this is something different. Like a bat whose confused screeching works to orient it in dark cave spaces, this internal echo flies after surfaces she cannot see. An intensity, not a movement, emanating inward, not outward, reaching for the unseen limits of that greater room, to its ruined walls Junta thought would close her in forever. Flying over their crumbled ramparts into an eternally unending everywhere within her. No cheap movement; she exudes only speed. Through herself, she reaches out for someone and there’s no distance between them. Inside her there’s enough to hold the ghost and its organs, the whole Middle-Distance with its residents and itinerants and even those people out there in the world waiting on them, waiting on her.

Junta stands. “You have come a long way, I can tell, so you must be tired,” she tells its destitute body. “But there are people out there who expect us. They are alive but only for a while longer, alive in a way that’s not much like living—especially without you.” Inside the shadow pitch containers, glowing cartoon eyes peek, swim and silently return her gaze. “We should go, we risk too much if we just stop.” They swim away, receding into their personal interiors and distances to never reemerge. “Move, let me carry you.” The faceless thing, if it hears her pleading, does nothing. But in what way could she expect a response, without eyes, without a tongue, with a form that’s ever diminishing?

No speech and no body language. What would you say, if you could? Tell me.

“Are you content?” How could you be?

“You’re tired, you want to give up, and now that you’re cut loose, you think a disconnected life is better and this is your chance.” It’s true. This is their only chance to seize control, to determine their own course. Every organ is subject to the influence of a movement that functions automatically to perpetually keep them from failing, from selfishly opting out. A pulsation that confines them to a prison of living health. The movement is constant, though it seems to take them nowhere. The organism overrides whatever selfish desire the organ might have to function for some other purpose. Suicide motivates the organs of this ghost tonight; they harness spite against the resistance to let a heart slow down to the pace of a blinking eye, to speed up and become the flipbook of a caged bird taking flight. It is a tyranny to insist that a lung remain a lung when it might also be something else.

So, remaining still is a motion that seems especially meaningful tonight.

But just the same, conceding perhaps, the ghost does move to pass Junta onto the other corner of the broad balcony where a straight-back chair is placed. Beside the chair it wordlessly stands, waiting with patience for Junta to accept what seems to be its offer for a rest. Between the decorated nodules of the chair’s shoulders, she can see how it frames an image of the Middle-Distance with the crushed perspective of a painting. Her entire journey is depicted with all its distances reduced and folded together. The territories of the field and the band of woods she scrambled over in panic are layered on top of each other, comprising what seems to be just inches of space. Because there are no words the two can communicate with, she moves to meet the ghost and leans with her back turned to it, against the railing where the image before them fills her vision completely. She does not sit, she won’t.

Above these layers winds the road, a dark cut snaking across the canvas where Junta started out on foot. It shrinks to the image’s vanishing point where the moon bows heavily over everything. In the sky, it is the dominant object in the frame. A distorting moon that dictates scale for the night below, holding space together and apart. Suspended between its sloping belly and the asphalt below is Junta’s car with all its scattered cargo. Falling or rising amid an ambiguous state of pre-crash or recomposed ascent. And the night is so quiet; across the flattened distance she thinks the sound of its idling motor might be heard. A familiar humming, far from her, that still seems so close.

Are you coming or going? I can’t tell with you.

You haven’t decided yet, is that it?

Well, you must know by now; no one is going to just wait on you.

The ghost slips away while her back is turned. Its farewell sounds a final surging thrush of substance, rapids of shadow spilling into the last empty jar along the table. Grinning still and chattering, now relinquished, the jaw lands with a buoyant plop. In its last dithered seconds before what happened to the throat happens to the jaw, its own phantom organism sends an itch of laughter along its gums.

Ah, just try to laugh without a jaw. Hilarious; it would have cackled.

A weight in the sky. The midnight vacancy of space which, on nights that are not like this, nights in other places, is cradled serene over land where only a fine scattering of stars occupy the sky, now presses downward onto the terrain, bears itself against the Middle-Distance with the force and presence of that domineering moon. All over there is isolation, and continuous departures and wanderings; a suicidal motion where things appear only to vanish, wherein their vanishing imposes onto presence a frustration of absence, of two mouths mouthing “remove” and “adhere” to each other shoulder inside shoulder, overlapping, compacted and scattered throughout the invisible crowd all over.

At the railing where she leans this atmosphere suddenly grows dense and aggravated. Junta experiences it like a haunting so forcefully against her back, it seemed, that she was threatened with the possibility of being shoved over a ledge. She turns sharply as though to protect herself yet discovers no one on the balcony with her. Despite the unfixable sensation of being rudely crowded into a tight order among other bodies, she walks with an unrestricted gait in her search along the balcony and the connected anteroom for whoever could be blamed. But in a moment, as the same crowding feeling persists and she adjusts. It dawns on her that there is no one here, that she is all alone, and that she is probably the only moving thing in all the Still Museum. Returning to the balcony at a startled pace that almost sends her colliding with the table, which would have sent one lidless jar tumbling, Junta discovers she isn’t just suddenly alone but that she is abandoned.

The last jar is filled; these cargo organs have gone a distance that she cannot follow. Staring into the black nothing, she finds that its warbling surface distorts all reflection, presents images, signs, possible hints for direction but all incoherent. Standing next to the table, feelings of loss flirt with Junta but it’s all too intangible for her to mourn. Nothing here for anyone, especially for her, and she has grown tired of seeking comfort through absent things. Inside her, in that vast everywhere she contains, there is a tangible medium through which she can reach anything, take comfort in contact and touch. And it would be real.

Still at the table looking down at the quivering liquid in the glass container, she reaches out for something to hold—for those who might love her, for those who are waiting for her, for those who aren’t, for a pharaoh’s mummy pet downstairs, those boys outside, and a seal to place upon the jar. With one movement she gathers all these things and takes them with her when she leaves the balcony, headed to the first floor.

And in still silence, black pitch rejects the pestering of moonbeams against glass and will not permit their begging to be let in.

We are gone, Junta is too; just let us alone.

“We can’t trust maps on nights with moons like that.,” she shouts, running out the front door of the Still Museum and jumping in the passenger seat of the van. “Let’s go, I know the way enough,” and Ub peels off. The smell of rubber; you could tell that’s where he channeled his terror. “For jobs like this, you need focus. And now I can appreciate why you always tell us not to think too much, stick to the plan, not second guess nor start improvising. It would be so easy to fly apart at the seams when you see such inexplicable things, when your plan gets away from you as it did.

Boss, take it easy, don’t try to get up. It’s dark in here but you’re safe.

Just listen. Let me tell you. I know you’ll be proud to hear it.

Ub and I, we got that kitty.

But we very nearly left without it. There was a moment, Boss, where, yeah, the plan did fall apart. When you weren’t responding, and it seemed like Ub and I would have to go it alone. We just couldn’t get unstuck from our roles, it seemed impossible without you. Ub could only think of driving, and I was just a pair of helping hands there to hold things when told to. It was like if the two of us could somehow function like normal then you would have to function like that too. But you weren’t waking up.

It was lucky that she came along.

Because when she did, something inside me started to move and, you know, Boss, I started to see myself sort of as I see you. For a moment, when you weren’t there, I was something of a Boss myself. But not actually. I just brought her in on the old plan. It was like you were still there when you really weren’t. We both needed help. It was the only way we could get the job done without you.

She told me her name is Robin. She’s the one who went inside and grabbed the cat.

Then we left. Robin had us moving quickly through the zone, off roads, through parts not on any map. She was charting us a course because neither of us knew the way in, out, or through this kind of space. That was part of your expertise, but you weren’t awake then.

On our way, we had to stop to pick up cargo she had stranded after totaling her car along the main road, north from where we were. Just a bunch of coolers scattered all over the road. I helped her gather and put them in the back with us. (You looked like a pharaoh all your own, I think to tell you, laying still beside those coolers, watched over by a mummified cat waiting for the doors to close and resume its eternal rest.) One of them was leaking, just useless, damaged cargo. Robin reached inside it, handed what it was to me and said, “Here, if there’s any swelling,” and closed us in.

It was firm, damp and cool. I pressed it to your cheek while Robin directed Ub where to go next, and I think it might have helped with your swelling. But if nothing else, Boss, it kept my worry down. Which is just as good, I think.

We were rolling through the dark for some time. Through the window in the partition, I watched Robin guide Ub to avoid parts of the Middle-Distance that were painted by the moon’s glow. We drove along barely perceivable wooded roads, beneath thick canopies, where vision was so poor and Ub really should have slowed down but kept up at Robin’s insistence.

Then we came out into the open, and up ahead I saw a sign welcoming us to the FARM FOR ANIMALS. We passed beneath it, traveling along a dirt road that sloped downward and ended, just ahead, I could see, not at a farm, Boss, but at the edge of a cliff. Before us was just the maw of craggy expanse and overhead the hanging moon.

Before the road could run out ahead of us, Robin asked Ub to pull off, guiding him to this destitute wooden shack. It was all that was left, it seemed, when the rest of what must have been the Farm For Animals slid away or was bitten off the map; at least that’s how it seemed to me. Robin got out, leaving just the three of us, the old crew, alone in the idling car. We didn’t talk, but Ub and I watched as Robin approached the shack and, after knocking, entered. Neither of us said it then because said or unsaid it couldn’t make any sense; but even though the moon was hanging bigger than ever over our heads, its glow was weaker here than anywhere we’d been all night.

It was like we were out of reach, Boss. There were shadows where it seemed like there shouldn’t be. I don’t know if I could explain why but that was a strange kind of comfort. I don’t know. We looked up at it for a long time and all the while my thoughts were empty. Nothing of the usual moon things like astronauts, cheese, distance, ghosts and crimes at night. What we were looking at might as well not have been the moon.

And while we looked, the shack door had opened, and someone stepped out and crossed in front of Ub. A man in blue overalls, his neck held to a stiff tilt, squinting past acknowledgement as he walked with purpose in a direction I couldn’t see. Then, from the shack exited several more men, similarly dressed, but otherwise different. They followed the first somewhere off to the left, toward the cliff edge. Robin was the last to exit and now she too was wearing overalls. Following the group of men, she signaled Ub to bring around the van as she passed.

He moved the car over to where the road disappeared. Through the window, I could see some of the men waiting idly around, speaking to each other without animation. Around them there were chained together various vehicles made for farm work, worn and weathered through time, rusting and in noticeable states of decay. Linked together as they were, with tow cables snaking in a powerful mess that disappeared off the cliff behind their herd, they seemed like ruined beasts of burden who had grazed on everything these indifferent farmers allowed them to reach for. When all the men had gathered, Robin addressed the man with the squint in a discussion I could only hear fragments of.

“Union job.” 

“The waitlist.” 

“Dreaming,” 

“Out there.” 

“Only now.”

The man turned and spoke with the rest of his crew while Robin returned to the van. “We’re getting out of here,” she said, like it was all taken care of, as though we could just drive off into the maw below the moon before us.

Boss, I want you to understand what happened at least as much as I understand it. It feels like I can’t remember, but I do. Just listen.

These men and their machines that whinnied like horses when they struck them to get moving watched the sky beneath the moon without astonishment, like it was absolutely ordinary, as it was yoked like a sleeper’s eyelid that’s delicately drawn open by a nurse or a surgeon just before operating.

Over the puttering of diesel machines, along thin night air, Boss. “Go in,” is all one of them said; the last word anyone has spoken since.

The way your own words get told inside you works differently than how they get told on the outside. This is the difficulty that confronts me, Boss. Knowing what a word holds when it’s on the inside, like a brick that’s laid to something grand, but seeing how it struggles to hold anything and flies away from me when I tell it to you. Well, it’s my terror, Boss, and I haven’t got to tell that before. I’ve been told to, in the past, keep it quiet and so I have. But now I’m going to tell you. Tell you about what just happened and at the same time tell you how I’ve always told myself and never tried to tell on the outside.

Let me tell you, Boss.

It fell over us, covered us, went over us like a blanket and we crawled in under it. And I mean that; there’s no other way I know how to say it. The briefest glimpse of a night beyond a curtained window as the wind, well, opens it like a sleeper’s eyelid yoked. Ub flicked on the high beams and we peered at the space beneath the moon. “Go in,” someone said, and we did.

It fell over us, it covered us, we crawled in under it and have been crawling since that last word someone said. We entered into this undermoon domain.

Ub was showing signs like he might never let up. It took an equal effort from himself and the machinery of the van to drive through terrain like this where there were no landmarks, roads, nothing near or in the nonexistent horizon that the furthest burning high-beam could ever reach. His face was changing, another terror reaction like he’d gone through at the Still Museum when he saw that ghost, but happening too slowly, too mechanically. It was as though the clutch had been leveraged between the hemispheres of his brain until it snapped just to keep things operating.

From the passenger seat, Robin kept her eyes on Ub. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think there was any overt concern in that look. She might have been watching his rapt attention, trying to imagine what he was seeing, because outside the windows there was nothing.

But, Boss, that’s not what it was. Robin was watching out for Ub and at some moment I couldn’t distinguish from the rest of them, here in the dark where time didn’t seem to work, she reached an arm out to his shoulder and said “I can get us the rest of the way, Ub.” She pulled him out of that stasis so steadily, understanding his blinkered reaction with no need for words, seeing him and wanting to help. I don’t think I could have done it, Boss.

After some elaborate maneuvering over each other, Ub got into the passenger and let Robin take over. He stared straight off for a minute but then turned his attention back to me and you, Boss. He didn’t say anything. I just watched him watching me, held him in my vision, glad he was okay.

“Hey, Ub.”

He lifted his arm onto the shoulder of his seat and laid his chin against it, then he said “never gonna take another job like this again,” and rested his eyes.

You must have heard her say it, “this is a truly awful way to get through it.” You were awake then, Boss.

“Yeah, I don’t like it, but it’s how we’re going to get there.” She signals turns, flicks on the wipers, and seems like an expert even out here.

“Just don’t take that to mean it’s going to be quick, we’re not almost home yet.”

“But I’ll see that we get there,” she says. Here, where it’s as dark inside as it is outside, I can’t see anywhere else without Robin, Ub and you, Boss.