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“There shall be a fire that knows your name.”
How, then, did bodies understand the landscape? How did minds flourish or wither, still tuned to a distant frequency?
The estuary held Dead Town like an open hand that could close into a fist at any time.
The biologists’ sleep was long and deep in their mosquito-proof yurts, and the sounds out of the night did not frighten them, and they did not dream, for they lived within a kind of dream already, doing what they had trained for their entire lives.
while the eyestalks of the crabs, for as long as they were able, watched their own death with only mild interest.
MEDIC: Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?
“The red-tinged eye of the lighthouse shining out distant at dusk seems both comforting and utterly unfamiliar,”
“The fire of his words had cloaked him in flame and now rushed out to all sides.”
How the wrongness made them clutch their heads but they could not get the wrongness out. How the sounds built and vibrated and spun and unspooled and in all ways made of them taut twine and elastic stretched to its utmost. To feel attenuated and so thick all at once. To be abomination and unable to cast off the shame of that.
The aftershocks faded. The rain did not stop, but the sun shone through a hole in the black clouds to illuminate stricken faces, each lit differently by shadow and by light, so that some registered more as silhouettes than people.
“I wish you weren’t wonderful in so many ways, because you’re so awful.” A wave of blood, spreading out in all directions.
What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?
That the amount of time he’d had to be someone else, or some variation on the real him, had eroded all of his relationships, professional and personal, taken hold in ways that made him, yes, an empty vessel hoping the flame would stay lit.
And he might as well have lain there a century as an hour. He didn’t know if he could get up again. The smell of the mud mingled with the flowers, strong, earthy, and so full of a fragile, trembling fragrance that he wanted to stop weeping, to take root. To be mindless here and become lost, taken away and dissipated into the sky with the flock of cranes he spied swirling higher and higher still. To forget everything, to remember … nothing.
All the ways he was being released into the world and the world released into him. The simple relief of that even as his fingers came apart at the piano, the wound in the world that kept attracting the candle, the flame, the vessel. The way he could be in all three places at once now—the present that had annihilated him, the past that had never left him, the future that held him still and trembling like a bird caught in a biologist’s net.
There shall be a flame that knows your name. But, perhaps, he knew its name, too.
“The natural state of men living side by side is war. The natural process of peace is to side with war. This expedition goes in peace, but with the capacity to wage war.”
it was just wrong, that was so fucking wrong, that two butts should touch.
An astronaut who had never left Earth, fighting an enemy toward entropy.
