room, in this whole final series of rooms, something else, not memory but prophecy, or else memories of the future, of the people we would be when we arrived there, or as perhaps we had already arrived, in a world where so much was made to circle, to roundabout: Her, asleep in a burning bed. Her, fevered beyond recognition. Her, waiting for me to reach her chambers. Her, not caring if I ever did or else not able to care. Her, happy with her foundling and then sending the foundling away. Her, dead or dying but only if I did nothing.
So much of what I saw there was only possibility made flesh and space, made room and what goes inside a room: all this purity of potential, all this stripping down to the elements, and now the eleventh element, named long after it had become all I had, all I hoped to see.
There were twelve elements, and the eleventh was called
memory
.
Memory, as all the earth was filled with, as all our bones.
Memory, an element breaking and taking apart the others, storing them away.
Memory, so that even after the other elements were gone they were still there, so that even after they were used up they were already returning.
H OW LONG I SEARCHED FOR her, and how many more rooms I entered, and as I searched how my beard widened its dishevelment, how my fingernails grew longer and more yellowed, caked beneath with dirt, with some rare fish and fowl stolen from memory-lake, from mystery-woods. How the years passed, and how much older I was after, and how rarely hungry anymore, full anyway with the stuff of my taking, with what the bear had put inside me.
How next my muscles slipped waxy down my bones. How my hair faded, star white as my wife’s eyes after they paled with her sadness, after the making of the moon and the coming of the foundling. How with no seasons there was only watch-time left to track, a circle circling circles, that mechanism passed down by my father, which had marked all the hours of his marriage until he gave it to me, at the beginning of mine.
How then my watch stopped.
How something like years passed, even with no record, and still I climbed farther downward into the deep house, into its spires plunging into the depths of the earth, until at last there were nomore rooms, no more passageways, only a chamber that led to the landing at the top of a great stairs, of a series of steps spiraling into a blackness that my sight could not penetrate or pierce.
Into a
black
, the twelfth and final element, into which I would not go.
Into a black, which unlike all the other elements had no twin I then knew upon the surface, between the dirt and the sky.
The black, awful as it was, I believed then it could be found only in caves, in lakes, at the bottom of houses, and who knew what was below it, what was waiting within?
We looked out into the darkness from atop those first widened and also taller steps, perceived the enormity yawning before us: At that depth, there was again wind, blowing up from the chasm below, and also there was something like rain, water dropping from some ceiling above, some higher height far above where the fingerling and I stood, that low spot we had descended to that was still not low enough, for it did not contain what we sought. The walls ahead were so distant as to be invisible, or else the dark was so dense that they were close but not knowable, and below us that bottomless black soared, and despite my long want I trembled, and so did the fingerling.
I was already an old man, skin flapping upon the flagpole of my bones, and still I waited as if there were more time coming, as if my clock were not run out. But after I grew restless I also grew brave, or at least brave enough to crawl on my belly to the dark end of that platform, to yell my wife’s name down into the void.
There was no answer to my many shouts, not even an echo, and how far did the drop have to be for there to be no echo? How far away the walls?
How far away my wife?
The fingerling claimed
So much of what I saw there was only possibility made flesh and space, made room and what goes inside a room: all this purity of potential, all this stripping down to the elements, and now the eleventh element, named long after it had become all I had, all I hoped to see.
There were twelve elements, and the eleventh was called
memory
.
Memory, as all the earth was filled with, as all our bones.
Memory, an element breaking and taking apart the others, storing them away.
Memory, so that even after the other elements were gone they were still there, so that even after they were used up they were already returning.
H OW LONG I SEARCHED FOR her, and how many more rooms I entered, and as I searched how my beard widened its dishevelment, how my fingernails grew longer and more yellowed, caked beneath with dirt, with some rare fish and fowl stolen from memory-lake, from mystery-woods. How the years passed, and how much older I was after, and how rarely hungry anymore, full anyway with the stuff of my taking, with what the bear had put inside me.
How next my muscles slipped waxy down my bones. How my hair faded, star white as my wife’s eyes after they paled with her sadness, after the making of the moon and the coming of the foundling. How with no seasons there was only watch-time left to track, a circle circling circles, that mechanism passed down by my father, which had marked all the hours of his marriage until he gave it to me, at the beginning of mine.
How then my watch stopped.
How something like years passed, even with no record, and still I climbed farther downward into the deep house, into its spires plunging into the depths of the earth, until at last there were nomore rooms, no more passageways, only a chamber that led to the landing at the top of a great stairs, of a series of steps spiraling into a blackness that my sight could not penetrate or pierce.
Into a
black
, the twelfth and final element, into which I would not go.
Into a black, which unlike all the other elements had no twin I then knew upon the surface, between the dirt and the sky.
The black, awful as it was, I believed then it could be found only in caves, in lakes, at the bottom of houses, and who knew what was below it, what was waiting within?
We looked out into the darkness from atop those first widened and also taller steps, perceived the enormity yawning before us: At that depth, there was again wind, blowing up from the chasm below, and also there was something like rain, water dropping from some ceiling above, some higher height far above where the fingerling and I stood, that low spot we had descended to that was still not low enough, for it did not contain what we sought. The walls ahead were so distant as to be invisible, or else the dark was so dense that they were close but not knowable, and below us that bottomless black soared, and despite my long want I trembled, and so did the fingerling.
I was already an old man, skin flapping upon the flagpole of my bones, and still I waited as if there were more time coming, as if my clock were not run out. But after I grew restless I also grew brave, or at least brave enough to crawl on my belly to the dark end of that platform, to yell my wife’s name down into the void.
There was no answer to my many shouts, not even an echo, and how far did the drop have to be for there to be no echo? How far away the walls?
How far away my wife?
The fingerling claimed
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