By James Sallis
James Sallis, 23, is a Southerner educated at Tulane. Until recently he lived in rural Iowa with his wife, a painter and medical illustrator, and their son Dylan, 3. At present he is living in London, where he is fiction editor of New Worlds. With Thomas M. Disch and Samuel R. Delany, he typifies the emerging new generation of science fiction writers.
Almost to a man, the writers of “new wave” science fiction deny that there is any such thing as a new or old wave; they say there are only good stories and bad ones. Nevertheless, the new writers form a distinctive group. They are trained in the arts, particularly in poetry and music, rather than in science or engineering, and it shows in their work. (Some of the older writers majored in English, but went ahead and wrote pulp just the same.)
Like Disch and Delany, Sallis uses all the resources of English, not just those few that have trickled down our side channel in the last forty years. “A Few Last Words” is an end-of-civilization story, if you like, but it owes much more to Eliot than to Wells or Wyndham. Its domain is not the great out-there of conventional science fiction, but the poetic intensity of right-here, right-now:
Is this how it feels, the instant of desertion?
* * * *
What is the silence
a. As though it had a right to more
—W. S. Merwin
Again: the dreams.
He was eating stained glass and vomiting rainbows. He felt he was being watched and looked up and there was the clock moving toward him, grinning, arms raised in a shout of triumph over its head. The clock advanced; he smelled decay; he was strangled to death by the hands of time . . . The scene changed. He was in a red room. The hands of the clock knocked knocked knocked without entering . . . And changed again. And the hours had faces, worse than the hands. He choked it was all so quiet quiet only the ticking the faces were coming closer closer he gagged screamed once and—
Sat on the edge of the bed. The hall clock was ticking loudly, a sound like dried peas dropping into a pail. This was the third night.
The pumpkin-color moon was arrested in motion, dangling deep in the third quadrant of the cross-paned window about three-quarters out along the diagonal. Periodically clouds would touch the surface and partly fill with color, keeping it whole. Dust and streaks on the window, a tiny bubble of air, blurred its landscape; yellow drapes beside it took on a new hue.
He had watched it for hours (must have been hours). Its only motion was a kind of visual dopplering. It sped out into serene depths, skipped back in a rush to paste itself against the backside of the glass, looking like a spot of wax. Apogee to perigee to apogee, and no pause between. Rapid vacillation, losing his eyes in intermediate distances, making him blink and squint, glimmering in the pale overcast. And other than that, it hadn’t moved. Abscissa +, ordinate +. Stasis. This was the third night.
* * * *
His wife stirred faintly and reached to touch his pillow, eyelids fluttering. Hoover quickly put out his hand and laid it across her fingers. Visibly, she settled back into blankets. In the hall, the clock ticked like a leaking faucet. The moon was in its pelagic phase, going out.
The third night of the dreams. The third night that lying in bed he was overcome by: Presence. In the dark it would grow around him, crowding his eyes open, bunching his breath, constricting—at last driving him from the bed, the room. He would pace the rugs and floors, turn back and away again on the stairs, wondering. He would drink liquor, then coffee, unsure which effect he wanted, uneasy at conclusions—certain only of this sense of cramping, of imposition. In the dark he was ambushed, inhabited, attacked again from within.
His wife turned in bed, whispering against sheets, taking her fingers away.
Hoover lifted his head to the dresser, chinoiserie chair, sculpt lame valet, to glazed chintz that hid the second, curiously small window. A simple room, sparse, clean, a room with no waste of motion. And a familiar room, intimate and informal as the back of his hand, yet his eyes moving through it now encountered a strangeness, a distortion. He cast his vision about the room, tracing the strangeness back to its source at the window: to pale plastic light that slipped in there and took his furniture away into distances. It occurred to him that he was annoyed by this intrusion, this elusive division of himself from his things. He watched the moon and it stared back, unblinking.
Hoover fixed his chin between his fists, propped elbows on knees, and became a sculpture. His face turned again to see the window, head rolling in his hands, ball-in-socket.
A cave, he thought: that was the effect. Gloom, and moonlight sinking through cracks: pitch and glimmer. A skiagraphy of the near and foreign. Quarantine and communion, solitude and confederation. A cave, shaped in this strange light. . .
And bruising the light’s influence, he walked to the chair and stared down at the suit he’d draped over one arm—looked at the hall clock—ten minutes ago. It was happening faster now . . .
The suit was pale, stale-olive green and it shined in a stronger light. The coat barely concealed the jutting, saddlelike bones of his hips; his wrists dangled helplessly away from the sleeve ends like bones out of a drumstick —and Cass hated it. Regardless of fit, though, it felt right: he was comfortable in it, was himself.
He took the coat from the chair, held it a minute, and put it back. Somehow, tonight, it seemed inappropriate, like the man-shaped valet that no one used. As with the room, the furniture, it had been taken away from him.
He turned and shuffled across the rug to search through the crow-black corner closet behind the creaking, always-open door, discovering a western shirt, with a yoke of roses across its breast and trying it on, then jeans, belting them tightly, and boots. The clothes were loose, looser than he remembered, but they felt good, felt right.
Stepping full into light at the door, he shattered strangeness, and looking back saw that the moon was now cockeyed in the corner of the pane.
Ticking of a clock, sound of feet down stairs.
* * * *
He assassinated death with the cold steel rush of his breathing. . .
The night was pellucid, a crystal of blackness; hermetic with darkness. He moved within a hollow black crystal and up there was another, an orange separate crystal, bubble in a bubble . . . And quiet, so quiet so still, only the ticking of his feet, the whisper of breath. He pocketed his hands and wished for the coat he’d left behind.
Hoover turned onto the walk, heels clacking (another death: to silence).
A sepulchral feeling, he thought, to the thin wash of light overlaying this abyss of street. A counterpoint, castrati and bass. Peel away the light and you: Plunge. Downward. Forever.
Another thought . . . you can tell a lot by the way a person listens to silence.
(Sunday. It was evening all day. Over late coffee and oranges, the old words begin again. The speech too much used, and no doors from this logic of love. We go together like rain and melancholy, blue and morning . . .)
At the corner, turn; and on down this new abyss. Breath pedaling, stabbing into the air like a silent cough, feet killing quiet—
I am intruding.
Darkness is avenging itself on my back.
(And I, guilty realist, dabbler at verses, saying: There is no sign for isolation but a broken spring, no image for time but a ticking heart, nothing for death but stillness . . .)
Light glinted off bare windows. Most of the houses were marooned now in a moat of grass and ascending weed. Driveways and porches and garages all open and empty, dumbly grinning.
(Evening all day. World out the window like a painting slowly turning under glass in a dusty frame. Rain in the sky, but shy about falling. The words: they peak at ten, pace by noon, run out to the end of their taut line . . .)
The shells have names, had them. Martin, Heslep, Rose. Walking past them now, he remembered times they were lit up like pumpkins, orange-yellow light pouring richly out the windows; cars, cycle-strewn yards, newspapers on steps. The casual intimacy of a person inside looking out, waving.
(And I remember your hair among leaves, your body in breaking dew, moonlight that slipped through trees and windows to put its palm against your face, your waist; bright and shadow fighting there . . .)
Darkness. It moves aside to let you pass. Closes, impassable, behind you.
(Four times: you came to bed, got up, came back to bed. You turned three times, you threw the pillows off the bed. Michael, never born, who had two months to live, was stirring in you and stirring you awake.
Your hair was on the bed like golden threads. The moon had pushed your face up into the window and hidden your hands in shadow. You were yellow yellow on the linen bed, and opened your eyes.
—If I weren’t afraid, I could leave and never look back.
You say that, sitting in a hollow of bed, knees tucked to your flanneled breasts, arms around yourself.
—Would you follow, would you call me back?
I watch your steps track down the walk to the black, inviting street. And later, when I open the door, you’re there, grinning, coming back; coming back to make coffee and wait for morning. And another night, another day, saved from whatever it is that threatens at these times . . .)
Hoover looked at the streetlight shelled in rainbow and it was ahead, above, behind, remembered. Darkness shouldered itself back in around him. Snow hung in the air, waiting to fall. The dead houses regarded him as he passed, still, unspeaking.
(October, time of winds and high doubt. It comes around us like the shutting of a light: the same thing is happening to others. And the people are going away, the time has come for going away ... It all boils up in a man, and overflows. His birthright of freedom, it’s the freedom to be left alone, that’s what he wants most, just to be left alone, just to draw circles around himself and shut the world out. Every man’s an island, why deny it, why tread water. So people let go . . .)
Hoover picked the moving shape out of the alley and was down in a crouch, whistling, almost before the dog saw him. It raised its nose from the ground and walked bashfully toward him, sideways, tail banging at a drum, whining.
“Folks leave you, fella?” A brown shepherd with a heavy silver-studded collar; he didn’t bother to look at the jangling nametags. “Take you home with me then, okay?” The shepherd whimpered its agreement. Hoover rummaging in his pockets.
“Sorry, fella, nothing to give you.” Showing empty hands, which the dog filled with licks and nuzzles, snuffling.
“Bribery, eh. Sorry, still no food.” He stroked his hand into the dog’s pelt, found warmth underneath. It sat looking up at him, waiting, expecting, its tail swishing across pavement.
When he erected himself to full height, the dog jumped away and crouched low, ready to run. Hoover walked toward it and put out a hand to its broad, ridged head.
“It’s okay, fellow. Tell you what. Come along with me to see a friend, then I’ll take you right home and see about getting you something to eat. Think you can wait?”
They punctured the night together, down the walk, heels clacking, claws ticking. Hoover kept his hand on the dog’s head as they walked. The nametags threw bells out into the silence.
“Or maybe he’ll have something for you there, come to think of it.”
Click, clack, click. Staccato tattooed on the ponderous night. The sky is still ambiguous.
(Remembering a night we sat talking, drinking half-cups of coffee as we watched stars sprinkle and throb and fade, then saw dawn all blood and whispered thunder. I remember how your eyes were, pink like shrimp, pink like the sky when it caught the first slanting rays and held them to its chest. And as morning opened around us we were talking of Thoreau and men who sailed the soul, of ways and reasons to change, the old orders, and of why things break up. Outside our window it was growing between them, people were letting go, were wanting their Waldens, their Innisfrees, their Arcadias, they were falling away from the town like leaves, like scaling paint, by twos, by ones. Even in our house, our hearts, it moves between us. Between us. We feel it turning, feel it touching. But we care, we love, we can’t let go . . .)
Hoover drew up short, listening. The shepherd beside him cocked its cars, trembled happily.
It happens like this . . .
A drone, far off. Closer. Becomes an engine. Then a swelling of light blocks away. Then a rush and churning and soon two lashing white eyes. Loudest, chased by a dog. A roar and past, racing. A thrown thing. Neil’s car . . . and silence again.
And minutes later, the shepherd’s body went limp and its head fell back onto his lap. Hoover took it in his arms and walked out of the road, its head rolling softly along the outside of his elbow. In the streetlight his face glistened where the dog had licked it.
Crossing the walk, kicking open a gate that wind had shut, Hoover surrendered his burden into the lawn. Ten steps away he looked back and saw that the dog’s body was hidden in deep grass, secret as any Easter egg.
* * * *
Three hundred and some-odd steps. Two turns. Five places where cement has split its seams, heaved up, and grass is growing in the cracks. Pacing this map . . .
(The sea grew tired one day of swinging in harness, ticking in its box of beach. One spark in the flannel sea, possessed of fury, gathering slime like a seeded pearl, thinks of legs and comes onto a rock, lies there in the sun drying. It seeps, it slushes, it creeps, it crawls; it bakes to hardness and walks ... All to the end: that I am walking on two feet down this corridor of black steel and my hand is turning like a key at this found door . . .)
The door collapse-returned. He looked around. A single light cut into the cafe through a porthole of glass in the kitchen door; powdery twilight caught in the mirror. In the dim alley before him, neon signs circled and fell, rose and blinked across their boxes like tiny traffic signals. Profound, ponderous grayness, like the very stuff of thought. . .
Decision failed him; he had turned to go when he heard the door and saw light swell.
“Dr. Hoover . . .”
He turned back.
“Didn’t know for sure you were still around.” Nervously. “About the last ones, I guess.”
Hoover nodded. “Any food, Doug?”
“Just coffee, sorry. Coffee’s on, though. Made a pot for myself, plenty left.” He stepped behind the counter and knocked the corner off a cube of stacked cups, burn scars on his hands rippling in mirror-bemused light.
“Sugar, cream?” Sliding the cup onto crisp pink formica.
Hoover waved them both off. “Black’s the best way.”
“Yeah ... No one been in here for a week or more. I ain’t bothered to keep the stuff out like I ought to.”
Hoover sat down by the cup, noticing that Doug had moved back away from the counter. “Like you say, I guess. Last ones.”
Doug scratched at his stomach where it depended out over the apron. Large hands going into pockets, rumpling the starched white.
“Reckon I could get you a sandwich. Or some toast—-then it don’t matter if the bread’s a little stale.”
“Coffee’s fine. Don’t bother.”
“You sure? Wouldn’t be any trouble.”
Hoover smiled and shook his head. “Forget it, just coffee. But thanks anyway.”
Doug looked down at the cup. “Don’t mind, I’ll have one with you.” His penciled monobrow flexed at the middle, pointed down. It was like the one-stroke bird that children are taught to draw; the upper part of a stylized heart. “Get my cup.” Over his shoulder: “Be right back.”
Light rose as the kitchen door opened; died back down, leaving Hoover alone. He turned his eyes to buff-flecked white tiles; let them carry his interest across the floor, swiveling his chair to keep up. Light picked out tiny blades of gleam on the gold bands that edged formica-and-naugahyde. A few pygmy neons hopscotched high on the walls. The booths were empty as shells, humming with shadow; above them (showing against homogenized paint, rich yellow, creamy tan; sprinkled among windows) were small dark shapes he knew as free-painted anchors.
(All this shut in a small cafe, sculpt in shades of gray. Change one letter, you have cave again . . .)
Doug came back (light reached, retreated), poured steaming coffee. He squeezed around the end of the counter and sat two seats away.
“Neil left today.”
“Yeah, I saw him up the street on the way here.”
“So that’s whose car it was. Wasn’t sure, heard it going by. Going like a bat out of hell from the sound.” He drank, made a face. “Too hot. Wonder what kept him? Said he was going to take off this morning.” He blew across the mouth of his cup, as though he might be trying to whistle, instead breathing vapor. He tried another taste. “Will came through, you know . . .”
Hoover’s own cup was sweating, oils were sliding over the surface. It was a tan cup; the lip was chipped. They weren’t looking at each other.
“That big cabin up on the cape. His grandfather built it for a place to get away and do his writing, way the hell away from everything. Now it’s his.”
“I know. My sister called me up last week to say goodbye, told me about it, they thought it was coming through. Wonder when she’s leaving?”
Doug looked up sharply, then dropped his head. “Thought you knew. She left about three, four days ago.” Doug belched, lightly.
“Oh. I guess she went up early to get things ready, he’ll meet her there. You know women.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably it.” He went for more coffee, poured for them both. “Coffee’s the last thing I need.”
“You too.”
“Yeah—lot worse for some, though. Been over a week for me, lost about twenty pounds. Catnap some . . . Thing you wonder about is, where’d they find a lawyer? For the papers and all. Didn’t, maybe, guess it don’t make much difference anymore, stuff like that. Anyhow, they’re gone.”
(And the wall’s a wedge. Shove it between two people and they come apart, like all the rest. . .)
Hoover shrugged his shoulders, putting an elbow on the counter and steepling fingers against his forehead.
“Almost brought a friend, Doug . . .”
The big man straightened in his chair. His mouth made “Friend?” sit on his lips unspoken.
“But he was indisposed, disposed, at the last minute.”
Doug was staring at him strangely.
“A dog. Neil hit it. I was going to see if I could talk you out of some food for it.”
“Oh! Yeah, there’s some stuff, meat and all I’m just gonna have to throw out anyway. What isn’t spoiled already’s getting that way fast. Didn’t know there were dogs still around, though? Whose is it?”
“There aren’t now. I hadn’t seen it before. Was it: it’s dead.” Extinct.
“Oh. Yeah, Neil was going pretty fast. Dog probably wandered in from someplace else anyway, looking for food after they left him.” Gazing into the bottom of his cup Doug swirled what coffee was left against the grounds, making new patterns, like tiny cinders after a rain. “Always been a cat man myself. Couldn’t keep one, though, haven’t since I was a kid. Sarah’s asthma, you know.”
“You do have to be careful. Used to have hay fever myself, fall come around I couldn’t breathe. Took an allergy test and they cleared it up.”
“Yeah, we tried that. Tried about everything. You oughta see our income tax for the last few years, reads like a medical directory. Sarah got so many holes poked in her, the asthma should have leaked right out. Wasn’t any of it seemed to help, though.”
“How’s Sarah doing? Haven’t seen her for quite a while. She’s usually running around in here helping you, shooing you back to the kitchen, making you change your apron, talking to customers. Brightens the place up a lot.”
Doug tilted the cup to drain an extra ounce of cold coffee off the grounds.
“Not much business lately,” he said. “Boy I had working for me just kind of up and left three-four months ago and I never got around to looking for help, no need of it, specially now.”
“She’s well, though? Doing okay.”
Doug put his cup down, rattling it against the saucer.
“Yeah, she’s okay. She—” He stood and made his way around the counter. “She went away awhile. To get some rest.” He dipped under the counter and came up with a huge stainless steel bowl. “Think I’ll make another pot. This one’s getting stale. Better anyhow if you use the stuff regularly, easier on it, works better—like getting a car out on the road to clean her out.”
He started working at the urn, opening valves, sloshing dark coffee down into the bowl. Hoover watched Doug’s reflection in the shady mirror and a dimmer image of himself lying out across the smooth formica.
So Doug’s wife had gone away too; Sarah had gone to get some rest . . . Hoover remembered a song he’d heard at one of the faculty parties: Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Went to see my Sally Gray, Said my Sally’s gone away—only this time Sally Gray had taken everybody else with her . . .
Doug was chuckling at the urn.
“You know I gotta make twenty cups just to get two for us, I mean that’s the least this monster here’ll handle. Ask him for forty-fifty cups, he’ll give it to you in a minute. But you ask him for two, just two little cups of coffee, and he’ll blow his stack, or a gasket or something.” He went back to clanging at the urn. “Reckon you can handle ten of ‘em?” He started fixing the filter, folding it in half twice, tearing off a tiny piece at one corner. “Hell, there ain’t enough people left in town to drink twenty cups of coffee if I was giving it away and they was dying of thirst. Or anywhere around here.”
He bowed the filter into a cone between his hands, climbed a chair to install it, then came down and drew a glass of water, putting it in front of Hoover.
“That’s for while you wait.”
“I need to be going anyway, Doug. Have to get some sleep sooner or later.”
Doug reached and retrieved Hoover’s cup, staring at the sludge settling against the bottom. “One last cup.”
“All right. One more.”
One for the road . . .
Doug bent and rinsed the cup, then got another from the stack and put it on the counter. He stood looking at the clean, empty cup, wiping his hands against the apron. He lit a cigarette, nodding to himself, and the glowing red tip echoed one of the skipping neon signs on the wall behind him. He put the package on the counter and smiled, softly.
“You know, you could’ve sat right here and watched the whole thing happening. I mean, at first there’d be the usual group, but they were . . . nervous. You know: jumpy. They’d sort of scatter themselves out and every now and then the talk would die down and there’d be this quiet, like everybody was listening for something, waiting for something. Then a lot of them stopped coming, and the rest would sit all around the room, talking across to each other, then just sitting there quiet for a long time by themselves. Wasn’t long before the regulars didn’t come anymore—and you knew what was going on, you knew they were draining out of town like someone had pulled the plug.
“That was when the others started showing up. They’d come in with funny looks on their faces, all anxious to talk. And when you tried to talk to ‘em, they’d be looking behind you and around the room and every once in a while they’d get up and go look out the window. And then they’d leave and you’d never see them again.”
Hoover sat with his legs locked back, toes on the floor, regarding the glass of water (the bubbles had nearly vanished). He nodded: he knew, he understood.
“For a while I got some of the ones that were coming through. I’d be in the back and I’d hear the door and come out, and there’d be this guy standing there, shuffling his feet, looking at the floor. He’d pay and take his coffee over in the corner, then the next time I looked around, he’d be gone—lot of them would just take it with them, to go. Then even that stopped.”
(The people: they drip, trickle, run, pour, flood from the cities. They don’t look back. And the ones who stay, try to fight it—they feel it growing in them worse than before. Turning in them, touching them, and they care they love they can’t let go. But the harder they fight, the worse it is, like going down in quicksand, and the wall’s a wedge: shove it between two people and they come apart, like all the rest, like all the rest of the world . . .)
Doug found something on the counter to watch.
“One time during the War, the ship I was on went down on the other side and a sub picked us up. I still remember how it felt, being in that sub, all the people packed in like sardines, stuffed into spaces between controls and motors. You’d think it would be full of noise, movement. But there was something about being under all that water, being closed in, something about the light —anyway, something that made you feel alone, made you want to whisper. I’d just sit in it and listen. Feel. And pretty soon I’d start wanting them all to really go away, to leave me alone . . .”
Doug stood looking for a moment out one of the small round windows past Hoover’s shoulder.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s the way it is all right.” Then his eyes switched back to Hoover’s cup. “I better go get that coffee, just take it a minute to perk.”
He picked up his cup and walked down the counter toward the kitchen, running his hand along the formica. The door swung back in, wobbled, stopped (light had reached, retreated).
Hoover felt suddenly hollow; empty; squeezed. He looked around. The room was a cave again.
Out in the kitchen, Doug moved among his stainless steel and aluminum. Hoover heard him banging pots on pans, opening doors, sliding things on shelves out of his way. Then the texture of sound changed, sank to quiet, became a silence that stretched and stretched. And seconds later broke: the back door creaked open and shut with a hiss of air along its spring, clicking shut.
(So now the quicksand’s got Doug too, for all his fighting. Now he’s gone with the rest, gone with Sally Gray . . .)
Outside in the alley angling along and behind the cafe, Doug’s Harley-Davidson pumped and caught, coughed a couple of times and whined away, one cylinder banging.
Hoover sat looking at the abandoned cup as silence came in to fill his ears. Then he heard the buzzing of electric wires.
The last grasping and. their fingers had slipped.
The wedge was driven in, and they’d come apart . . .
He stood, digging for a dime and finding he’d forgotten to fill his pockets, then walked to the register and punched a key. “No Sale” came up under the glass. There were two nickels and some pennies.
He fed the coins in (ping! ping!), dialed, and waited. The phone rang twice and something came on, breathing into the wires.
“Cass?”
Breathing.
Again: “Cass?” Louder.
Breathing.
“Cass, is that you?”
Silence.
“Who is this? Please. Cass?”
A small, quiet voice. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”
A click and buzzing . . .
After a while, he reached up and flipped out the change tray. As the lid slid away, a tarnished gray eye showed there: someone had left a dime behind.
Nine rings. Cass’ voice in the lifted phone. Sleepy; low and smooth; pate, ready for spreading.
“Cass?”
“Is that you, Bob? Where are you?”
“Doug’s place. Be right home.” The space of a breath. “Honey. . .”
“Yes?”
“Get your bags packed, we’re leaving tonight.”
“Leaving?” She was coming awake. “Where—”
“I don’t know. South maybe, climate’s better. But maybe that’s what everyone will think—anyway, we’ll decide. Just get your things ready, just what you absolutely have to have. We can always pick up things we need in towns. There’s a big box in the bottom of the utility closet, some of my stuff, some tools and so on I got together awhile back. Put that with the rest—there’s some room left in it you can use. I’ll be right home. Everything else we’ll need is already in the car.”
“Bob. . .”
“Just do it Cass. Please. I’ll be right back, to help.”
“Bob, are you sure—”
“Yes.”
She paused. “I’ll be ready.”
He hung up and walked into the kitchen, came out again with a ten-pound sack of coffee under one arm. He started over the tiles toward the door, then turned back and picked up the cigarettes lying on the counter. He stood by the door, looking back down the dim alley: stood at the mouth of the cave, looking into distances (he’d seen a stereopticon once; it was much the same effect).
The tiny neons skipped and blinked dumbly in their boxes; the kitchen light glared against the window, fell softly along the mirror. Shadows came in to fill the cafe; sat at tables, slumped in booths, stood awry on the floor; watching, waiting. At the end of the counter, the blank tan cup silently surrendered.
He turned and switched the knob. Went through the door. Shut it behind him. The click of the lock ran. away into the still air and died; he was locked into silence . . .
Cautiously he assaulted the street’s independence, heels ticking parameters for the darkness, the motive, the town. The sky hung low above his head.
(I walk alone. Alone. Men don’t run in packs, but they run . . . Death at the wheel expects his spin. Dark seeps in around the edges, winds rise in the caves of our Aeolian skulls, five fingers reach to take winter into our hearts, the winter of all our hearts)
And they came now in the darkness, they loomed and squatted about him, all the furnished tombs: this dim garden of rock and wood.
(Bars of silence. Score: four bars of silence, end on the seventh. See how they show on my white shirt among the roses. Bars and barristers of silence)
The quick blue spurt of a struck match. A cigarette flames, then glows, moving down the street into darkness.
(There is no sign for isolation but a broken spring, no image for time but a ticking heart, nothing for death but stillness . . . and the wall, the wedge, is splitting deeper but we’ll hold, for a while we’ll hold on, you and I)
He stood still in the stillness that flowed around him and listened to the hum of insects calling through the black flannel. As if in answer, clouds came lower.
(At the mouth of caves, turning. We can’t see out far, in deep, but the time has come for going away the time has come for becoming ... At the mouth of caves, turning, and time now to enter the calm, the old orders. At the mouth of caves. Turning)
He walked on and his heels talked and the night came in to hush him.
He hollered out into the dark, screamed once out into silence—and it entered his heart.
He passed a pearl-gray streetlight, passed a graveyard lawn.
(“Sudden and swift and light as that the ties gave, and we learned of finalities besides the grave.” Is this how it feels, the instant of desertion—a vague epiphany of epochal stillness, primal quiet?)
Around him, scarcely sounding his echo, stood the shells of houses, like trees awaiting the return of dryads who had lost their way.
(The instant of desertion, the instance of silence) The cigarette arced into the street and fell there, glowing blankly.
He bent his head and began to hurry. And with a flourish, the snows began.