and with a flick of the wrist sent the book off into the darkness, then retreated.
Checking it back into the library system in a few days would require little other than a passworded function override, and the records would, of course, be swept clean in a couple of weeks. If anyone ever sought it, it would be tagged MISSING and the usual searches would ensue; I’d go through the motions, use it as an opportunity to look for fresh mouse droppings. I had no idea what fate would befall the book itself. Would the temperature of the cave preserve its molecular structure like fine cheese, or would dampness eat away at it, inviting microorganisms to feast upon its pages, cannibalize descriptions of their own likenesses? Would an intrepid spelunker eventually stumble across it and send it back, or see it as a sign and take it to the next cave on his itinerary?
As I decided to depart, then, pitch-darkness at my back, I felt that whatever future lay before his book, it would be safer here, more permanent even than in the Library of Congress itself, more faithful to my father’s ultimate ambition. And surely it was self-delusion, but I’d driven all that day fueled by coffee and a vision: the words and the Ding an sich of the cave reaching out, embracing each other. In the embrace, whether eternal embalming or disintegration into cave sludge, I’d felt sure I would sense both what had created me and what would ultimately end me. En route, I’d pictured it cinematically, as sculpture, as jewelry; the reality was less dramatic, and now even that was gone.
For a moment, though, I risked flicking off the lamp. It was the sheerest darkness I could recall, and I instantly lost track of my limbs. I knew I needed to steer myself with arms extended; I knew the fingers of my left hand were still poking through the handle of the flashlight and my right palm was fully splayed. It was a directionless dark in which I could still distinguish degrees of cold but not myself. I kept expecting to smack into something, almost willing it to happen, because I’d lost all recollection of pain, of sensation. Not wishing to push my luck, I flicked the light back on, to exit—I’d gone only a yard or so.
I took in the cave one last time. Its shadows were restless, already arranging themselves into the stories I’d carry to Aidan’s kids, much like the ones I might one day tell my own. As I neared the mouth, children’s voices were audible just outside. Abruptly, I reentered at once light, warmth, clamor. At first, it was too much—I threw the hand with the lamp straight up to shield my eyes, but the other remained stubbornly outstretched as I pointed myself in the direction where I recalled the parking lot to be. I could feel my skin awakening to the moist air. With each step blinking my way back, I gradually lowered the lamp. It was tougher in daylight, but I wanted to see how long I could maintain that feeling of open, open arms.
All that about apples not falling far from the tree—shit, that. I know; I tumbled ass-first earthward and fell where I fell, and where I fell, I rolled, only then recognizing how rounded parts of me must have been. I wound up whole deserts from Morrisania, deserts that gleamed and those dull as obverse mirrors, deserts lush with indifference and misinformation. If sand can turn to glass without human ordination, surely that was what had happened here time and time again. I passed shards that had never been part of anything larger than themselves, whose only shot at survival was to stow away in passing flesh, lodging in soles and ankles that no longer could tell agony apart from ordinary touch.
But when at last I arrived in Delagotha, how I longed for those distances, their quaint assimilations of glass. Immediately past her gates, I was accosted by stacks of marketplaces where smaller marketplaces were for sale, themselves selling nothing other than still-smaller marketplaces. This regress wasn’t infinite—sure, it took many purchases, but eventually you’d arrive at the “atoms”—the goods—and you’d tremble at the prospect of dropping one and losing it forever.
All the while, getters, the closest thing the city had to beggars, moved hither and thither with the compulsive synchronicity of zebra finches or a crew team at break of day. They bounded off one another’s shoulders in a choreography of beguilingsignals. Finally, I just asked one what it all meant. It was not what was said, he insisted, turning his stubble-ridden face aside as if speaking to someone beyond me. No, it was what was on their breath when they spoke that delineated meaning. That depended largely on what they’d eaten most recently, which hinged, in turn, on what had tumbled their way—thrice-scorched crescent breads, globules of the sweet balm gondoliers slather on their cankers, the cankers themselves, and, for the luckiest only, the city’s famed tomatoes, in which succulent pulp and ceramic likeness lie spooning like lovers.
Like a kid with a new decoder ring, I boarded one of Delagotha’s octens of rails, which plunge, capillarylike, improvising their routes as they go, bearing passengers to destinations that they’ll be convinced in retrospect they’ve chosen. So it was breath and odors I should attend to. I sniffed, hoping for caramel but bracing for something fetid. Nothing—smell reduced to a nullity. Instead, socketed into a sheer mesh of interlocking elbows, I felt the skin of my fellow commuters, a blind man’s brothel of textures that mocked endings and beginnings like objects of a misplaced nostalgia.
It was then that I first noticed the assembly of musicians who’d begun to jostle the crowd at its fringes. I tried to observe them. Their musical extrusions acted like they were sentient, jostling for attention and dominance. Some performers spewed their notes into the fray, as if trying to edge out those emanating from their fellow musicians. Others stacked chords and arpeggios, forging walls and stairways for other notes to climb on. Still others dispatched castanet shoes that tripped notes but somehow left passengers standing. I wanted to plug my ears. I worked my hand upward through the thicket of limbs, but a G7 chord slapped it away, taking down my glasses, too. I groped, but I couldn’t even get near the floor, where, unless a getter had snagged them in midair, they must have tumbled.
I was mystified, as I would be those early weeks. How was it that no one in Delagotha complained about these suffocating crowds, this steady bombardment, this all-at-onceness? How could a place persist under such conditions? Why didn’t its citizens unite their voices and demand respites—parks, plazas, sound-swallowing walls? And yet I was stunned at how easily and smoothly I was able to get along without the glasses, girded by the flesh of those around me. Slowly, eventually, it started to dawn on me: five senses was madness, four mild insanity, three delusion, two wrongheadedness, and one, quite simply, ideal. In Delagotha, they’d learned to burrow into a single sense at a time, dwelling utterly there, and thus treading calmly and rationally amidst pandemonium.
Anyone but Lear, Schöner thinks. He hobbles across the pebbled path, toward the periphery of the woods, where he can still plant the walker almost flat. On he goes, “Let not . . . to true mind’s marriages . . . admit . . . impediments.” Even as he pitches himself forward on hard end consonants, he senses the quote is off: the right author but the wrong words, the right words, the wrong play, maybe not even a play. Not only wrong but ironically wrong. Anyone but Lear, he has vowed for a long time, and he is none other.
As he pauses to survey the woods, he feels them staring back, judging, rejecting his desire for entrance. Like he is some illegal, trying to cross a border without the proper papers. The sun catches him as he curses the wood that he wants to be in. This is the most devastating part of age, he thinks. He can laugh at slipshod memory along with the others, the misplaced glasses and pills. The hearing aid is no picnic, but he does not miss the birds nearly as much as the trees they sit in. Aches and pains are jarring, but there are medication and sleep for such things.
