How it clears the mind. How the body falls

into a pace and the body empties and as in the riddle of the flowing cups so in a parallel course the mind just there right there over beside the body there here not here opens itself up as well. Oh I shall sever the top of your skull and pour the information in. Simpler operation that way spesh here on a starless night. Much as in a strange room in which you must empty yourself for sleep and before you are emptied what are you. And when you are emptied you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. Think: I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am. You don’t. You know so very little now. Walkwalking here and now in the herenow moonlit dark.

And it’s here, in this self-emptied rhythm, step by step, that more pieces come to you like so many crumbs scattered upon the moonlit road: you had two siblings: a brother and a younger sister. The former left you both when he came as it is said of age, after years of torments laid upon you both. Vicious brother, all those plots he hatched, all the plot-holes you fell into. The painful poundings, the pinchings, the jeering jabs. The holes he cut into walls to spy on you, to spy on her, too, and what power had either of you to stop him, as in what powers do readers have to stop the story’s writer? Stories will be stories as writers will be writers as boys will be boys—this the parental refrain.

Finally, you fled, too. Too much pain left behind. Sorry, sis.

But now: could it be—that she is taken? By whom? By him?

You walk with a certain dread along the road, lost in a swirl of thoughts, and soon you hear, ahead, past a copse of trees: voices. Soft murmurings. Perhaps a garden party.

It’s but a dim lighting. Take a long holiday. Night has eliminated the landscape, and as you follow the narrow winding highway, a series of short posts, ghostly white, with reflectors, borrow the moon to indicate this or that curve. As sad obstacles in the dark do tend to gather meager light about them. You can make out a dark valley on one side and wooded slopes on the other, and in front of you, like derelict snowflakes, moths drift out of the blackness into the moon’s probing aura. At the twelfth moment and, just beyond it, a white-washed rock looms on the right; a few car lengths further, on the same side, you turn off the highway, up gravelly Grimm Road. For several minutes all is dank, dark dense forest.

The manor is an enormous wooden house with a turret, arising in a circular clearing. Its windows glow yellow and red; its drive is cluttered with half a dozen cars. You pause in a shelter of the trees beside a small utility shed at the garden’s edge, hiding a moment in this nighttime shade. From your vantage you see that despite the late hour there are children at play, rushing across a grassy lawn upon which an immense veranda intrudes, scampering and laughing themselves into fits of more laughter, chasing something that in this darkness you’re not able to see.

The mansion glows; warm yellow light emanates; the curtains are pulled; you hear music and more voices, more laughter, the tinkling of silverware set upon plates, glasses clinked; you see through the curtains the faint outlines of men and women smiling and nodding and cajoling and fraternizing and sororitizing, no details per se just the fuzzy logic of half-familiar forms, shadows on a wall, only the shape of happiness behind curtains, and its sounds, too, the murmurations of fond elegy to a life you’ve certainly never found since you left the past behind.

Someone pulls an actual curtain in a great room, windows two stories high, and you see within it faces recently familiar and otherwise, like a troupe of actors after a long theatrical run, the last curtain has fallen (opened), they can finally relax. Their faces are smeared with wiped-away makeup, wigs are gone, hair is tamped down, they’re wearing more or less underclothes, a robe here, a flash of thigh there, laughing and backslapping, the show is over, the game is done, the music’s quiet. You recognize them from your many recent adventures. Shipmates. Captain-bus drivers. Office men, gypsies, fortune tellers, train passengers. Teachers.

But you don’t see him—and you don’t see her.

Until a door opens. A young woman steps onto the veranda. She walks to the edge.

She is weeping.

You know you must save her. But now—a voice calls to her from within the room, and she wipes her face, turns, goes back. Now is not the time. Go to the shed’s door. Wait within.