Prologue

Burning Burning Burning Burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning

— “The Waste Land,” TS Eliot

I dreamed of an enormous serpent trying to ensnare me in its coils. It wasn’t trying to wrap me up like a constrictor, but to cage me within the huge pebbly walls of its own bulk, to circumscribe my existence. I wouldn’t let it. I kept searching its scaly limits, looking for a way through. And eventually I found one.

Or I thought I did.

But imagine a piece on a Snakes and Ladders board. It would have no idea of the danger until it stepped on the snake, and by then it would be too late. Up until that moment, it would think the world was an ordered, forward progression. But after its trip, through some kind of amnesia or belief that the serpentine backslide was an anomaly, it would get up and march forward again. I’m getting the strange feeling that if I were able to pull back, to gain perspective, I’d understand that, despite the enormity of those coils, I’d only known a small portion of the serpent. I’d see that the serpent, with its tail in its mouth, encircles everything, the entire board from first square to last. It’s a rigged game. We can’t escape the serpent. The concept is totally meaningless, because there is nothing outside of its coils.

We’re all pieces on this board, but I seem to be the only one who notices that we’re going in circles, that the world is not the logical place we think it is.

Because the bed I’m lying in isn’t the bed I was lying in when I went to sleep. And the woman I’m lying beside wasn’t here at all.

It’s watching. Here in the darkness, without the distraction of my senses, I can feel it watching me with cold, reptilian patience. I can feel its pulse. The entire universe thrums with it.

I can’t let it know that I know, that I’ve figured out the game. I don’t know what it would do, but I know it would be bad. Maybe worse than what’s already happened, which is hard to imagine.

And so here I lay, searching for the limits of the limitless serpent with its tail in its mouth, losing my mind with a tale in my mouth. Choking on it. Consuming it and consuming it and finding that I’m consuming myself and creating myself endlessly.

If there’s a way to end this cycle, it’s to be found in taking the tale from my mouth and telling it the only way I know how…the only way it can be told.