Quinn’s breathing slowed. He began to snore. Tomorrow he’d have a murderous hangover. I sat up and watched him, at last leaned over to retrieve my camera. Low light would make it difficult if not impossible to capture anything but a range of shadows stretching across the bed; no details of face or hands, no trace of the tattoos and scarifications that mapped his life without me.
But that seemed right. In many ways, for decades, Quinn had been a projection of myself, the shadow of a memory of someone I’d lost when I was young. Perhaps that was why all the photos I’d taken of him as a teenager had disappeared: they’d never truly existed in the first place. Quinn had become indistinguishable from my longing for him.
My eyes burned; I was too dehydrated to cry. I’d crossed over to a place beyond grief or fear. I’d lost everything, even, for the moment, the need for a drink or speed. I’d outlived the world I had evolved to inhabit; not a dinosaur but a rodent, scrabbling for shelter in the cracks of the twenty-first century. I groaned and roused myself, and went into the bathroom to take another shower.
When I was done, I dressed quietly, went into the other room, and sat at the small desk. The Svarlight CDs were where I’d tossed them, alongside Quinn’s cigarettes and laptop. I picked up Stone Ships, cracked open the laptop to let a sliver of light fall across the jewel box. I almost wished I had some way to play it. Not that the track list was all that inspiring, though “Within the Petrified Darkness We All Disappear” held some promise.
I squinted at the final production credit at the bottom of the back cover—Album produced, engineered, and mixed by Gwilym Birdsong at Svarlight Studio.
I felt my breath catch. I searched to find the artwork credit:
Front and back cover photographs by Big Delusory Whim
BDW: Big Delusory Whim.
I read and reread those two credits. I started to breathe way too fast, my thoughts falling like dominoes: a stream of words, letters, names, forming and re-forming in my consciousness the way that the symbols from Ludus Mentis swirled into a pattern just beyond my comprehension.
It’s all code.
I breathed deeply and closed my eyes, trying to force my heart to slow, fighting to grasp and hold on to the solution to a puzzle I hadn’t even known I was attempting to solve. I found the pen and paper I’d nabbed earlier and made my way to the bathroom. I closed the door and turned on the light, perched at the edge of the tub, and scribbled on the paper:
BIG DELUSORY WHIM
GWILYM BIRDHOUSE
I cross-checked each letter, drawing a line through every single one, stared at the piece of paper. The letters matched out. “Big Delusory Whim” was an anagram for “Gwilym Birdhouse.”