ELEVEN

Outside Fake City

[Outside Time]

It was morning again, the light just breaking, when I arrived at the limits of Fake City and the edge of the wide sand desert. The change was as abrupt as unlikely, but there it was. At the edge of a furthest suburb, the last brick of the last fallen building, I’d poked my head out across the membrane of the limit and broken face-first through. Where the city stopped, it was absolutely no more. There was nothing of it left. And the scrabble and brush, and the bits of jagged rock, and the distant mountains, and the not-as-distant mountains, and dry dirt and flat hardscrabble, and the snakes and the lizards, and all the hard-shelled bugs, tough as little army tanks, and those far, far-overhead specks, the black and sweeping shapes of buzzards, began. This happened all at once. The sky even was different here, and that too was all of a sudden. Gone was all the massed haze of smog. A bowl of blue heaven wrapped overhead; a gradient sky, the deepest of it the most directly above.

This suited me fine. I was done with the city.

So I scanned the wide horizon – knowing that was what one did in the desert – I scanned the wide horizon for what otherwise did not fit. I looked for my friend. My…

The shiny, shiny – or no, not so shiny… not so…

And there it was: a flash, something glinting, a reflected glare of sunlight. A little bit dully. That would be right. Flickering? Why should it be flickering?

But that would have to be the one. Flickering. Dully.

I’d find my friend. It was there. It wasn’t so far off now. What was once in the sky now wasn’t in the sky. Not anymore. It had leveled, it had attained to the earth, attained gravity, attained solidity. It had… attained.

•

I kept walking, steady, steady… Each foot fell flat and left marks in the earth – shoe marks, like footsteps on the moon – and the tough little bugs went to scurry from my feet, and the little lizards whipped their tails and turned and hid, and overhead, up above, the sunlight – infinite, worried, resolute, a Diaphane of photons, of wind from the sun (the all-source of wind, the all-source of metal and of blood) – these moments, each was captured by a wavered imprint, which otherwise did not speak, and though my legs were heavy I was light, and I hadn’t felt the sun (all-source) for something like… for something like… I had forgotten the sun. Because, being dead, the body was no body, and the creatures, being frightened, scurried further to their dark places, where some found holes in the ground, and the scrub reached out to scratch at me, and I was scratched (body or no), and I felt the sun, and prickle-pear cacti flapped their pods and spent quills and languished.

These were the days of meaning. The personal and the impersonal. These were the days of forgiving, and I was forced to forgive the sun. These were days of forgetting, and I had forgotten everything. The living me, who I was. And there was little, almost nothing of it left, this person – all of it was dispersed, dried off like the morning mist. But that was because I was dead, and it was good to be dead, and there were the smells of dust, and of the body, and of no body, of the… was this the smell of the soul?

Was I a soul?

I figured myself a fragment. All of it, or only some small part; it was the same.

The piece hides the whole, the whole is inside the piece, and as above the pieces, as above, the broken bits. Footprints, fall the earth, the scratching scrub. Why wouldn’t the scratching scrub? I had to ask, why wouldn’t the scratching scrub?

But it wouldn’t, no.

The metal grew closer as I grew closer to it.

I was, wait… a soul?

Perihelion!

The bird-flaps at the top of the sky – something shivered, I felt it flutter, something in air, and I heard words, or no, not words but the small shuddering of a body falling and thump! There near next to me, some lump of meat hit the earth, hollow-bodied, and a small cloud upraised. I turned to look, startled. A splotch of dark feathers, something dead in the dust; a buzzard corpse lay just-fallen from the sun (the all-source of everything!), because everything dies (you know this), everything dies, even the dead, even the eaters of the already dead.

Beyond this, it: Mosquito. I called it that. Near now, metal-bright, prising limits out of nothing. The closer I got, the closer it was. With a semi-reflective sheen, it made, I suspected, a heavy thump also when it fell, or maybe no sound at all. Perihelios, a near-sun, the reflective source of every image. But this was no fragment of anything. This was only itself, this thing. If it grew, it stayed exactly the same. If it shrank, it was no different. It grew heavy. It weighed nothing. The simple explanation was a crash landing. Sometimes objects did that: they crashed. If it was a machine, then I was a machine, pressing footsteps into dirt until I was there.

Mosquito was much smaller than I’d thought.

When I reached the object, it stood barely any taller than I did. Maybe eight or ten feet, altogether, though much was buried in the dirt. The impact crater displaced around it, where Mosquito had stuck the ground, formed the shape of a wave, though one frozen in the earth. But the object itself was whole, and therefore good. Some amount of cactus had got flattened into mulch. This was also good.

I looked up, back toward the city, where it was gray and the air fogged with murk, to see if there were maybe any hole it the sky where it had been. I couldn’t find any hole.

This might be the everlasting source. Is it? A species of dog, or people of the dog, who barked at the hole in the sun (the all-source, the maker of the wind, the sort of thing dogs would bark at). The warp and weft of parting impressed in the filaments of sun’s silky threads, the. Diaphane; two, not more, two within the Diaphane.

This thing of the city. It is of the sun. Where should the city be now? I looked: the.

Fake City stood a rank and heavy thing, all the colors pulled out from it; a skyline, a haze of brown smog, opposing the base purity of the desert beside it. The two were, of course, incommensurate. Never together in the same place at the same time. Fake City, I supposed, must be an image for this to happen. As would be the desert as well. The two. Yet these two things occurred, as image.

The.

The object… (and why would I call it object, when I already knew it had a name?) the object rested heavy in a divot of dirt made with itself, reflecting in a baffled way back the sun’s own image, back the light, back the.

The.

The weight and volume. The apparent occurrence of – The it: thing. Object. It may have resisted the name, and that was why.

I reached a hand forward because I wanted… But the closer I…

The.

The more my head expanded to fisheye distance and everything bent, fingers spread, distance contracted, and my flap-arms felt to fit me less.

Bent around every certain space of volume, every volume of space, and though space itself bent around the object, around the it-thing, while the object bent space around, there was also a volume around the object, bending, a certain space.

I pulled my hand back. It returned more or less to a normal hand-shape, unbent. I imagined that the surface of the object would have to be cold. Despite the heat, the surface would be cold, would have to be cold, owing to its nature, being a very cold, cold object. Yes, that was it, wasn’t it? Among the things that I knew, I knew that. I also knew…

If I approach the object. A terrible false distance, bent fisheye, it was true. People of the fish; people of the eye. But that wasn’t the worst of it, because the worst was I myself was bending, that is, my mind – like magnets, the two same ends, pushed together, pushed one another apart. My mind spread open; it was forced to spread open. It was going to break my mind open.

That was okay. What were minds for, after all?

I stepped back, breathing. No wind, only heat, and stillness; the sun, the dirt, the hole in the dirt, the sun.

I looked up: where was the sun?

And so I pressed ahead, and pressed again harder, pressed against the edge of it. I felt my mind stretch wide, felt it shiver (weary in its width, blue above, blue in the center; the jagged distant and the not so distant mountains a gray horizontal scratch; the warm, wide ground; the rock, the cactus reaches, giving quill and shiver; a hole, a stretch, a scratch) and broke.