One Night
He heard a piano someplace distant, in a back room perhaps. But it sounded even further away than that. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could possibly not be a piano you were hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination, or just something loose and distant in the world. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes. He went through the front room and into a hallway heavy with shadows. The place was sealed up tight, and only an occasional angle of light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust. There was blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial patch of it, gone to the black edge of maroon, and become almost chalk. A powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door. From the kitchen window he could see out into the backyard, where there was an empty doghouse, and there he found his piano: a clunky set of windchimes swaying slowly from a clothesline pole.
At the edge of town there were ruins of an ancient fort, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southermost end overlooking the water was a large terrace, completely exposed to the stars and sky. He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fort, and through the labyrinths of the fort to the terrace above the ocean. It was a wonderful place for quiet; whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed and amplified. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a great well. The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He watched stars falling again and again into the ocean, and saw the astonishment of blazing cruiseships creeping along the distant horizon.
A God Like No Other
He was a god like none we'd ever seen before. I'll admit right now that I thought there was something sort of funny about the boy, and though you probably won't now find anyone to acknowledge it publicly, many thought his problems went beyond funny. Plenty of others thought there was something plain wrong with the boy. I've never seen a boy so ambitious at such an early age. Ambitious, and smart as a whip. He was always building things, creating little animals and plants, all sorts of unusual things. He also made a lot of noise, and there were people who didn't much care for him and who felt he should have been discouraged somehow. I remember when he made his first large body of water, and then constructed a mountain range alongside it. Let's just say that some were fascinated while others were scared to death. He got more and more ambitious as time went on, and I still remember the day he pulled off his biggest trick. It was early evening, and we left the dinner dishes in the sink and took our lawn chairs out to the curb to watch the world be born.
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
--H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian businessman.
--Ibid
The white men are landing. The cannon! We must submit to baptism, put on clothes, work.
--Arthur Rimbaud, Mauvais Sang
1:02:17 AM 
|
|
