noahwareness

[noahwareness]

I COULD HAVE SENT YOU

all my Alien postcards wrapped in a fat blue rubber band, Ripley’s eyes rubbed out white and drawn back in ballpoint pen; your old Barbie with armpits full of cat hair I found in the heat vent the night I forced your dad’s window to look for bus change; a wooden spoon burned in half with a lighter; your red Lego astronaut stuck in your red candlestub; the fortune cookie slip we made fun of at the St. Paul St. house, how it said only family lasts; something saying how I found the Barbie and the hair separate, I only put them together because you’d laugh; the Antarctic coastline carved under a mayonnaise lid, with a letter swearing I found it like that; something to say you always know who I am, even when most of me’s made up; last winter’s letter I never sent, rolled up in a yellow glass bottle; a microscope slide Taren split open and remounted with sleepcrust from their eye; something to take back the jumping off the bridge joke, and a heart in a thumbprint of red ink the way you told me sorry once; a crate covered in postage stamps like the Velvet Underground song, enough to mail us to Australia; a Ziploc freezerbag of dead dragonflies from Taren’s attic windowsill; a ripped piece of newsprint with Silver Surfer’s hand going on forever; a stranger’s photo I found in a library book, and I’d have written on the back it was Taren, and their voice makes me miss yours; anything but your bottle of Amytal, even if you’d wanted it back.

[noahwareness]

EVERYTHING’S POLITICS

for Melanie The words are the power the words would destroy. Now it’s December, I wrote about this park already, the powder snow streaming over the walking paths, blowing in ribbons, billows, all torn kitecloth trailing, revealing in its traces the soft flank of the wind. It isn’t a sign. It’s not the wind’s mixed metaphor. The wind isn’t the snow’s; and nothing’s ours, too. Either way, now it’s March. On Highway 17, Emese calls them snow snakes. Our tires run them down. There’s nothing in this frail little magic, not to hold, no stone for power’s throat. We ask the words for true and false, the power the words would destroy. It’s just how seeing makes more seeing, this mind, ours, running up to itself with shapes in its mouth. The world’s netted through with words, whichever way, but always too fine to catch nothing at all. When I did finish this page, it was raining instead. Either way, it’s past four in the night. It’s not now. The wind’s come looking back like something else.

[noahwareness]

HEY JUSTIN I WROTE YOU A POEM

So in grade four, when listening sucked, we’d sneak Dragonlance books under our desks. How there’s three wizard guilds, distinguished by the pigment in their robes, their rigid faction moralities, and their chromatic totem moons. Good, neutral, and you-know-what. But all those common-ass herders and teamsters just figure Krynn’s got two moons. One ivory, one rust: whatever people see. That other moon, though, Nuitari? It knows what wizards really want. How red and white archmages can’t even tell it’s there, shaded out exactly like the night. How all those dark robes biking out for midnight spell component runs, they’ll stop to take it easy against some headstone carved like a baernaloth, spread out scrolls, maybe, if the turf’s wet, and trip out on the secret black moon. I mean today I did two pickle jars’ worth. Started this thing ten AM your time, when you said you did first pour. All things can be handled, but freaking out’s protocol. We stare down the philtre. How coffee’s actually red.

[noahwareness]

THE OTHER EDGE

Goro Nyudo Masamune folded the law of Heaven ninety-nine times in each blue sword he forged so that each steel’s quenching trapped ferrite grains like dark and spattered constellations praising nothing and hanging hungerless as any star. As to the red swords of Senzou Muramasa that would abide no sheathing unblooded their grain had exactly the striation of muscle. Now a traveller from the south provoked Muramasa by esteeming the edges of priest Masamune’s blades renowned for splitting violent throats yet skimming like dandelion-down over the skin of the desireless. Leaving his forge in the care of a mute apprentice a tethered crow and a clay image of buddha Monju Senzou Muramasa rode three nights hard south with a red katana riding steady at his hip. Within the scabbard pouch its red ceramic whetstone cracked with no keening laughter under Heaven’s vault and the hilt of ceramic did not spin and never sweated nor dreamed blood for Heaven’s laws prohibit aberration but no more than planed granite admits mercury could that katana ever have a name. When the smith Muramasa flung down his spent map before a quiet riverside and ramshackle shrine the blade at his belt split its bullhide sheath apart and he smiled that the sight gave him no wonder then cried the name of Goro Nyudo Masamune who rose smiling from his nap beneath a maple-tree. At once Muramasa waded the river’s slow shallows to stand his sword’s hilt between river-stones where in the clear water each turning maple-leaf only whispered like ash upon meeting the blade. Each leaf came apart one hundred feet downstream like half-leaves split in breaking mirror-glass and Muramasa shouted his edge’s perfection. The priest laughed toward his mountains soundless then produced from the shrine a katana blue as milk and pale as the thunder that hung in far cloudtops even as he waded to balance this swordpoint. Ninety-nine steps downstream from the gray sword before the wounded leaves could split apart they crossed the other edge’s flowing reflection and continued hail-struck to the long bright sea passing into the sea whole. The smith untied there his ruined sheath and he made an oath in his right hand drawing from split river-stones his beaten sword which could abide no sheathing unblooded. The priest Masamune with eyes so empty of victory who meant perhaps to speak had barely turned halfway before his lifeblood crashed spooling in water turning both edges’ reflection a momentary plum. Senzou Muramasa looked out to the mountains and frowned to see only mountains there so setting his own blade for the current to wash he slit his thumbprint red with the other edge. Now he rides the pathless mountains under hooded skies riding scabbardless and sleeping with blue hilt in hand and constantly a silver hail drives the smith Muramasa striking him like forge-sparks and like cast prayerbeads. His beard lengthens and grays with his seeking as he challenges each patron of his ravenous forge and holding his lifework in contempt for failure casts those blades to rust unblooded in obscure gullies.          The apprentice was crippled at duel with his master’s creditors. Senzou Muramasa’s death on the hill called Kanarazu is recorded as suicide in Annals of the Chained Tigers without reference to the cessation of a meteoric hail.          The crow took up a piece of wire and picked her tether free. In truth the ronin Bizen with morale shattered had drunkenly fled his red-eyed antagonist who never once permitted his blade a sheath.          Wasps dug their house’s clay from the cheek of buddha Monju. In pursuit Muramasa’s ankle slipped between rocks and in falling he gashed his belly to the spine on the heaven-moted edge named Tender Hands. Years ago he rode away from a burning shrine and another sword propped among river-stones.          That night the river split in half. Check out my new book.

[noahwareness]

ONCE REMOVED: ON TAXIDERMY AND TAXONOMY

for Luke There I was, stitching Percy the teagle together—four lengthwise strips, that is, of tabby and juvenile beagle— cat's name was Periwinkle, dog collar said L. Schmidt, and I sure might have counted the teeth better. Whole face had crept out of order. Like all the wide world's gingivitis united within my teagle to build itself a ten-lane speedway. Man deserves a challenge sometimes. You bore yourself wrapping desiccated trout around pre-molded fiberglass, retouching their goddamned scales Diffuse Moonlight #32. Besides, diffuse moonlight's forty-one dollars fifty a jar. We're fallen back on shellac and ecru house paint… You ever seen an ouroboros? Snake's asshole vanishes up his own maw, so there's no beginning to him anymore. Hard knowing how to start... no, I'm shitting you. It's Saul. The ketamine was too efficacious, I couldn't distinguish his galoshes on the concrete from ambient buzzing. Or get the tarp over my teagle in time. Abruptly he flaps up—it's that bad yellow raincoat he's in—and he might be my cousin, but there's birdshit on his specs. He leans in and kootchie-koos the unseamed abomination like his own plush Garfield cat. Saul would get drinking at dawn. These days I don't mean the clear liquor. Said the fluid would arrest his aging. He stopped recollecting things, how many knees on a squirrel, and he'd lose entire smokes pouring the molds... Never seen so many filter-tip drakes. Friend, even if you do need a duck who won't decay before all human memory lays in tatters, you might still take your custom elsewhere. Anyhow, I finally dragged Lucky the cougar back inside, extracted the milk bottle from his caved-in asshole... Hours later he's doing time as Saul's hassock, missing teeth where somebody opened a beer with his face. I didn't complain on it, just took a blunt from the porpoise, got my fuzzy earmuffs and hit the cold room—I wanted to organize some frozen whooping cranes and relax, but the cranes were already in perfect order. Wingspan. Cloacal width. Hue, saturation and chroma. Diameter. Cause of death. Presence or absence of vestigial dewclaws. I squat down, start randomizing the whoopers, whereupon my cousin's shabby bowline hitch slips in the rafters— Bucky the elk plummets twelve feet to the tile, nosefirst. Like a frozen pond meets a porcelain piano full of steak. So I put four hundred pounds of elk chips in the bin, bleeding through my prized earmuff where I'd intercepted a flying shard of tenderloin. But needle and thread's worth two doctors, I've always thought, and Bucky's haunches were still rosy fine. Unholstering my bone saw, I riddled aloud to Saul what kind of sort might need a human torso— for instance, someone in possession of an incomplete satyr... Now, you can correct an ouroboros with an ordinary pair of wire cutters—Shit, though, I've become morbid. See this lifelike iguana? She'd crawl right off her mount, clickety-clack talons on the desk, parietal eye pulsating, tongue sniffing for mangos in your ear, right? She's a favour to the best customer we've got: Tucker the barber, she grew that lizard from a spermatozoon. Better than any dog; no dog can pluck no-see-ums from the air. Tucker the barber came to me weeping... stray Buick hubcap bullseyed her reptile while she sunned herself on the gazebo rail. Hands me an old oil bucket, there she all is: four-foot leather hematoma with spikes and a dewlap. This is ten days later. No charge for Tucker... I'm joking, friend. That iguana, she was born a salmon. Her jawline still has a few imperfections, but what's perfect? There's days I can't tell my eyes to match. Don't know why I bothered hiding anything under that dusty yellow tarp. Saul was too busy spilling butyraldehyde on his khakis to ever peek underneath. Ever seen a jackalocust? —Half jackal, half locust. We surprise ourselves sometimes. Catfish, dogfish, geese orientated centripetally. Traffic cone fish—these really puzzle the cat. Pear-headed chicken—hippopotagriff— oysterantula. Gopher tree, that there's from Genesis 6:14. Lindorm—praying manta ray—praying manta reindeer— chicken-faced pear. Aurumvorax there needs touching off with pyrite. Over there's the cat, finally at peace with Yip and Yop, the Siamese bunyips. You can guess where I found the top for my satyr, and his raincoat needed no alteration. All the fucker does now is smoke. I'd spend nights here, make a blanket of the tarp, except I'd gotta fix that cougar. Can't handle the way he implores me from the dog's-eyes encircling his rent asshole, begging for a change of pelt and a colostomy bag.

[noahwareness]

NOT TO BE PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BUT

you shouldn't cut steaks on that wood cutting board. They were alive, and it'll leave ghosts in the wood. Worse, they're the ghosts of Joe Hill. Tethered to the kitchen cupboard with a silvery tendril, they're following us through the park already, distributing anti-Syndicate broadsheets which collapse into moth-colored dust and trickle between the fingers of neighborhood children.           Processes like these are assumed to be monitored: for every disintegrating pamphlet, another Joe Hill ghost is distilled within a collectivized kitchen at the earth's core. It is assumed that the Syndicate's three-hundred-year research program will culminate in tunnel-boring trains powered by ambient geotectic heat. It is assumed that when the ghost distillery is breached, the continents will turn to salt.

[noahwareness]

THE DREAM OF “C”

I like my coffee how I like my own fucking heart full of blood and coffee grounds skinned with membrane unevenly one cinnamon stick standing muscles beat all round it and matted with papyrus sopping fragments of Linear A Halfdrunk at my desk waking to a night dark as its bones harsh cadences dissolving into memory like spoonfuls of salt the dead oracle's whisper jagged cuneiform stirring upward Ursprache a basalt spearhead unfolding through its backbrain Time's mitochondrial gateway orthagonal to time I like the way my coffee starts boiling again Clay mug sliding out the door never waking me It counts every broken window sliding uphill silent roads to kneel behind the water tower and work one stone free It takes up the ritual athame called Finds-Between-Veins Now drinking drinking Drinking itself

[noahwareness]

FRAGMENT FROM THE FIRST SERMON AGAINST INLÉ-RAH

All those who forget their wildness conceive wildness as a single thing, by some teachings wicked and others wise. But wildness is the entire world without exception and no single thing to sit neatly at the feet of a philosophy. And to assume anything of monsters is the gravest mistake, because monsters are wild shapes, the wildest things that can be. Rabbits who grow as old as myself often come to believe the tangible matter of all their experience is a thicket of monsters' bones, monsters starved and tamed to death by the operation of reason on the world...

—Trilliath of College Hill From my new book. Check it out.

[noahwareness]

AFTER RANDOLPH CARTER

Written August 2015. Originally appeared in Cthulhusattva: Tales of the Black Gnosis.

1. The way through death is located in death, just as the way through the sky is located in the sky. Those who train lucid dreaming make it their reflex throughout the waking day to ask whether all phenomena are dreams: recalling this question during sleep brings liberation. As long as you are alive, you should ask if you are dead. If you would turn back the world’s patterns on themselves, rejecting the world, you would train for the way through death. The way through death is felt as wonder. 2. Blank-featured, wind-cloaked, the traveler from Providence glances away from the great silver key on its opal throne. There is a cord of some crystal filament, silver too but not bright; it grows from his inside wrist and reaches all the way back to the world. This he wraps twice around his palm, as though to secure himself. Not taut, never quite touching the floor of the empty hall, it spills a blood-tincted shadow across the gray obsidian tiling. It is wider far than the cord, this shadow, and a metallic and liquescent quality marks it, as though blood were turning inside a vein of mercury. Where footfalls lately touched the ground, the shadow ripples metallically with their imprint. This hall belongs to a great king, it is said; or the silver key is somehow the bodily remains of the king, or the locus of his sovereignty. None have called it his manuscript, but the austere handwriting of Randolph Carter seethes blackly across the key from bow to tip. And all this is remarkable. The traveler clenches the long tether in his fist. Once beyond the gates, one ought to find no single thing remarkable over others. 3. When beholding any phenomena, whether remarkable or mundane, ask if you are dead. When you pour out water and eddies emerge in the stream, a miniature river with boiling, diaphanous banks, ask if you are dead. When planes of warm sunlight slant through the leaded window, when they lie alongside your body as their meaningless geometry decomposes into noise, ask if you are dead. When putting away the coming week’s clothes and the late evening moon seems immeasurably near, ask if you are dead. When walking, you gash your hand meaning to break a twig from a hedge, when looking back, many hands are hung from the hedge’s thorns, trailing silver tangles of root from their ripped stumps, ask if you are dead. When you regard a mirror, when it folds and divides like paper, becoming a sheaf of folded mirrors joined at the hinge with signatures of fraying mirror-twine, when mirrors reflect featurelessness, ask if you are dead. When recopying the draft of a poem and the heel of your hand slips over the drying ink, blotting your skin with diffuse silver pictographs, ask if you are dead. When stacking flints alongside an abandoned road, when they become a gray and heatless fire that never crackles but makes the grinding sounds of stone on stone, ask if you are dead. Ask if you feel wonder. 4. The silhouettes of vanished footfalls echo ever harder in the shadow, expanding and intercrossing, breaking against each other. His astral tether is not matter and should not cast shade at all, and the traveler stumbles forward half a step. He crouches there, staring, palms flat to the ground while the shadow billows and whips. For all he knows these footprints are not his but the king’s. When he looks back the silver key has become a hollow, slender cone of no clear purpose, carved of yellow petrified wood. There are different markings, roughly incised: a passage beginning Blank-featured, wind-cloaked, the traveler. It is not written here whether you are dead or dreaming, what you ask, only that your body dissolves from the center out as you read, like a bundle of scarves untying and blowing into intangibility. Certain of your most well-worn memories settle in the mind of Randolph Carter, sovereign of Ilek-Vad. A line of gabled rooftops reflecting sunlight like clouds of golden steam. The sour-sweet taste of juice held with cloves in a gourd, approximating moon-tree wine. The smells of boot polish and old wet brick. Numerous others. 5. What is the expression of a life spent toward death, Providence? A gift to those we have never met. What is its redemption from waste? You do not know me, Randolph Carter.

[noahwareness]

FOURTEENTH CHAMBERS

Originally appeared in Feast of Laughter 2, March 2015. Written February-March 2015. Now I understood by some kind of intuition that what I had been writing was a never-ending story and that the name of it was "A Ghost Story." The name comes from the only thing that I have learned about all people, that they are ghostly and that they are sometimes split-off...      R. A. Lafferty This is not what I look like, I tell them.      Neil Gaiman You’ll never be a writer. Same for me. But still, remember: no one ever was. It’s nothing that a human life can be. You persevere, you practice on your knees; you hollow out your life into the cause. You’ll never be a writer. Same for me. Read back your grafted words: at best you see a breaching ghost that’s wiser far than us. It’s nothing that a human life can be. They hardly need us, only that we breathe; and they don’t know us, they don’t give applause. You’ll never be a writer. Same for me. Don’t count yourself among them in your greed, that lineage of half-existent gods. It’s nothing that a human life can be. Don’t spread your hands and call yourself a dream, some magic golden dream that jumped the odds. You’ll never be a writer. Same for me. It’s nothing that a human life can be.

[noahwareness]

WHAT HAPPENED TO MARLY AND LANNA

Originally appeared in Black Static #42. Written March - April 2014.

          (For my brother. Not Josh. The other one.)

          Es increíble que nada pasa. Un poder grande se mueve.

The real Salvation Army set up behind Sam Long Park last night, on a bunch of nappy flannel blankets spread out on the grass. Dry gluesticks, unwound pieces of chainlink, broken wineglass stems. They have everything, really everything, so almost none of it has any point. I start crying sometimes when I notice signs for the ordinary Salvation Army stores, or even the sign over the shelter. Even stop signs look like their red badges, and I have to remind myself we're all volunteers too. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

What happened is mostly about Marly but it comes back to my sister Lanna too, and I’m saying this at all because I saw some of her from the bus window last night, laid out on their yellow blankets. She used to tie all this gray yarn in her hair so it’d be longer and she’d look more like a Raggedy Ann, and what they did with it was wind it two ways around some roof shingles in a gray X with her gold earring in the center where the bundles of yarn crossed over. I don’t know why they think anyone would want something like that. This is still about Marly the sick dog who we buried in the garden last summer but when I got off the bus and ran, they were gone.

I remember Marly’s hair was yarn the same way, but black. Like a stuffed dog, actual yarn. Mom would always say he felt like a sheep. You could run a hand through and barely see your fingers, but sometimes that would pull his yarn and hurt him. I can’t do it anymore but I used to put my face up close to him in a sunbeam and watch all these thin little colored threads come clear against the black. Dusty gold flaring in the sun, roan red and whiskey and horn. I’d be down on my side, watching him sleep and trying to follow the colors, the threads splitting into their own threads. One color went deeper than black but that would mean I was sleeping too.

Lanna spent that whole summer going back and forth between the Salvation Army and the blanket fort on the back porch. The day school got out she found a record player on a planter in front of the thriftstore, and two albums by a Mexican band named Corrupted. It hadn’t rained for a month but somebody must have left them out once, the pictures were all flaked off the covers. Neither one of us knew any Spanish. Those were two reasons why I didn’t like them, I think, and why she did. But Lanna kept going back because she said she’d find the rest of the records.

It was really hot, even at night, and Marly kept sleeping more. He could hardly walk and the fishpond in the back yard grew out with algae the color of dirty glass. I’d go out to throw sticks at it and say I was aiming for the heart of canine leukemia. We had this beige plastic statue of Pan standing in the middle of the pond and the heart would be at its base, just under the curdy green water. I thought it would look like a drowned wasp nest full of leeches. But one time the stick hit right where I aimed and I couldn’t handle going back to the house to check, so I just gave myself three thousand points like Duck Hunt. After that I was aiming to miss and saying the God Pan was putting curses on my arm.

Marly was half poodle but pretty small. Ever since the letter of diagnosis he had to stay on the back porch. Our mom might have thought you can catch cancer from a dog. We built a big blanket fort around his bed and brought the fan inside it with an extension cord. I held the flashlight for Lanna while she read to him about the Land of Oz, and a few times every hour he’d whine in his sleep and wake up. We’d feed him cold wieners from the fridge. That summer we were running the washing machine so much the well got low, and Mom started having us get thriftstore blankets we could just throw away. She had piles of old blankets in the downstairs bathroom, but she said those were too antique to use on a dog.

Lanna pushed the dresser against her bedroom door and listened to one side of one album over and over. She said she was burning candles to make Puppy okay. I got to remember every tick in the vinyl, and sometimes I’d walk around the side of the house and see her leaning out the window smoking. Yarn hanging down her face like the smoke was sticking there, building a gray chrysalis around her.

One time Mom left for a week and it took us two days to find the note on the back door corkboard. She didn’t leave any numbers to call, just some five and fifty dollar bills on a pin. Her car wasn’t gone but there was a big gap in her closet of dresses. We couldn’t get Marly to stand so we each took a side of his laundry hamper bed and carried him into the livingroom. He didn’t bring his head up at first and then his lips peeled back and a little wormshape of blood fell through his teeth, like it broke off from inside him. That was when we thought he would die.

“I have to go look things up,” said Lanna. After she shut her bedroom door I could hear her pushing clothes around in her closet. She only had one single book about magic and she kept it under her mattress, not in her clothes closet. It was illustrated with green drawings of crowns and these rows and columns of numbers it said were important. The other thing she kept there was a Spanish dictionary, both of them wrinkled from the same spill of tea.

She came out an hour later in a navycolored rayon kimono that smelled like burning incense. A few minutes before that Marly’s eyes stopped moving under the lids. He wasn't breathing and I pinched his side because I thought it might wake him up. Lanna yelled at me for not coming to get her. Then she said she prophesied the death. But she had to turn away and look out the window first, before she said it.

What happened to Marly is we carried him outside in his laundry hamper bed. The kimono was too long so we went slow down the stairs while she hiked it up on one side. He looked so small curled in his blankets and towels, like a stuffed black otter, and when I turned my head I saw three boxes on the dryer for delivery pizza we never ate. We walked him to the juniper tree in the side garden, pushing through overgrown pampas grass, and Lanna took out a blue candle tied on a leather string. She lit it and started spinning it in a circle. It would go out but she kept lighting it. “We have to baptize the room with candlewax.” She kept calling it a room. The record player was going really loud with both speakers balanced on her windowsill and I don't remember her going back to do that so I think it’s a thing they got wrong, like Marly’s yarn.

A spot of wax hit me in the cheek. Not really hot but I brought my hand up anyway. Her back was turned and I sat down on the flagstones. It hadn’t rained for weeks and between the flagstone joins, brushes of dead thyme were colored like water drying on sand. A few days before, Lanna was saying if someone's headed to the Great and Only, the duty's on their loved ones to prepare the way. She always said the Great and Only when she talked about death. The record ended right when she finished lighting and spinning the candle, and she said something in Spanish. She got on her knees and lit the wick again and poured blue wax right on him.

She said, “If we loved Marly we should dig his grave with our hands.”

Mom hadn't planted for years. The dirt under the tree was mostly old juniper needles that came out in curtains of velvety dust. I kept digging up filters that had Lanna's toothmarks in them. All she would say was song lyrics in Spanish, really quiet and not to me. The pile got big behind us and the sunset came in orange. Sometimes she’d push my hands out of the way. The deeper we got the more cracked the earth was, until we were pulling chunks of dirt from the ground like rocks. Centipedes slipping backward into the cracks like copper cords and I wondered if they ate juniper berries. If they ate meat they would have Marly.

When I looked over he could have been some crumpled blankets, one color of black in the shadows. I felt sick for thinking that so I petted his side with my hand. He didn't have tangles at all. I tried to count days since he'd been out of bed, and Marly’s mouth opened and closed. Lanna was digging onehanded, humming with her wrist pushed against her lips. She let juniper needles fall from her hand and glide into the hole. Mosquitoes dropped the same way through the air. It was deep enough for a grave, longer than wide. Marly’s mouth really did open and close.

He didn’t move when I touched him again. Then Lanna pulled him into the grave by one handle of his laundry hamper bed. He was slipped to one side in the bed of thin towels and she got down and put her face against his ribs, crying and saying the same words I didn't know. I wish I never figured out why I didn’t say anything.

We buried Marly with a half pack of wieners we brought out from the fridge and all the biggest dirt chunks on top like a cairn of stones, and we built a star of broken branches over it and set it on fire with all our library books about Oz. I was always afraid Lanna would figure out I couldn’t keep her stories straight. Once she told me Corrupted were from Japan, but they chose to sing in Spanish because it was the language of magic. I said no way. I said the albums just came from a Japanese printing press.

A few days later our mom came back. She never mentioned Marly, but the next day she brought home pizzas and seven rental movies for a week. If I told Lanna and he didn't move again, she would have called me a liar. That was why I didn't say anything.

I found a Marly doorknob in Mom's boxes while she was in the bath. It was wrapped in christmas paper with my name on the tag, so old the tape was yellow and dry. I left the box and wrapping there and took it up to my room because it was black ceramic with a painted red tongue and red eyes. I don’t know how to change a doorknob so I just held it up against the inside of my door. It looked just like him and I remembered that exact box and paper from three christmases ago. That time it had a gameboy.

I hid it in the winter sheets in my closet and took it out a lot to draw pictures of Marly. To spend time I'd shade the backgrounds black until I couldn't see the edges of his face. Lanna would push furniture around in her room, and then I’d hear hours of nothing but music so she was reading on her bed. I was thinking about Marly underground, frozen and stopped like the doorknob or a chess pawn or anything not alive. I tried to figure out what not being alive would mean, how if I was made of ceramic I would still want to move so people would know. I wished the doorknob would open and close its mouth at least once. If I was a chess pawn I would still try to tip myself over.

Lanna told me an eraser or a chess pawn doesn’t have muscles so it can’t move, not even to tip itself over. She said they didn't have senses either and I hated that idea, how they were alone with themselves. “A dead dog has muscles,” I said. The skin shook under her eyes and she didn’t end up crying, but she yelled for me to get off the porch. She had a shrine built in the place of his sickbed, all these polaroids and stale dog cookies mounted on a piece of posterboard. Except for the burning candles it looked like a science fair project.

When I asked Mom why I couldn’t have a lock on my door like Lanna she didn’t even spin her chair around to look at me. “She’s wearing down her records and it’s not even music, sweets.” Then she said it was hot enough in my room without locking it, she knew I was sad this summer and she didn’t want me to do anything crazy, I would grow into such a good person and I should just read a book on my bed or watch movies.

What I wanted was to look in a candleflame how Lanna said she always did, and I thought not getting disturbed had the most to do with it. I got a bag of tealights from the drugstore and instead of my room I locked the bathroom door so I could sit with my back to the tub and watch the burning candle on the tile. There was a bathmat off to one side made of fluffy black fibers and they started coming loose from each other and changing to white. By coming loose I don’t mean they actually moved, more like the littler shapes that made them up were coming into focus. I saw how the strands were all wrinkled or snapped or bent back on themselves or stretched thin. Like those trees that grow from the cracks between rocks all kinked over in the wind. The black wasn't fading. I remember knowing that when I got up, but not what the difference meant. It was changing to white.

That was the only time I ever meditated. The candle burnt out and I stood up with numb legs. Everything seemed like it was swinging back and forth inside itself. I went down to the side garden with my shoes off and stood holding a cherry tree, watching Lanna sit with a cigarette in her fingers and trace glowing infinity loops in the air over the grave. The cairn dirt was still blackened from the ceremony fire.

I stayed back because I thought she might get mad, but I asked Lanna if she was okay with digging him up to say another goodbye. What I wanted was to see if he moved underground, even though that wouldn't answer anything. I had words ready about wanting her to bless his spirit, but I didn't have to say. She just put the cigarette in her teeth and started pushing dirt with two hands.

It felt like the same night as before. The little blurs of mosquito, the sunset like dusty fire. Lanna’s hands pushing mine away when I slowed down. With every piece of dirt we moved, more fell like sand through the cracked floor of his hole. Then I thought one more handful and we’d see part of Marly withered, his side or his leg.

“Don’t get scared,” I said. “I mean if he moved around a bit.” Lanna finally looked over. Her lips curled. Like she wanted me to know there was something wrong with me and she’d almost figured it out. She finally said, “Do you mean we buried Marly alive?” I edged off from her and the grave. “You were busy,” I said, sitting with my hands under me.

She yelled I was a shit and then I was pitiful and I was a waster, and she slapped me hard in the ear. It rocked my head sideways with this big clopping noise like a wood bell. I remembered Lanna saying she’d break my eardrum if I didn’t leave her bookshelf alone. A hot shiver of pain went through my ear and down my neck while I sat there watching her crush a chunk of dirt in her fist. Then I got up and ran.

The cracks in the flagstones felt sharp on my bare feet. I couldn’t run straight and all I heard through that ear was a hiss like a tire going empty. I turned my head twice to see if Lanna was chasing me. The second time I saw she was crying too, and I cut around the corner of the house.

Down both sides of the front driveway were long folding cardtables stacked up with junk. I ran between them, hardly looking. Mom used to talk every few days about having a yard sale and I didn't remember you never have those at night. I was ready to start running down the street but Lanna stopped in the driveway and then walked into the garage. After a long time I came back. There was supposed to be a yellow bare bulb over the garage door but instead their sign was glowing there flat and red, coming blood pink through the bodies of the moths who held there like trembling pieces of scab. That was the first time I saw the real Salvation Army.

I remembered our garage so full you could barely squeeze through sideways, but this time Mom’s boxes and plastic tubs were gone from the walls. The room went on longer than our whole house, stretching like a road tunnel through a hillside, two lines of dull socketlamps in the ceiling. Hot thick shocks were washing through my ear, down the side of my head. While I stared the crickets started to sing, and the breeze smelled like cellar floors and rotting tin. Both sides of the long room were lined with folding tables and newspaper racks full of clutter and I just stared with my broken ear hissing until the middle table came down to meet me from the far end of the hall. Lanna came with it, but frozen in position like she was drinking from a little gray sack. I couldn’t think. Then she was standing looking at the table, and so was I.

All the different parts of Marly were mixed up across the wide folding table. They looked like they'd spent years in the ground and it never once rained. Everything had dirty little price stickers I couldn't read. His skull all brittle, filmed with dust, and these things like fingers cut from gray gloves were sections of his tail. Splintered bones in rough stacks and dried tissue like rusty streaks of cobweb. Bundles of yarn laid out by color but all just faded blacks. I reached to take one but I pulled back. If I took one, I might have seen how it works.

The people behind the table looked cut from heavy construction paper. Shapes like green photocopies of old coats, old coats wearing themselves and each one with a red Salvation Army shield pinned off-center to the neck or the featureless head. They spoke in a grainy, stretched version of my voice and I thought it was the one from our answering machine tape.

“The children who live in the yellow house with their mother who left their toy dog in the ground who asked to have it again.”

They didn’t say anything else. When I looked back down Marly's parts were different. Fresh and gleaming wet, laced together in some way I couldn't understand. The smell made spit rise up my throat and the green shapes of people behind the table didn't move when I turned my head. Like how when a bright light stains the back of your eye, you can't look away from the stain. The real Salvation Army people were the same way.

“Marly wasn’t a toy,” I said. “He was alive.”

The pulling green voice said, “What you call the world is a working of joints and every joint of everything in your world is alive and no joint moves at all. If you could stand outside a life, you'd realize that. Just as the bundle of hair can't pull and push itself across the table, the child can't replace the events of its life into a different order. But do you not both appear to move, and both in just the same way?”

The voice had something behind it, like different words forming in a second throat. The pieces of Marly changed every time I looked down and the table was warped and peeling, the laminated top cracking apart. Lanna was chewing a piece of gray yarn from her hair and she said something back. I don't know what she could have told them, but it was what she told Marly before she pushed dirt over him, and before that I heard it through her wall. But I only know one word in Spanish.

Then she leaned in and pushed all the parts of Marly together on the table. Bone and skin, slick gray flesh and fading yarn. He was always so small. “Cuánto?” she said, and pointed at the pile. Then she shrugged and took a handful of change from her jacket pocket and set it down on the table. I remember this black bobbypin being in with the coins. Lanna lifted something from underneath Marly's pelvis bone. The heart of canine leukemia was smaller than I thought, like old gray paper stretched over a brittle cage the size of a plum. The top was dented, almost torn open. I must not have missed after all.

What I think now is you don’t actually need to pay. But Lanna grabbed my shoulder and I couldn’t move. She looked at me a long time before she stepped back and she peeled a piece of skin from the thin coarse heart. Leeches were moving inside it, churning slow and wet, one dull hook of tooth at the point of each thin head. She tipped the heart to her lips and drank the leeches down, and it moved into her throat like a breath.

After that I just remember the long brown table with the peeling top. Marly’s parts were gone but somehow the clutter stayed. Whenever my eyes found an in-between space, something would rush in to fill it. I don't know. Things I still can't tell from my other memories. Bead jars and crumpled pages from under Lanna's bed. A safetypin on a broken chain. A plate of burnt-out incense cones, a cork. The table kept rising closer and I couldn't look away. Her old blue plastic camera, and that same camera with the side smashed in. All these trays of clear liquid in little hospital jars. Then the first string of her yarn, the first red root of tooth. Wherever I turned, I couldn't look away.

But I was standing over the grave alone with chunks of earth shifting in the ground. When I put my hand between them I felt Marly's ribs moving, and he sneezed. That was it. I clapped my hands twice for come, and his head pushed up from the loose dirt. I helped him out and he sneezed again and shook, dust smoking orange all around him in the sunset. His hair was hair like any dog's, not yarn. Most people would call it a mean game to bury a dog. But it seemed to me like he knew how to play.

I left the hamper in the garden dirt. Marly left dirty pawprints in the laundryroom when he came in with me. Mom was in her chair drinking a bottle of rose wine and I asked if she'd seen Lanna and she just breathed out and threw her glass. She still didn't look at me. She started saying I wasn't funny but I was already running upstairs.

I'd never seen Lanna's bed made before, or her books squared away. The two Corrupted albums were balanced on the windowsill with the sun on them. I took one from the sleeve and it was so melted from the heat, the grooves weren't even there. I sat on her bed for a long time. Marly jumped up and stood on my lap to do shake-a-paw, and I held it for a long time before I knew what was different. That night I looked in a book and made sure. They put his feet together with the pads underneath facing backward, the wide ones in front.

I dreamed I went to see her in the garden, but in real life I never figured out where she was buried. Later I started dreaming she came there to see me. One time Mom asked why we weren't in school and Lanna said July wasn't even over. She didn't believe us, she needed to see a TV channel to prove it. But half through September she asked again, and that time I was alone. I said I didn't want to go and she just bit the side of her hand.

I got three months off. My first day back, a science teacher said we were made of almost entirely oxygen, carbon and hydrogen atoms. All that mattered was the pieces coming together the right way. I started breathing so hard all I could do was grab the sides of my desk. After a while somebody touched me and I screamed. I got more time off, and a school transfer if I wanted, but then Marly got sick again. I took money from one of the hatboxes in Mom's closet. We met a lady on the Greyhound bus, I paid her a hundred dollars to say she's my mom, and we found a shelter in the city where we could stay.

Marly's okay. He has a hard time waking up once a month or so, but there's a vet who puts blood in him from other dogs. I just go up to the desk with a card they gave me, I write our names on some forms. I don't know whose dogs, or who pays the vet. It's probably the Salvation Army too.

I've been thinking about the people who look like green construction paper. I think just by living, people like us do something wrong to time. Like we put things out of order by remembering them. We just can't stop living. We can't even stop living by dying, because we can't take our old selves out of time. We stay like an old spill polluting the ground, living over and over again. I think there's another kind of people who don’t have to live, and we need them to go through all the parts of time we leave behind, connecting them back up so our world can keep going. When I get mad at how they're not even good at it, I remind myself they don't know us at all, and I don't see how they could be doing it for a reward. Whatever we could try to pay, it all goes right back on the table.

I don't know, I hope maybe there's something else. I've been looking every day in the record bins. When Marly gets better I'm going to try and volunteer.

“I guess it didn’t work.” She stood up from the plush brown chair and pulled her jacket around her.” I'm still here.”

The woman in the sweater leaned forward a little, sitting her hands on her knees. “No one could ever blame a little girl for someone getting leukemia, Lanna. You don't need to put yourself in anyone else's place.”

“I told you, I’m not using you as a therapist. If I could find them one more time I wouldn’t need you at all.” She walked to the doorway and stood with one hand holding the frame. The plush dog on her shoulder lolled its red flannel tongue. “You said I could pay you to listen for two hours a week, no matter what. I feel so bad I did that to Jamie. Next week I’ll come back with different pieces.”

[noahwareness]

THE UTTERANCE OF A FLUORESCENT SAGUARO ROUSES "IGNATZ MOUSE" FROM TURPITUDINOUS SLUMBER

Originally appeared in Strange Horizons, 25 October 2010. Written February 2007.

[noahwareness]

WAGON WHEEL

Appearing here for the first time anywhere. Written November 2012.

[noahwareness]

FUGUE FOR EARDRUM

Appearing here for the first time anywhere. Written May 2007 - January 2008. Contains intense horror images and themes.

Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing…

          --Herodotus

I ought to fix a station-brooch to the leather of this journal. Some gaudy and irreplaceable ornament, some golden pittance paled with yellow jade. And you would squint to count the inset stones marching like ants down its face, that you could read my titles from their spacing. Whether you who reads this be high commander or a yeoman in his patchment motley, you would better trust my words by some obsolete pin, I know.

My name was Gadaan Suuko, once, and surely your comrades have already taken my life. Your war-chants throb at every join of the alabaster wall at my back, and I hear fury in them to stand no appeasement. I will stride, though I am weak now. My heartsblood will clatter to the stone bridge and I will never deign to look you in the eye.

You who read, set your armament down. Your siege has left none of us standing.

On the third floor I have blockaded our southfacing recital-hall with couches and tables, every weight my wasting arms could drag. You will see this. I beg you, undo that meager work and enter; but first spend a minute and hear me. We built in that hall something greater than us, and greater finally than our aspirations could bear; and twice greater than you, killer, who had no hand in it. We had no occasion to name it, but for you I will demean it with that vacuous cerement, a name for my narrative to flow around.

I will call it the singer of songs, then. You must not let it die.

This journal means to be an account of our singer, a historical record. It will not dwell on the psychology of your contempt. I have given myself no leave to know such petty motivations. I was Chirurgeon and Medic Prime to the Court of Organum, whose value to society has been proven centuries -- doubtful you have read those proofs, but no soul could keep from partaking in our music. Perhaps you possess some anarchistic daydream of liberating our instruments and the folios on harmonic structure, and throwing them to the callus-fingered dockworkers?

You know what must result from unregulated musical expression; better you move to a nation where two glass shekels pay for a ceramic drum, and join that formless clamor where creative progress drowns. Each year the Court has given its country eighty phonologues, and such have been the terms for ever; do you demand more? Can that be why you siege us – even when a year is not sufficient for common ears to fully appreciate one recording?

The outside’s labor sustains our music: that exchange has always been necessary, beyond mere fairness. How else to combat the influence of mundane life? Harmonies are defined, after all, without reference to what stands outside them.

I suppose your envy brought us low, but you are heartless, finder. Truly those you murdered were born luckier than you, but what shame does indistinction carry? Even the pettiest of mud-stained fieldworkers sang to prove their joy, before the Court was formed, in the times when spontaneous song was permitted. And in focusing on our music’s evolution, we worked to benefit you, just as your efforts brought us cuttlefish, saffron, whatever other sundries. But you sustained only our bodies – we lit your souls from above.

Coward. I care not to know any detail of your tactics. I hear your rough-hewn oaken ram slamming ceaseless at our gates, and that is enough. I am proud to have never walked the rooftiles and seen your horde; but secure in these quarters, I could not hold off imagining. Before our peaceful keep knew of the siege, a few thugs must have held vigil at the steward’s arch, waiting for dawn and to slay the serving-engine who meant to receive the week’s delivery of foods. You knew pacifism and trust were etched in his picamite brains. Still I cannot say why you bothered – our great house encircled by troops, we would have starved just as efficiently without. I suppose I lack the malice that would let me comprehend you.

So much you do not realize. Captivity is no new thing for us. The singer of songs has long held us close; we have wasted sickly with our constant dancing, and few even noticed their bodies' frailty. In short, we had no need for a medic’s presence, but my vocation had already shifted. I ministered, then as now, to the singer's health instead.

Once I found it a noble duty to patch broken teeth and tug salmon-bones from drunken throats; a medic’s poultice cures the hand inflamed from slamming the chord-strings of a pantar, and even the ribboned, blistered soles – they are like rags – of those dancing restless for eighty, ninety hours. But my second duty grew around me like time, and I saw it was wider, holier; and my title was dead; and none of their tongues were left to speak my name.

The weak have starved – rather, you have starved the weak, and the strong have traded ground with the weak to fall in turn. I too have spent more than my paunch, and I have been hungry and long alone. You condemn me even as you hear this: when our pantries ran empty, I hung the gaunt bodies of dozens in those frigid stockrooms. Of thirty-nine innocents, there remains only bone slivers, pounded and boiled marrowless, and the gold and cowrie braidings of their hair. That scant flesh was rich yet, and of it I fed the singer of songs.

This morning I opened the radial vein of my arm, taking enough to fill an old alembic. I stirred my aching blood over a charcoal flame and gave it over so the music could go on. Before your siege I needed only give the singer’s stomachs mussel-broth, and fennel-pulp, and the juice of garlic, antibacterial. I digress but that is no digression. You will know its hunger, which comes at sunup and sunfall precisely, by an insistent phase in its song: eight pulses against five, similar in rhythm to the humming of a kitten’s pancreas. It requires thick broths, heavy with protein; I have noted several recipes in my file, which holds every text needed for its upkeep. Find them in the quartzite lockbox at this hall's southeast corner, behind the oblong ivory fountain that splashed, until your coming, with port wine. The mosaic upon that fountain – the clasped hands glittering like ash of a diamond – is tiled with gems the surf has grinded small: I mean the carapaces of trilobites. Do kneel by it, as I have done so often, and enjoy the craft employed: that seamless interlocking of every minute shard. Contemplate what you have ended.

You will need the box's key, which is to hum the third coda from Csysaen’s Fantasia for Oboe and Speculum. No: I suppose you are ignorant. There is a secondary key, which I still use from habit. Trace the letters providence across its face.

Now here is a digression. Soon after my birth there was a virus my predecessor never managed to identify. Fever lapped in and out of me, and serum bled from my ear-canals as I thrashed for two nights without solace; I have been deaf since that fever broke. Organum Court pitied and kept me, but I was raised among a generation of growing virtuosos, and nothing in the serving-engine who raised us could address my deformity. Its brains were fashioned only to tutor us in music (and myself in medicine, of course).

I learned jealousy before words, I could not escape it. I would rock on my stool, reading lips for hours while my elders debated subtle points of harmonic structure. Later I would squint into the bare sun, yearning to imagine what their ears knew. Even before my peers outgrew their simple tone-matching games to play at emulating the adults' ensembles, I was shunned.

In furtive and precisely-timed visits to each child's vacant quarters, I would hold their instruments, count the valves and frets. I sketched on looseleaf the internal paths of sound’s motion. Working against my innate idleness, I composed rigorous verse for a time, searching in our library's deepest layers for instruction; I explored geometry, studied abstract formalisms of dance, searching for music’s nature in the sallow arts that imitate it. At best I only envisioned shifting tapestries of racing hue and kaleidoscopic texture – as if music resembled the crude work of a loom!

Yes, I have spoken of music. The singer bestowed hearing to me, much later. Here I have only theories, and no time to share even their groundwork, though it must seem to you no fairer than light teaching stones to see. My eardrums were crippled too young for memory to catch there, so each sound of recent years is new to me. I celebrate them still: the chiming of my sandals against flagstone, the silken whisper of ravens and the rustle of compass-needles tracking north. You doubt me by the ragged scars in my ears; but they prove only that I have received a profound gift.

Have I even begun yet? I am sore of this body, all but its hearing; I ramble. Two decades past, Gadaan Suuko watched our music fail. (Time knotted and unknotted him to make me, of course; but then I was a different, bitter man. I hope that the singer has changed me utterly, that I might err in calling him myself.) His bare soles, or mine, pressed the tile tight, to better discern the vibrations. He deluded himself, I think, if he felt anything of substance.

That day, while Tssal Ottourv's anticipated octet performed only its second movement of nine, our queen regent fell dozing on her silver couches. Their long training undid them, I think: they were born to a deep and searching tradition, but a tradition that stuck them that day like amber, and their attempt at anterio-modal recontextualization of pre-Organum chorales might have surprised no-one’s great-grandmother.

Suuko sought to lose himself in the sight of their dazzling finger-patterns and the thick halations of rhythm against his skin; but each time he half succeeded, his deafness wrenched him back to shuffle my eyes about and curse the listeners’ rapture.

Hearing that last sentence, I have two reasons for regret. First is nostalgic, a wish to have held genuine audience, for I will never hear my Court’s music performed. The second is shame in my near absorption; such inaudible shades had no right to entrance me, who stood with the rest in high Organum Court.

Our queen listened deeper than any of us, so that their winding arpeggios rung stale to her, their vaunted improvisations no freer than the whirling of an osprey at its tether. No doubt her snore rose louder than all the cascading chords of ouds and deeper than the great rosewood dulcian. Inevitably someone stumbled at his fretwork and woke the queen, who was displeased by no error of fingering – only her own boredom.

Surely you know her portrait in sepia, and you find that image fair. But since Organum's queens may never lift an instrument, you believe she was nowhere present in the phonologues. But every song was built on her discernment, which is – no, you have killed her – which was her beauty and greatness. She gave immaculate audience, keeping above whatever gaudy faddishness and the mercurial dramas of shifting ensembles. She could choose no favorite, of course, not in music or in any social endeavor. But all who performed for her knew they had been understood, and in every case, her judgment blessed the Court. I am a good man.

Still you are doubtful, uncomprehending. Consider this instance: in my youth, one kitchen-engine's leftmost hand once developed a constant slant of several degrees; the proportions of many chopped tubers were ruined, and minces were untenably coarse. Our predecessors commissioned each automatic steward as perpetually self-adjusting, and although this particular engine had labored little more than three hundred years, our Queen never utilized conductor's-right to punish the machinists' descendants. Rather, she adjusted its tendons herself, and never boasted of it. She was modest; who could say how else she aided our lives?

Her edict had no precedent in either content or brilliance. Two months passed before the Court admitted any further music, and all instruments were locked away, dimming the players' preconceptions of their art. She summoned a contingent of foreign flutecarvers and spoke privately with them, reasoning from two facts: a soloist’s recital cannot hold the complexity of orchestra, and conversely, an orchestra lacks the unity of one pure voice. She devised a bridge for this unnoticed dilemma, and the flutecarvers created a many-branching tower of ivory and brass, what she named the tetrasel.

No less than three tall men were needed to link arms around its coiled and chambered body; and indeed, four musicians were to play it as if one. Its mouthpieces let the work of dual throats and tongues collide and overlap, and likewise its bellowkeys and mahogany slides required twenty fingers. Accordingly – remember this – no player had full control of any single note.

Barefooted and pathetically eager, I was allowed to observe its first demonstration from a small bench in the back. Four men and women knelt like compass-points around it, and their breath pealed rough and strange from the shuttering silver iris at its peak. For perhaps fifteen minutes their voices grappled to possess a single melodic line. Can you imagine a fugue come alive, climbing outside itself?

Our applause wavered, indecisive; the song unsettled even me. It seemed to express a shifting number of human wills, more than one, less than four, but never three or two. Yet the Queen's ovation tugged ours endlessly forward. She finally asked the tetraselists to continue, and sat again; and from my remote bench I realized that she praised not their music, but their abandonment of musical notions that we had considered central. Perhaps I am only casting backward an old man's insight, but the players had dropped their individuality like ballast. They played without knowing what their actions entailed, each only providing material for the others to shape. Whatever grounded their few and profound moments of unity, it has no name we know.

Our queen commanded the tetraselists to immerse in practice; such was their devotion, they surely must have rejoiced to learn they would play no more instruments alone. Charged to seek unity of will, they spent no more time apart. To lessen the inconvenience of separate bodies, they took identical meals, discerning fullness from only the others' outward signs; they fit their breath to contrapuntal cycles I myself devised, rendering eight lungs a single continuous process. When they attended recitals and the rhythms tugged their bodies along, they seemed a fourfold machine linked by intricate chains. In sensual play, too, they took no additional partners, but evoked every facet and permutation of one another.

This all remained quiet, like the development of any new instrument or style; they set up quarters in an obscure cellar, rarely standing from their four stools, eventually passing in and out of sleep without compromising the music's flow; and for a while, only the queen remembered them, and I.

By the fifteenth month, they reported unfamiliar modalities within their dreams: she who never saw colors there would glimpse the prismatic, ever-drifting feathers of coraucs; he whose thoughts came only as fleeting mental voices would witness doors or rivers invert, then bloom into texts recounting the objects they once were. Always they heard each other's voices, dim and removed; and responded always by calling louder. By the twenty-first month they walked together in dreams as if on land. If one brought a message to relate on meeting in sleep's molten territory, all would remember on waking. In dreams, too, they coaxed and rung vast instruments whose boundaries with players and landscape were unclear.

But the tetrasel is a matter for history; I never heard its song. In this journal I mean only to note the singer's context. My lips will no longer bleed, killer, and my eyes are like sand. The polished bottom of a salver reflects my tongue: a leather strap. But all throughout our alabaster house, all these hubs and wandering halls, the singer resonates and reaches me still. Even in duet with the thud of your damned battering-ram – so monotonous, the sound of desperation – that music abases the very air.

You ask how this deaf man could ever have known music: you think my careful accounts of sound are recited, or invented. I know what it is to endure music's empty tactile echo; and too, I know true hearing, as certain as my eyes. Finder, what reason has a corpse to lie? I suppose it is too mundane for the novelists to mention, yet it has always struck me as fine and strange that a crystal decanter, shattering, makes no sound at all, while the ruddiest sunsets shriek like a woman in pain.

Certainly I do have some power to briefly refuse its song. My peers could not have left to prepare the singer's broths, especially in these hard last weeks – indeed, they barely noticed the nourishment I tipped to their own lips. I can only answer that I am more than typically dutiful; I built a staunch self-discipline in the years of my disability, and never once broke down. But after losing that deafness, I watched all who collapsed in their dancing; and listening to the joy on their faces, I found it equal to my own. I was of the Court.

I must not dawdle with justifications. With three years' practice behind them, the four performed again. Afterward, none could still view the tetrasel as a mere thought-experiment or psychological bauble. Other musics came to feel wan and slapdash, while the curious manner of its players provoked no small interest. Many remarked on their ceaseless play precluding even sleep; I contended that they never truly woke, for their half-lidded eyes shivered like those of dreamers. We could not ask what those eyes saw. Tetraselists cannot speak, but none of us complained at that sacrifice – them least of all.

The Court’s music began to borrow the tetrasel's harmonic constructions, a fad swelling to the point of reliance; so when a contagion of chiral nephropathy fell on us the next year, I bore especial concern when a tetraselist was among the afflicted. (Tinctures of chafed osmium proved a quicker remedy than the standard seabore infusions. I accepted the inevitable damage to her optic nerves, as a musician's eyes are irrelevant. Note the singer's weekly osmium dosage, a general measure against microbes.)

Diagnosis was hard, as her reactions were stilted and hesitant; if not for having known her, I would have diagnosed a malformed cerebrum. Licking incessantly at her rictally bent lower lip, she bobbed and squinted like a barrowhorse in sunlight. She slurred even the simplest words, ebbing often into a basso drone that seemed to grope against ambient noise, seeking counterpoint. (That surety of decription may be undeserved, but I systematically quizzed the autonomic medic's-helper, believing that such a method could pinpoint a sound's nature.)

Her behavior recalled a few reports from my medical textbooks: the brain tissue of those object-lessons had been partitioned with gold mesh, or amputated to allay spasmodic fits. But their drowsing and fragmented personalities had resulted from physical damage, when my patient's brain was merely unusual. Perhaps it even represented progress; certainly the tiny shuttleworks of her cortex were more specialized than any previous musician's. As well, her mode of play – of life – denied the simple pairing of one mind to one instrument. Due to isolation from her fellow tetraselists, she was no whole or single entity. More similar to a subtracted element of neural tissue than a recovering epileptic, more accurately a part than a whole – a component disjoined from its natural group.

Long nights have always offered me up to thought; and the tetrasel's song, though deeper of aspect than the tessellations of any throne arm, could make no lullaby for me. Laying awake I saw again the ailing woman's fingers, and realized their tremble implied no impairment. Rather, they wanted to stroke tones from a tetrasel's dozened holes, seeming ten-jointed, scribing subtle glyphs and hexes in the air. Compensating for her ducked and half-shut eyes, her eardrums would have been preternatural – walking my memories that night, I became sure that her head bobbed not randomly, but toward the tiniest motes of sound. If I spent all my days in nothing but scalpel-work, surely each of my empty-handed gestures would be crabbed and hesitant, echoing the motions that defined and circumscribed my life. So too the musician.

I claim no credit for the singer of songs, that ideal evolution of our tetrasel. I did speak the suggestion, but if I truly conceived it, those dawnless skies conceived it too; and the sick girl in my memory’s eyes; and the three whose presence would have completed her mind; and our regent in her quiet magnificence; and the textbook's epileptic, strapped to his table one hundred years ago. As the final cause of these words I record, am I accountable for their content? As well to single out the ink of my pen. My words in turn have altered me.

And paramount, the girl was not miserable. Her dazed behavior was mainly a puzzlement at her fellows' absence; she displayed no greater suffering than any patient with nephropathy. Degradation in consciousness? We possess no way to measure the wisdom that dwells in fingers and ears.

Lately, the queen had decreed we all spend half of each day apart from the tetrasel; but what weight has a command that binds its giver? Chirurgeon and Medic Prime, I would carry her from the hall myself, denying the serving-engines this privilege. I fed her, attended to her every necessity.

Our pursuit of other musics had already dwindled. The musicians passed half of each day with ornate meals and languid games that carried desperate undertones. As I have come to understand this, it is far from our shame; but yes, they took no further phonologues – not of themselves, never once of the tetrasel.

At first we meant to study it, combine its innovations with our own. In half a year that program seemed intractable. Its song was praised for escaping all theories of structure and dynamics, but that very otherness meant no system we knew could encompass it. Dancing they bowed their heads, hearing the Court refracted there, knowing their creation had transcended them before its first performance.

Did you believe yourself so privileged, killer, as to deserve its song? You may have contributed to our Court’s creations, in your removed and unskilled way, but the tetrasel was ours alone. We were obligated to give you our music, but that music was intended only for us. You confuse motivations, I think. The Court’s aim was progress itself, not the masses' enjoyment, and when it created its successor, that aim was surpassed. Reading this, you ought to feel only pride.

So I did a favor to them then, and sent again for the flutecarvers. The tetrasel had continually honed my interest in the play of muscle and nerve, and I confess to spending many nights in study of its schematic -- turning between anatomy texts until my knowledge of hearing's physiology was deep enough to bury all my envies. As my studies became strictly theoretical, I wandered beyond the texts like a wayfarer without the land's language -- coming at last, still ignorant, to principles that are surely profound. You hear proof of that, dimly, through these walls.

In what brief contacts I could make with our regent, she supported the plans, I believe. The new instrument’s mechanism outbounded the flutecarvers’ narrow expertise, so to broaden our skills, two watchmakers were enjoined; and potters, luthiers and brasscasters; a silent albino experienced in sculpting digestive tracts for autonomous clockwork jaguars; and one young technologist with stuttering gray eyes, adept integrator of prosthetic organs with damaged bodies (a rediscovered science too old yet for a name). Fearing its addictive qualities, I allowed no guest access to the tetrasel, claiming the instrument had been retired for deficient performance.

Still, the foreign artisans were entranced. They wondered at our kitchen-engines' wide and subtle palette, and our tantric refinements astounded them twice again. With difficulty I persuaded a few hands to give recitals, and others to look on, offering the semblance of critique. These pleasures were farcical to all courtiers but me, of course; and I found succour in that lush and secret irony.

The singer’s mechanism came from the work of that year. Squatting like a conch within its knurled porcelain dome, towering with clusters of pipework. Seven diorite coffins were suspended inside, each having space for a person full-grown, each equipped with flexible breathing-tubes for its tenant. A central cavity, intricately twisted, would focus the work of fourteen lungs; and supple braids of metamercury dangled from the ceilings of those seven close rooms, their far ends fixed to mallets, airbladders and lidded pipes, so that each minute tugging of cord would generate a tone. And more contrivances than I can list, nocked there in ivory, geared in teak or cast in steel.

Remember, finder: you killed me, killed Gadaan Suuko, in blind wrath alone. Never assume yourself righteous by what you learn after you move. Presume no empathy with that girl; and whenever an act breaches the moral terms of the everyday, it is those terms we must reconsider. Condemning us you would condemn worlds, for the singer was born on my scalpel's curve.

While the crafters worked, seven infants were requisitioned from outside and conveyed to a room. For their purposes, vision would be a distraction, diverting their proper development. The choice had no ramifications that could be weighed: one cannot compare two distinct types of sensing for their power, cannot call a rabbit's ear keener than a falcon's eye, for the spheres they regard are altogether different. It is known those with the subtlest hearing learn it as a substitute for sight.

On activating the wet-nurses, I told them an amoebic bubonism had wracked the babes' eyes, requiring surgery. (Obviously you have never known a serving-engine; but personalities etched in picamite are as gullible as the novelists portray. This was designed: although such engines are formally autonomic, they function best when provided with strict obedience. Otherwise they would not extend us, but supplant us.) I gave similar explanations upon multiplying their lungs, equipping them with colostomies, and so forth. Those matrons were implanted with many proven lullabies, and on passing the room of basinets, I would sometimes pause to remove my shoes and stand outside for minutes, pondering whether human singing was something like music.

Upon their release, the crafters would have brought their newly-learned techniques to all further creations, but the boundless world is no fitting place for sublime things. If our nation were home to the worlds' only tetrasel, our queen would have argued, the justness of our Court's place and purpose would be forever evident. The crafters' contracted payment of gold had been cast as heavy chains, manacles lightened with ammonite and crescent pearl. We upheld the terms of our promise; and too, they received even a greater reward than they deserved, for they were kept in the tetrasel's blissful chamber. The bindings proved unnecessary in days.

By the time the babes could finally digest foods other than engine-milk, their hunger for physical contact was gone. I brought them to that echoless porcelain cask and set them in its seven coffins to grow within and live.

Their knuckles were integrated with the silvery braids, that every gesture would have its equivalent in tone; likewise, dozens of gold rings in the expressive muscles of their cheeks and brows and lips were linked to the cords. Feeling cannot but show itself entirely on such guileless faces, and what is music but feeling purified of self? Only the suddenest motions would let one body form notes alone, but combined efforts would easily succeed; this ensured they would intuit the need to collaborate. Their functions were united, in short: both with the apparatus and each other.

As the newborn singer gathered itself, its sheaves of pipe throbbed a great dissonance that seemed to break across my skin. I have never heard an infant's cries; it may have been like that. Indeed, when I introduced cupfuls of dilute yam in the feeding funnels, the dissonance diminished. I will not say they acquired structure then; but spectators assured me that the frantic edge was gone.

At just that age the soul's autonomy begins to awaken; a child-mind comes to realize its control over the body's position in space. Their spinal columns had been partitioned to restrict undesirable movement, of course, but the singer would come to know its actions as well as any conscious thing. However, the knowledge was not grounded in spatial terms or language, though, but in sound alone. One knows their hand, for instance, as a bodily thing, a complex of potential actions through space; observing a hand in a multiple of situations a child infers the enduring realities of will and the external world. Not knowing the physical positions of its seven bodies, only the musics their positions created, the singer experienced the space of potential tone instead.

On reflection, one realizes the appreciation of music is not altogether learned, but rather a basic perception: harmonies please even infants, and cacophony gives them unease. My small audience had slipped back to the tetrasel, and I sat alone, meaning to grasp some primordial vibration in which the singer's consciousness began.

In a few hours a gentle rhythm seemed to thread itself across the drone – drifting as an eidolon drifts in a fever-dream, in and out from memory to sight. I finally recalled it as a lullabye of the nursing-engines, assembling itself from shards of babble. Hunched naked against the ceramic shell (to know the vibrations at their absolute clearest) I realized the singer was reaching for the exact comfort it remembered; and in some hours the flawed mimicry became, so far as I could tell, precise.

I dressed and went to my queen, who stood before her tetrasel, rocking on the balls of her feet. I think the – I think she heard me, but she never moved. Perhaps she did not remember.

Again I neglect time; I cannot say which time any longer, or how much. The singer awakened long ago. At my last inspection its seven bodies had only the stature of three-year-olds; but their proportions were strange, huge-jawed and huge-handed, with pelvises like yellow fists.    

The Court could no more ration the singer’s music than their own heartbeats, and I think I have spoken to no-one in years. Even the tetraselists brought themselves to the singer. They were the first to stand, finder. Discounting myself, they were the very first to stand.

But I must speak of me. From the time of the singer's awakening to the great miracle I have hinted at – it may have been a dozen weeks, or twenty dozen. All days were the same, as I have said; and all nights too, for the singer's hall lay below my bedchamber, and its voice rose and shuddered through my floor; and with it, the foot-stamp of slow dancers, pounding arbitrarily, I felt, in and out of time.

In and out from memory to sight. To recall our encompassing passions and transformations is an imprecise game: those weighty events strip our preconceptions to nothing, but we ourselves are nothing but collections of expectation and foresight, focusing and making tangible the raw future. We attempt to slip our selves into the centers of these vastest moments, not realizing the moment occurred because the self was gone. But for all that, I recall the miracle – only not the hours leading to that axial point.

The change must have occurred before I realized, for when I examine the path of my insomniac night, another memory always seeps in. I am perhaps ten; I sit with my shoes in one hand, squinting over rows of heads to the small ensemble at the hall's far end. The tick and pound of their percussive blocks aligns to no sequence I can place as pattern; the ghosted melody of the three mirlitons I cannot hear. I am deaf.

I speak of recalling myself ten years old, but at the recital, that child imagined himself aged, with a fine gray braided beard and tough callouses on every finger's pad. I was ancient and still hale, and all those I knew were gone; and I rushed through our long burnished galleries casting down every work on their shelves, decimating them: the hollowed rosy pearls limned with marching algae, the thousand-angled busts claiming structural isomorphisms with notable sonatas, the porcelain oboes and gilded skulls.

The halls stretched as I ran, looping and sprawling forward joyously, all things wanting only to be broken; and I saw myself as I knelt in the wreckage and laughed. Then – in both thens – I could never laugh for fear of being heard. All the Court spoke laughter as an emotion inherent in a sound, carrying the empathy of others within its contagiousness. I scoffed at this, and at the same time privately craved the sound of laughter, fearing I was deprived of something ineffable.

But I am speaking of that night's apex, and the endless reverberation of dreaming song, when that music's shadow ground a pinhole finally in my chest, and ground a pick to slip within it. I cast away my bedsilks and swayed on the palms of my feet, having never known a person dancing is truly music dancing within a person, and even the bleak arch of night seemed to rush at my window and flare like dawn. Laughter swirled from everything, from the creases in the heaped silks and the lines in my hands; and I knew I had always shared in its omnipresence.

When the moment passed, in turn I was amazed by the croaking drone from my window, the sound of the moon as it fills. I have denied so many trivial things a place in this record – now I have no words, and I will pass by the sublime. All at once I heard the singer of songs, and dashed to join their sleepless dancing, greater far than prayer. My beard tells me years have passed.

Our domain is sturdy built, but small. We lack rooftop gardens or other means of creating foodstuff; surely though, ingenuity has lasted us longer than you allowed for. Did you think I would climb the parapet and beg parlay? Attend your shouted demands? Be you insurrectionist or invader, your demands are no business of mine. I am Gadann Suuko and the singer's to touch as it pleases; I have gone farther than you, and I meet you only for my duty of care, which I can no longer carry alone.

Killer, I spoke of a lockbox. Take the singer's schematics from that box; check the ebony scrollcase tied with red. Hold that handful of ashes you find, and dredge them for ink if you like. You have judged me, as did whatever nation you represent – you who had no hand here.

As you must understand, I am exceptional for my capacity of restraint. Not even a deafened technician-caste could maintain a society where singers of songs were common; and even serving-engines break down, as we have seen here in our Court; and they are vulnerable to violence, as you of course know. Eventually each singer would starve. In this new-created world, such is the worst murder; nothing can justify it at all.

Killing me and my memories, you have ended all possibility of further singers; and reading, you have risen elite in your knowledge, become the Court you besieged and starved. Your choice is simple; in fact you are without choice, for this music cannot be shared. Acquire earplugs, or use more permanent protections, and hope they will be enough. You must minister to the singer as I did. Let none take it. The singer is your responsibility, and with it the continuation of all we believed. You stand at the head of rotting Organum Court, preening for your easy victory? You kneel at the foot of the singer of songs.

But that too might be a digression. These years have had nights, and I have wondered this: for all the profound music on the drum of my ear, for all the light in my maze, nothing in the singer's own experience might even involve the music we hear. It might hear nothing at all.

I have wondered only this. We have collapsed seven brains into one mind, one reality sealed and close, like the still piston begetting diamonds at the world's core. The singer exists outside all physical experience, outside all language; when I assume it knows the same music our human ears do, that notion is only a protective measure, like shutting my eyes to the sun. The music by which we know it is the only world it inhabits – but by that token, every human world could only be a wash of disorganized perception, a mere averaging molecules. My own eyes tell nothing of such chaos. By whatever secret art, they show the page before me.

Even if you were to plot each innumerable road of nerve in my brain, that knowledge would not help you share in what I feel. Likewise, to hear the singer’s song implies no empathy with its consciousness. Perhaps we are only like those senile archons of the fable, whose cataracted lathe shapes this world by perfect accident, lacking the flaws of its creators and standing outside their knowledge. I have gone within the singer's workings, unlocked a coffin’s mouth to stare at one wizened ivory ear as the hands spiraled and the lips worked like a lover's lips; I screamed so loud into that ear I heard the roots of my own tongue lashing back and forth with the scream, and in the music nothing changed.

And I fed the singer again.

On the day an oudist's slipping finger woke the queen, I believed the Court was exactly as precious as music itself, enriching all common lives with its pure existence. Your siege has taught me we might be held grotesque in our isolation, worthy of no praise. You force me to stand, killer; I will go outside this puzzle to look. I have told you my secret blessing, and my secret wish turns on that blessing.

May all that I perceive lead outward. May every thread of this world meet in harmony beyond me.

But I wish because I cannot hope. I go to free myself from all patterns, and the continuance I crave is not my own. I will put down this journal and start for the gates, bringing a gift to you.