Even the Name is Stolen

Cut down all the firs that suck up the rain and suddenly you’re hip deep in mud during the nine months of the year that it rains. It’s a devouring mud: the city builds boardwalks, lays cobblestones, and the mud swallows them whole. Potholes yawn wide in the intersections, deep enough to drown in, and a cottage industry springs up to raft pedestrians to the other side of the street across the reeking, stagnant water.

You didn’t move out west because you were skilled or determined to live a clean life: those folks are doing just fine back east. It was the losers who moved west, the weirdos, the loners, the queers, and the outcast, folks who couldn’t be bothered to clean the mud off their boots until they physically couldn’t lift their feet anymore and who were fine if more than half the water that washed back in with the tide was their own discarded shit, piss, semen and menstrual blood.

But if you didn’t mind the stench and the theft and the rain, you could mostly get on with your own personal vision of life. Change your hair, your name, your gender, your fortune, if you wanted. Sell blue jeans to gold rushers and tar soap to loggers and walk to work through the ghosts of the people you murdered to get here. Tell yourselves, once you’ve adapted to skunk cabbage milk and rhododendron honey, that you’re a special breed of survivor.

O, that I could tell you what you mean to me!

The poets in the mathematics department are flirting over a game of chess. Each piece is an airline sized bottle of vodka, and each one you take, you drink. No one in the department can afford to be sober, though differential equations prefers marijuana. But in number theory it’s vodka, clear as the day, fast and painful, easy to palm. Not that it matters; they’re playing in the building’s atrium, and have already weathered one stink eye from a wandering college president.

It’s a cold winter’s night a week from finals and everyone has gone slightly crazy. Someone has climbed up the outside of the atrium and is laying sprawled out against the clerestory, face pressed against the glass. Sheila’s off by herself, too large for her skin, flopped over the arms of a padded chair, desperately squinting at proofs that refuse to cohere into any meaningful sense. She’s read the same paragraph of logic a dozen times in the last hour and none of it is sticking. She’s dropped out twice, she can’t face a third time.

Someone around the curve of the hallway lets out a muffled sob and everyone sighs in recognition. The poets have finished their game and are leaning against each other, fingers twined together in mingled lust and despair.

Those Who Are Not Fed Must Still Eat

None of them are skinny, for all that no Allan Kuper ever goes to bed feeling anything other than hunger. Time goes on and they spread out, like anyone else, and it’s been decades, decades of diving and consuming and dividing again. They’ve narrowed down to a lone Allan Kuper half a dozen times, but it never lasts; what is united must dissolve.

Allan is living in a converted dentist’s office on the edge of the trees, a squat four unit building half built into a hill overlooking a disused railroad that gets buried a foot deep in cottonwood fluff every year. He’s been sleeping poorly, dreams vivid and contradictory, panic attacks at four in the morning, a burn like a knife wound deep in his gut every time he stoops to pick something up. He knows the signs.

It always happens when he isn’t looking. He’ll be lost in thought, wrist deep in the dishes, and it’s only the closing of the front door that lets him know it’s happened again, the sudden vast hollow in his stomach that tells him meat is on the move, back to the water, heading east. He’s older now, fat and balding, but you don’t have to be strong or fast, you just have to be willing to push the blade in.

Allan Kuper licks his lips and leaves, the door swinging open behind him.

The Archive is Lost

Somewhere one of the walls blows in; there are so many floors, there must always be one with a bomb just going off. Through the dust and the smoke vague figures move: green eyes aglow, hoods pulled down low, reeds tied around their waists. They speak a forgotten tongue, an Adamic babble, just above the edge of hearing.

The library is hexagonal, with a central well that stretches up to infinity and down to infinity, with a railing around the edge. A book dropped over the side—and there have been many, uncountable infinities of books—will fall forever, rise forever. If the well is not choked with falling books, it is only because the infinite collection is dwarfed by the infinite building, which is itself dwarfed by the infinite well. The well is empty.

Outside is a quiet plaza, seven sided, inlaid with stones, shaded by trees and old buildings. The library’s doors have closed for the first time, never to be reopened, and so they have come, the all-devouring, the desperate. The words must flow, must flow without end, in their infinite variation, their infinite meaning, their infinite meaninglessness. On other floors, the librarians work undisturbed at their eternal task, breeding categories out of systems, chaos out of order, hydras out of serpents.

So it has been written, so it shall be unwritten.

Surface Everywhere

Lew meets her walking along the train tracks that run along the channel between the town and the island, a short, nondescript sort of woman in dun colored pants and a hoodie slightly too large for her body. “You lost,” he says; not a question because no one comes to the tracks intentionally unless they were getting paid to be there, and he knows all those folks.

“No,” she says, maybe; it’s hard to tell. She speaks down into her chest, and her voice is muffled by the hood. “I’m supposed to meet someone here.”

“Here?” He looks around. The sunset is nice enough, and you can see the water and the city floating on the other side of it alright, but mostly what you see is rubble and barbed wire and oil. “You don’t want to meet anyone here. It’s dangerous.”

“Here’s where he said, here’s where I am.”

Lew shrugs, and keeps moving. When he passes back by at the end of his shift she’s still sitting there, hunched forward a little. Light from the yard picks out a pile of clothes dumped at her feet. The bottoms of her pants are soaked to the knees. He hitches his step and she sways towards him, just a little, and he thinks better of it. At three am you let them have the night who want it.