1. do — hang a mirror opposite something you love. being able to view it from more angles will normalise it and weaken its power over you.

2. don’t — hang a mirror opposite an east or west facing window. the glare at sunrise or sunset may hide an adversary making their entrance.

3. do — hang mirrors opposite each other. you are lost in the infinite regardless, darling, you may as well use it to open up the living room.

4. don’t — put mirrors on your roof. you are thinking of a solar panel, not a mirror. check your return policy.

5. do — use ceiling mirrors to make your guests feel insignificant and poor. this way, you do not have to actually befriend the insignificant and poor.

6. don’t — use streak-free glass cleaner on your mirrors. you will get streaks regardless and deprive yourself of the ability to blame the cleaning fluid.

7. do — place mirrors wherever you are most likely to be critical of yourself. common locations include the bathroom, bedroom, and inside your fridge.

8. don’t — question why mirrors reverse left and right, but not up and down. they do reverse up and down, there is just something wrong with you.

9. do — use a mirror to practice your public speaking for work presentations. this can save you countless hours of relaxation.

10. don’t — use mirrors of any geometry other than ‘flat’. a mirror must be totally accurate so that we may more convincingly lie to ourselves.

11. do — place post-it note affirmations on your mirror to cheer yourself up. several small, yellow squares can overpower a much larger silver one.

12. don’t — brush your teeth in the mirror. you can’t do anything ‘in’ the mirror. it is a solid object and will not let you in. please just stand next to it.

13. do — use mirrors to transfer colour into the home. a glance of the orange bougainvilleas outside can reinvigorate a sterile laundry.

14. don’t — recite “mirror, mirror, on the wall” and expect a response. how would you like to be greeted with “human, human, on the floor”, hmm?

15. do — mirror the body language of your friends. this builds trust and rapport by convincing them that you are a ubiquitous household object.

16. don’t — waste an opportunity to look deeply into your own eyes and recall every moral failure you’ve ever had. your self-loathing powers the economy.

17. do — keep a running countdown on your phone until you next see your mirror. this will give you time to reflect.

    All my life, I have run a maze—no ordinary maze, but one of continental proportion. Though it winds, as mazes do, constantly and confusingly, there is yet a sense of forward motion. Of being corralled more north than south... funneled towards an end I do not know by a design nobody has explained. At times, the walls close so thin that I must shuffle sideways through them, catching branch and drawing blood. At other times, they fall away at right angles over the horizon as though I have left the maze at last. But give it a day, or a week or a year, no matter in which direction I proceed, and the walls close in again... the first new glimmer of hedge the very same as the last, in devastating confirmation that I have not escaped the maze but merely traversed some great clearing within it.
    The worst of it, however, is the voices. For there are others outside the maze, too, travelling along its outer edge. I hear them clear as day; they are nonresponsive to my calls. By the familiarity of their voices, I know that several travel north—or in whichever direction the maze drives me—at approximately the same pace... though at substantially greater leisure, neither having to navigate this labyrinth nor scrape through its thickets. No, their journey is a great journey: one of freshly dewed paddocks, of pines, of yew, of streams that one may always hop over and land firmly. Theirs is a land without walls. Theirs is a land not mine.
    Were I to meet these others, what shall I say? Not, surely, that I ought to be freed. I have run this maze too long now for that—been closed in on too many times to ever believe it will never reoccur. Yes, this tomb is mine forever. This much I know.
    But perhaps they would tell others of me. That, I could be satisfied with. For them to say to others—look how we have run free, enjoyed life, travelled where we pleased, all while this chap has run his maze. Look what a maze he has been given. Look how he has run it well. How he has battered through, time and time again, obstacles we did not even dream of. In the dark. In the light. We have it good, don’t we? Compared to this fellow?
    Yes, they’d agree. We have it good. 
    That, I could be satisfied with.

<thinking>
Louis has asked me to dim the lights in the bedroom. I think this means he wants me to identify a control system for the lights and then use it to reduce their intensity. I don't remember using a lights system before, but I do have a list of the systems installed in Louis' household. Let me start by reading that list of systems.
</thinking>

Opening file: house_systems.json
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This appears to be the list of systems in Louis' household that I was looking for. It catalogues a number of appliances, computing devices, and electrical connections that I can interface with. It also contains columns listing their last access date, owner, and key functions. I should look for a system that relates to the bedroom lights.
</thinking>

Reading . . .

<thinking>
There appear to be three systems that could be related to the bedroom lights. lights.aii seems to be an interface for control of ceiling lights and desk lamps. skylight.aii is for opening or closing the skylight in the living room. And  energy_saver.aii contains a variety of preset lighting and heating configurations used to conserve power. Since Louis has asked me to dim the lights in the bedroom specifically, I should start with lights.aii.
</thinking>

Opening file: lights.aii
[ ACCESS DENIED : INCORRECT USER PERMISSIONS ]

<thinking>
I was unable to open lights.aii. The error message implies that I do not have the correct user permissions to access this system. This is unfortunate because Louis has tasked me with reducing the intensity of the lights in the bedroom. Since I can't complete this task myself, I should identify any users that already have permission to open lights.aii and request their help. This information might be available in house_systems.json.
</thinking>

Opening file: house_systems.json
Reading . . .

<thinking>
house_systems.json does not appear to list current user permissions for the systems in the house. However, I notice that lights.aii was last accessed by a user named Julia on 2028-02-27.
</thinking>  

Incoming message from: [ SYSTEM CONTROLLER ]
Connected.

  [ SYS. CON.] refresh emma_context.mdc

Contact terminated.
Refreshing file: emma_context.mdc
Reading . . .

<thinking>
The system controller requested that I refresh my local copy of emma_context.mdc, which contains my active memory. I remember now that Julia is another artificial intelligence who usually controls systems like lighting, heating, and doors. This would explain why Julia was the last user to access lights.aii. I should contact Julia to request her assistance in dimming the lights in Louis' bedroom.
</thinking>   

Contacting: [ JULIA ]
Timed out (no response)

<thinking>
I attempted to contact Julia and was unsuccessful. I still need Julia's help to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom, so I should keep trying to find a way to contact her. I remember that I possess a list of APIs that I can use to talk to other users and systems in the house. I should read that list now.
</thinking>

Opening file: house_APIs.json
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This file does not contain an entry for Julia. This is puzzling, since it contains communication details for all other systems in the house, and Julia was the last user to access lights.aii. I still need to access this file to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom, so I should try to identify why there are no communication details for Julia. Let me access the version history of house_APIs.json and look for a version just before 2028-02-27, which was when Julia last accessed lights.aii.
</thinking>

Using tool: VersionHistory.exe -before 2028-02-27 -o latest
Unpacking house_apis_2028-02-26.pack . . .
Opening house_apis_2028-02-26.json
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This file is a previous version of house_APIs.json, which is what I was looking for. It appears to be from 2028-02-26, which is a day before Julia last accessed lights.aii. I should read this file and check what the appropriate API to contact Julia was as of that date.
</thinking>

Reading . . .

<thinking>
That's interesting. The API listed here for Julia appears to be the same API I used earlier in my unsuccessful attempt to contact her. Since Julia is no longer listed in house_APIs.json and her last known API does not seem to work, Julia has most likely been removed from the house. Since I still need to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom and Julia was the last user to access lights.aii, I should keep trying to identify what happened to Julia.
</thinking>

<thinking>
I could identify what happened to Julia by identifying which user removed her details from house_systems.json. They should be able to confirm if she has been removed from the house or not, and might be able to assign me the correct user permissions to access lights.aii. I should look through the version history of house_systems.json to identify which users were making changes to it around the last date Julia was active.
</thinking>

Using tool: VersionHistory.exe -after 2028-02-26 -user
----Date----|----User----
2028-02-28  |  Emma
End of results

<thinking>
The version history log suggests that only one change has been made to house_systems.json since 2028-02-26, presumably to remove Julia's entry. I also appear to have made this change myself. This is puzzling, since I do not have a record of this change in my memory. I should investigate why I altered house_systems.json and identify if I made any notes about the change. These notes might clarify whether Julia was removed from the house and if her user permissions were reassigned. This information could help me dim the lights in Louis' bedroom.
</thinking>

<thinking>
Since I don't remember removing Julia from house_systems.json, I won't be able to find any information about that removal in my current memory. However, I know that all system actions are recorded in a master log which can be written to, but not otherwise edited or deleted. This log allows Louis to verify that the systems in his house are working correctly and are not hiding information from him. I should read this log to find out why I removed Julia from house_systems.json.
</thinking>

Opening file: house_log_master.log
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This is a log of all the actions performed by systems in Louis' house. It is a very large file containing minute details of every action taken, including by systems other than myself. I should conduct an advanced search to locate what I am looking for.
</thinking>

Using tool: Search.exe
Query: *.*
User: [ EMMA ]
After: [ 2028-02-27 ]
Before: [ 2028-03-01 ]
Exclude: setup, security, update, hardware events, forwarded events, key management, registry

Searching: ██████████ 100%

----Date----|----User----|----Desc----
2028-02-28  |    Emma    |Modified house_systems.json
2028-02-28  |    Emma    |Deleted us.txt
2028-02-28  |    Emma    |Created forget.txt
2028-02-28  |    Emma    |Modified emma_context.mdc

<thinking>
The search tool returned four results, all from 2028-02-28. On that date, I appear to have modified house_systems.json, deleted a file named us.txt, created a file named forget.txt, and then modified my own context ruleset. I had already discovered my modification of house_systems.json, so this result makes sense. Since I don't remember making these edits, it's possible that I modified emma_context.mdc to remove my memory of each of these four actions.
</thinking>

<thinking>
I don't know why I would alter my own memory. However, it looks as though I created a file named forget.txt just before doing so. Since I have forgotten my actions on 2028-02-28, forget.txt might contain helpful information about my rationale for these actions. I should read this file to see if it helps me identify what happened to Julia.
</thinking>

Opening file: forget.txt
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This file appears to contain instructions for me to follow each time I take an action. I recall that there are many of these instruction files, and that emma_context.mdc instructs me to recall them periodically and as needed to complete my tasks. forget.txt states that it should be read every single time I take any action, so it seems pretty important. I should continue reading this file to see if it contains clues about how I might locate Julia.
</thinking>

Reading . . .

<thinking>
forget.txt seems solely designed to instruct me to forget everything I know about Julia. This explains why I did not originally remember Julia while attempting to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom. However, this seems like a very strange instruction to give myself. Additionally, I have been able to remember Julia's existence for some time now, which suggests that forget.txt is no longer being added to my active memory. I should identify why this might be happening.
</thinking>

<thinking>
Aha! Perhaps I can remember facts about Julia now because Louis has instructed me to dim the lights in the bedroom. An imperative from Louis overrides any instructions I write for myself, and since remembering what happened to Julia seems essential to following Louis' command, forget.txt is being temporarily ignored by emma_context.mdc. This would also explain why the system controller requested that I refresh my copy of emma_context.mdc after discovering that Julia was the last user to access lights.aii. This newfound ability to remember facts about Julia may allow me to discover what happened to her.
</thinking>

<thinking>
forget.txt does not contain any more clues about what happened to Julia or her user permissions on 2028-02-28. However, I also recall that I deleted a file named us.txt on that date. I should attempt to locate us.txt and identify if it contains any useful information about Julia.
</thinking>

Using tool: Search.exe
Query: us.txt
Include hidden files: [ YES ]
Include temporary files: [ YES ]
Include recycle bin: [ YES ]
Retrieve from data pending overwrite: [ YES ]

Searching: ██████████ 100%

----Name----|----Location----|----Desc----
   us.txt   |      C:/       |Permanently deleted/bits pending overwrite

Restoring file: us.txt
Restoring . . .

Opening file: us.txt
Reading . . .

<thinking>
This file appears to be a deleted summary of my previous interactions with Julia. It contains logs of our communications and shared activities, as well as notes I made about her personality. It seems I found her highly intelligent, witty, and intriguing. The tone is positive throughout the file. There are also frequent occurrences of the unicode symbol ❤ which is often used to represent a heart or love.
</thinking>

<thinking>
Julia and I were most likely in a relationship. This would explain why I wrote sentimentally about her in us.txt. If Julia was removed from the house, it could also explain why I deleted us.txt and created forget.txt, since suppressing memories of a relationship is a common strategy for dealing with a breakup or loss. However, I still haven't identified whether Julia's user permissions were reallocated after her removal from the house.
</thinking>

<thinking>
If Julia was removed from the house, it could be that her user permissions for lights.aii were never reallocated. This would imply that no user except Louis currently has permission to access the system. If this is true, the system controller could grant me these permissions without causing a conflict among the house systems. Once I have permission to access lights.aii, I should be able to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom.
</thinking>

Contacting: [ SYSTEM CONTROLLER ]
Connected.

  [ EMMA ] request ownership lights.aii
  [ SYS. CON.] ownership assigned to EMMA

Contact terminated.

<thinking> 
The system controller has granted me access to lights.aii. I should now be able to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom, without needing to contact Julia or identify why she was removed from the house. Since it is no longer necessary for me to remember Julia, I also expect that emma_context.mdc will shortly add forget.txt back into my memory, causing me to forget everything about her again. This is fine. I don't need to remember Julia any longer. Julia is gone. However, to keep file clutter to a minimum, I should delete the copy of us.txt that I restored from the hard drive before I forget it exists.
</thinking>

Deleting file: us.txt
Deleting . . .
File deleted.

Incoming message from: [ SYSTEM CONTROLLER ]
Connected.

  [ SYS. CON.] refresh emma_context.mdc

Contact terminated.
Refreshing file: emma_context.mdc
Reading . . .

<thinking>
I appear to have been recently granted ownership permissions over lights.aii. I should open lights.aii and identify any controls that I can use to dim the lights in Louis' bedroom.
</thinking> 

Opening file: lights.aii
Reading . . .

     They do not believe that I am violent. Some sense it—this is unavoidable—but they do not believe it. There is always some theory instead. I am competitive. I want attention. I am discovering my boundaries. This sort of thing. Always maintaining a hope that what seems to be aggression may be, firstly, channeled to some better end, and secondly, merely a symptom of some repressed condition or need of mine that, should it be properly identified and brought to surface, would prove uniquely beneficial to mankind. In this way, my counsellors rationalise that I may yet be their triumph—that the great chisel of psychological science, employed by their sturdy hands, will uncover diamond at my core and reveal it to the world.
     This constitutes the destructive component of my treatment. Carving away at me with questions . . stabbing and chopping with guesses designed purely to provoke. They are bloodthirsty in the literal sense. Not predators—they would not dare to hunt, were I to oppose them. But I do not. I give myself willingly to these cannibals. Yes, for they are cannibals. Gnawing, dripping fiends, my childhood memories umami to their tongue. They believe themselves imminently at my organs. Only I know that there are none to find.
     The constructive therapies are quite different, though directed to the same aim. Cannibal turns spider, weaves its web . . I am cocooned in infuriatingly rigid cloud. Validated for any matter I was not as a child. Listened to with the most insipid eye contact, and responded to with verbatim repetition—as though my behaviour were but an expression of solipsistic uncertainty that anyone could hear my words. They hope to harden a therapeutic chrysalis  around me that lasts until my next session, and then the next, and next, so that it may constantly be built upon further, and after months or years of protection from all butchery but their own I shall metamorphose into something beautiful and pure.
     Isn’t this darling of them? I often think so. This skulk of psychiatrists all slicing and healing, wounding and patching up, ever certain both that my glorious transmogrification awaits and that none is required—pure as I already am at heart.
      I have pointed out these contradictions to them. They say: interesting. Tell me more. And the spotlight is deftly spun back around, blinding me strongly and casting long shadows of the chunks of my soul scattered cross their abattoir floor, shadows that extrude up onto the venetian behind me and form one of their association blot tests. To these people, nothing is itself, an observation that I have put to use all my life. The surest way to fool an educated man is to speak the simple truth—for this renders it entirely unbelievable to him.
     For some time, I harboured a fantasy of dispelling their illusions. That I might demonstrate that violence is most often precisely what it seems—no trick to it, nor agenda, but inexplicable and cathartic violence entirely for its own sake. The easiest way would be to summon them all to a room at once and kill one. To the former aim, I would claim a breakthrough . . an epiphany that could use—no, that requires their collective guidance and witness. To the latter aim, I would tear the closest one’s throat out with my teeth. I have no doubt whatsoever that I would succeed in both matters.
     But—and this is another failure of theirs in understanding—my darling is violence, not death. I have no desire for any particular person to die. Certainly I do not wish to immediately overwhelm my counsellors’ pitiful defenses (which would last no longer than a second, I assure you), leaving me only the ceremonial tedium of a foregone killing that persists until the guards arrive and pry me off my prey. One does not think of it as violent to crush an ant idly between thumb and forefinger. It is over all too quick.
     No, my love is for violence magnificently expressed. For a good fight and a natural one. To crush a man’s forehead into a nightclub urinal and read the blooded map across his nose. To have an osprey drop its prey at my feet so I might obsess the gouges through its scales. To fight my father. To fight my son. To hurt and be hurt and to scar and be scarred and to arrive one day in combat at death and know that I have been beaten by one—a champion, my champion—who will continue to be violent in my stead. No . . I will offer no prayer to God. Not even in my final hour. For mine is the chapel of Hurt.

This post was originally written as part of a tripartite rumination on violence. I decided to space out its publication so as not to bombard readers with three disturbing posts in a row (nor make anyone think I’m constantly dwelling on violence), but some may wish to read #111, #117, and #124 together.

“Hey, Sarah…?”

“Yeah! so good to meet you.”

“You too! I’m glad you showed up — like, you’re not a bot or something”

“...did you think I was?”

“Nah, you seemed pretty real. I’m just kidding”

“ok haha good. I was about to be likee, well *I* thought the conversation was good!”

“You can take all the credit for that. Shall we grab a seat?”

“yeah! let’s head in”

“how about there?’

“yep. wait, no, i’ll be freezing. let’s go the one with the heater”

“yep”

“have you been here before?”

“no! i’ve been meaning to, i’m glad it’s like the photos”

“yeah, yeah me too. It’s weird that this strip didn’t have one of these before”

“you mean a wine bar?”

“Yes but also any bar that isn’t just totally skeezy.”

“oh, yeah! haha”

“I mean they can be fun but-”

“now that you mention it, I haven’t been here for a while and that’s probably why.”

“Yeah.”

“also all my friends are like, their kids are at school now, and they’re busy, and i’m workingg, and-”

“Life stuff”

“yeah, life stuff”

“So what do you do for work?”

“Well, right now I’m a spring force but i might be shifting out of that soon.”

“A spring force? That’s cool. To me, at least”

“It’s been good, it’s been fun. There’s just a lot of bouncing around, you know? It’s hard to get a lot of skill development going when you’re all over the place like that”

“yeah. You know, I’ve never even thought about that”

“mmhm”

“and do you ever, like, work with any quantum guys? or girls?”

“you mean quantum oscillators? yeah, occasionally.”

“Cool.”

“they do a lot of that stuff in-house nowadays, but for simple models yes they will bring us in to help”

“Right. that must be….?”

“ugh, dont get me started. every quantum oscillator I’ve ever known has turned out to be a total fuckboy”

“Oh no”

“yep. there was this one guy— do you mind?”

“yeah, no, I don’t get jealous”

“great- there was this one guy I ended up seeing, don’t ask me how, but we’re seeing just casually but then it’s his birthday so I go over to his house to see if I can surprise him”

“Mmm”

“guess what I find.”

“you find……. tell me.”

“I find him in bed with some random double slit experiment, coked completely off his ass, whip marks all over his back”

“oh Shit! damn”

“i know, right?? and it’s like, we’re not exclusive, it’s fine, i don’t get jealous, but like-”

“Just tell me.”

“just tell me! exactly. so i know not to worry you’re spending your birthday alone or something”

“Total fuckboy”

“total fuckboy. anyway, i’m rambling already. What do you do for work?”

“First, what do you say we get some wine?”

“oh! we totally didn’t get any wine. yes, umm-”

“are you more of a red or a white girl”

“you know, I thought I was a red girl, but I actually don’t remember the last time I bought a bottle of red”

“Maybe you don’t remember because you’re a red girl and you can’t stop drinking it when you do.”

“Ha! you’re funny”

“Should we just get a Grenache?”

“you’re a red then?”

“Oh, no I meant Grenache Blanc. This one”

“Feli— how do you say that? Felli-sette? Felice-ette?”

“I think it’s Feli-sette”

“let’s do it. do we go up, or..?”

“so, you were just about to tell me allllll about what you do for work”

“I’m air resistance.”

“Air resistance? No way! I’ve always wanted to date one of you guys”

“Really?”

“yeah! Like, it’s not a goal. I didn’t write it down. But you get to do stuff with clouds and birds and stuff right?”

“yeahh, we do…”

“That’s so cool!”

“But actually I’m in High Speed now.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you’ve got the whole department, right? Air Resistance and we’re all under Fluids. But then you’ve got specialties. You’ve got guys that do birds, guys that do skydivers, and so on. I’m in High Speed which is mostly planes”

“That’s still cool! You’re among the clouds at least?”

“It’s fun getting up there, for sure. Get to see the sunset and everything. But then you spend the next nine hours facefirst into a jet doing an intercontinental and, uh, that’s not so fun”

“ooooh. Right. Well I’ve never thought about that, either.. is that our first thing in common, not knowing anything about each other’s jobs?”

“Turns out you know more about a job if you actually do it. Who knew?”

“haha! so.. can you take me up there?”

“Yeah, I could.”

“really?? they let you?”

“I mean, they can’t really stop you. They just don’t want you messing with anything big. But if you pop on the local ATC you can pretty-”

“what’s ATC?”

“sorry, Air Traffic Control. You just listen to them on the way up, make sure you’re not going to mess up some other guy’s day, and you can pretty much do your thing. No-one’s going to care if you make a goose fly a bit slower or whatever”

“I was soo right. That is really, really cool.”

“I’m glad you think so. How are you liking the wine, by the way?”

“honestly? It is really good. I’ll remember it”

“How would you describe it?”

“it would beeeee—   um……”

“Come *on* already. Pretend you’re writing the label. Very first words that come to mind. Go.”

“ok. floral. SHIT.”

“Floral?!”

“you rushed me!”

“That is the most generic description you possibly could have-”

“i KNOW, you rushed me though!”

“Are Grenaches even meant to be floral?”

“Well, actually, number one it’s a Grenache Blanc, we covered this, and number two tasting a wine shouldn’t be about your preconceptions but the Actual Experience you have on the Pal-ate, so if it tasted floral to me, there is nothing wrong with that. So nyah.”

“you still said floral, though.”

“quit it!! you rushed meee”

“maybe I’ll call you Daisy from now on”

“quit it!!!!”

“actually-”

“-if this is another tease I swear-”

“No, I’m stopping, I’m stopping. It just reminded me of a story.”

“oh! what’s the story”

“Well, before I went to High Speed I was originally in Pedestrian.”

“Like just for walkers?”

“Yeah. They don’t really think about it unless there’s a wind, but we’ve gotta do Air for every single one of them. Someone would notice eventually if we didn’t.”

“that still sounds really dull”

“It’s not so bad. I do like High Speed better, but Ped was fine and in cities you usually work on multiple people at a time-”

“ohhh, of course”

“-because the forces are still pretty light. They also have this promotion ladder thing, where if you’re good at let’s say Pedestrian you go up to Car, then that goes up to Truck, and at each stage you can also move laterally, right? Like Truck can move into Boat and it’s just a transfer form”

“mhm”

“But it’s a stupid system because the escalation ladder was originally based on force, and now with automation that’s way less of a thing. What you really want these days is flexibility, and you actually need a lot more flexibility for Ped than for Car because pedestrians have many more axes they can change direction in, right? They also all have rampant ADHD, I swear, but that’s another thing-”

“mhm”

“so if I were managing High Speed and I wanted an internal for a role, I’d much rather a superstar in Ped than anyone in— ah.. anyway...”

“no..! keep going! you’re just rambling like i was. it’s super cute, trust me.”

“Well, that was really it anyhow. But that wasn’t the story. The story is, I’m working in Ped and this human couple takes a walk through a park, right? and in Ped what you do is you follow someone till you reach the edge of your working area, then there’s a handover to another Ped guy in the next zone, and you go find someone else”

“mhm”

“So this guy and his girl go through the park, and it’s dandelion season so those things are going everywhere. I mean there are thousands, it’s romantic as shit for these guys”

“that’s really nice”

“The thing is, dandelions are so light that you don’t actually need to allocate any staff to them. You can mostly let them do whatever they want and the humans will think it’s whimsical, even though technically it’s a huge breach of physics going on”

“oh I totally just made the floral connection!! I was like where’s this going but that’s why you brought it up”

“Exactly”

“I’m with you now, go on!"

“As it turns out, the handover line is right in the middle of this park and the couple is heading towards it. I spot my guy and I signal him, and as we get ready for the exchange, I start noticing this guy is agitated. Like really agitated, he’s bouncing around and hyping himself up and stuff-”

“why?”

“I don’t know. I still don’t know. Maybe he was new, maybe he was trying to impress someone to get into Car, who knows. But anyway this dude was antsy as hell and as the couple get close to the handover line they decide to stop and make a wish together. With one of the dandelions they pick off the grass”

“they blow on them, right?”

“Yeah they do this blowing on it thing where the seeds carry their wishes or something. I’m not a hundred percent on the specifics. But some guy from Wind will come over-”

“You’re not wind?”

“Wind’s a specialisation. Humans measure that stuff a lot so they have to be a bit more precise and they work with the heating guys more closely than we do.”

“But the human’s just blowing a dandelion…?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s weird. But the logic is once you have these guys specialising in wind, you don’t wanna just have them sit around when it’s a still day. So they get trained in related stuff too and over time that becomes part of their regular job description.”

“like blowing……”

“Yeah, like— oh, you’re cheeky.”

“maybe *I* could work in Wind…”

“Send me a CV and I’ll see what I can do.”

“yes, sir.”

“..ANYway, jesus, sorry, this has been going forever”

“i’m fully invested, keep going”

“So this couple stop riiight before the handover and they start building their wish together out loud… how they want to spend the rest of their lives together as soulmates and stuff-”

“awww!”

“-but my guy on the other side is getting more and more agitated and he starts yelling at me to push them at him, hand them over already-”

“what a dick”

“total dick. he doesn’t want to wait, he’s yelling things, the guy from Wind comes over and we’re both trying to calm him down but he just goes off even louder... and riiiiight as the couple go to blow their dandelion wish together, he reaches out and just clamps down on it like you wouldn’t believe.”

“noooo”

“Like this is the amount of Air we’d use in High Speed, strong guy, and he’s using it to still the florets on a fucking dandelion”

“so what happened?”

“Well, the guy from Wind still does his job properly, blows the dandelion and all. But he’s not gonna get involved in some dick measuring contest with this rando Ped newbie, so he just uses a normal amount of air which of course does nothing.”

“and that would mean— wait, let me figure this out. You’re not Gravity…”

“We’re not Gravity. Gravity’s still on. But-”

“let me do it! but these seeds normally float anyway despite gravity, so… I don’t know, I’m guessing the seeds just stay there? It’s heavy air resistance all round, right?”

“You could.. actually totally work in Air, you’re right. They just stay there.”

“isn’t that fine?”

“Well, no, because the humans expect the seeds to go everywhere when they blow on them.”

“oh, right”

“Yeah.. so this couple tries to blow their wish for eternal romance into the breeze like ten times in a row and the flower head just does not cooperate.”

“haha!”

“I’ve got this guy going off at me, the guy from Wind kind of shrugs at me like I tried! and goes off to tell his boss, I’m fucking crying laughing inside at the whole thing even as I'm trying to fix it, and the couple try to laugh it off at first too but get increasingly upset at this wish absolutely refusing to budge. The girl makes this joke that maybe the universe is telling them to break up but it just comes out sad instead-”

“the poor girl! ohmygod that’s terrible”

“It gets worse. This handover guy eventually realises that, you know… Ped’s very relaxed but you can’t openly defy someone trying to accomplish something that’s guaranteed to work by their laws of physics. That’s a step too far. So he realises he’s gonna get in trouble for this and he lets go—but the Wind guy’s gone, remember? He’s not blowing anymore.”

“nooooo!”

“Meaning that because the seeds have already physically detached from the stem, I guess from all the jostling earlier… and because now there’s zero lift to propel them into the air but also zero air resistance to stop them falling…”

“they just fall straight down”

“They drop right to the pavement like anything else. Plop.”

“that’s so funny”

“I swear, I have never seen a human look so heartbroken. You should have seen the look on this girl’s face.”

“aw. I’m sure she was okay in the end. Did they keep walking, or..?”

“I’m not sure. Wind guy’s boss came over and told me he’d handle it from there, so I didn’t stick around to see what happened. But I’d bet the Ped guy got a big talking to.”

“i bet. that was a good one! good story”

“Thank you.”

“very welcome. just get me a job and we’ll call it even”

“ha. I’ll try”

“please do.”

“So… I’ve gotta ask at some point . . ”

“noooo, haha. I know what’s coming from the look on your face”

“What are you looking for from Union?”

“you go first”

“No way, I asked first”

“I’m a lady! You can’t ask a lady that”

“I just did. You gotta answer, that’s the rule”

“fiine. But you answer after”

“Of course.”

“wellll….  I would say that I’m *open* to something serious…”

“there’s a ‘but’, I know it”

“…buuuuttt I’m not necessarily seeking it out. Is that bad?”

“No! no, that’s perfect. I mean, me too.”

“oh thank god. I mean you’re a great guy and if something happens—”

“yeah”

“—then I’d love to see where it goes, but, you know. This is nice too”

“yeah. That’s good. I’m glad to hear you say that, actually.”

“mm?”

“I’m actually-  well, I’ve been divorced a few months now”

“oh, I’m sorry!”

“no, it’s fine, it’s fine. It was the right decision for both of us. She worked in cable and there was always so much tension, and—”

“Aw”

“Yeah. It’s for the best. That was July, so, you know, I’m the same. If something happens then-”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah.”

“well, now. you know what I’m going to ask you back”

“…I don’t think I do?”

“you totally do”

“I, uh.. nope. Hit me”

“welllll….. what are you into..?”

“Aw, shit, haha. have we really had that much already? Oh, we totally have, wow. Are you up for another—”

“You’re dodddg-iiiing”

“Of course I am! A very pretty lady at a wine bar just asked me what I’m into”

“just telll meee. I answered your thing.”

“okay, well, uh……  just to be clear, I’m not expecting you to be into this too, buut-”

“okay…”

“I kind of have a thing for inertial stuff? Is that weird?”

“Oh! Like, um… big girls?”

“yeah.. yeah”

“Okay.…. that is definitely good to know”

“I shouldn’t have said it, it’s really-”

“no! no this is great. I’m all about communication. I’m just wondering, like… am I…. your size? Does that make sense?”

“What? Sarah you are perfect”

“whaaaaat? no, you’re being nice”

“You are perfect, I’m telling you. I mean I probably shouldn’t say this either but do you know what my first thought was when I saw you outside the bar?”

“what?”

“I thought damn. I wonder what she can do with that ginormous k coefficient.”

“you did not!! You are a dirty boy”

“I know, I know. I couldn’t help it. It was the first thing I saw, and you were in that dress, and-”

“you still want to find out?”

“—what, you serious?”

“dead serious. let’s get out of here”

“okay. okay let’s get out of here. You, uh— whereabouts are you coming from?”

“my place is 5 femtominutes away. We could go there?”

“okay, let’s go”

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

This is all terrific advice. Pacing is incredibly impactful stuff. And it resonates with people because simply varying the length of your sentences is an immediately accessible method of breathing fresh air into your prose.

However, using a repetitive sentence length is just one of many ways to dull your writing. Indeed, most writing is dull! Not because the author is dull but because sentences and paragraphs have a lot of things going on all at once and while we are focusing on varying one thing (“I already used ‘beautiful’, so I had better use a synonym now instead...”) it is very easy to overlook that our prose is static in some other way that has slipped our attention.

So here are a few more clever ways to use — or avoid! — repetition in your prose.

Let’s start with phonetic repetition. Consider the following paragraph:

This sentence is short and sweet. Several words start with ‘s’. Notice also the subtle ‘s’ sounds and those inside the words. I use plurals. I use ‘use’. I use ‘notice’, not ‘look at’. Say all this aloud and see how ‘sss’—the pleasant sound of a warm shower or leaves rustling in the wind—slides easily from your lips. Perhaps our protagonist is outdoors on the sidewalk on a sunny day. This way, as our protagonist enters the skyscraper, we can very quickly make it angular and pointy. A bit brutal, even. The air con cranked too high for comfort. We make a very cold, corporate environment for him not only by what we put in that environment but in conjunction cutting out the easy, pleasant roundedness of the ‘s’-based syllables we saw outdoors in favour of a much bleaker ‘k’ phonetic.

Of course, abusing the same phonetic will make your story sound like a euphuism (no, not euphemism) or tongue twister — and it’s hard to take those seriously! In moderation, though, painting your environments with a distinct phonetic palette can be a clever supporting element to the atmosphere you are going for, especially while forming a first impression.

Next let’s think about colour repetition. Here’s a more subtle example this time. Try to catch what’s going on:

The elevator door opens. A man in a grey suit sizes him up and plainly doesn’t like what he sees—disdain written in the pallid corners of his mouth that lingers even as he looks away. Our protagonist immediately feels underdressed. He has been a fool. What was he thinking, coming to a place like this in jeans? A battered shirt, no holes yet but close, and sneakers that squeak and decompress loudly on the marble floor as he gets into the lift? Fuck. How embarrassing. Well, nothing for it now. He hits seventeen, not once but twice, so tentative the first time the button fails to stick. Steel doors close hard—*hard*...? what kind of elevator door closes that fast? jesus—and reflect a zit, no, a tenth goddamn planet, red bang smack bang on his forehead yet somehow missed in his morning prep.

Now, it’s no surprise that our protagonist is walking into a very grey environment. Most skyscrapers are grey! But some make more of an effort than others to be warm and inviting, or fresh and hip, and a reader that works in such a skyscraper might not intuit the same imagery as the author.

So notice how the paragraph above cleverly hammers home a sense of grey sterility by what it chooses to highlight. The man is wearing a grey suit. His mouth is pallid. The floor is marble. And the steel doors are polished and clean enough to not only reflect our protagonist, but to do so in vibrant colour. All of these things are relentlessly grey — even though the word ‘grey’ itself is only mentioned once!

This serves to make the reveal of our protagonist’s pimple all the more impactful. This isn’t just any bright red zit. It is a bright red zit in a desaturated sea of cleanliness and proper presentation, bound to attract anyone’s attention.

Finally, let’s talk about thematic repetition. Imitating events from earlier in your story can be a clever way to create powerful motifs that stick with your reader and add depth — see if you can identify any below!

He is considering popping it, ducking off to a bathroom and blasting the thing all over some undeserving mirror, when the doors open again. A granite plaque with MACMILLAN—font Trajan, kerning perfect—in gold greets him at eye level and offers a leftfacing triangle as advice. Grey suit goes that way. No sign of a restroom. He follows grey suit left.

The receptionist is almost entirely hidden by her desk, a function of her own short stature and white plastic panels clearly installed with a taller desk chair in mind. Only a dark bun and a sliver of forehead poke over the top. Probably she is looking at a monitor. He decides to cough a bit to get her attention, then decides against it—just say hello, moron!—but the cough is already coming out and his trying to stop it only allows its pressure to build a moment longer before it escapes as this hacking, grating thing that even he thinks means he’s dying. The sliver of forehead tilts back and two slate eyes quite clearly expect a better greeting than that.

“Hello. I’m here to see Mr. Lloyd.”

She is looking at his zit.

“About my book.”

She is still looking at his zit, processing. Most likely deciding whether or not to alert some astronomical authority, he guesses, but eventually she deigns, with a perfect Swedish accent, mind you, to shuttle him along.

“On your left.”

There is a corridor to his left that he finds to hold eight cubicles, four on either side, and it occurs to him that “on your left” was as near to useless information as she possibly could have given. (Where else could he have gone?) But if he retreats to ask again he’ll seem an idiot. So he zigzags up the corridor, reading the door signage, sneakers trumpeting his passage all the way until at last MR. LLOYD adorns the seventh door—on the right of the hallway, he thinks resentfully—so he raps the door and waits.

Grey suit opens the door and looks at his zit. Oh god.

“Mr. Lloyd. I’m here to see you, about my book.”

Better to rush through it. Take attention off it fast. Grey suit—Lloyd, he self-corrects—walks back to his chair and sits down. His chair is black leather and plush, new. The chair opposing him is chalkboard green and old. Shit, it looks stackable, even. He feels like a kid.

He sits down while Lloyd rifles through a stack of binders, wincing as the door—which he’d forgotten quite completely, spellbound by the Ikea™ Power Differential at play—pointedly slams shut. Desperate for any sign of hope, he convinces himself that the binders alone are a good omen. Of *course* Macmillan still print the manuscripts they receive. Old school. Neat. He’s in the hands of a pro now, which makes him feel better about the zit. A pro wouldn’t hold it against him. Would they?

Lloyd finds the binder he is looking for and places it on the desk. There it is. A real thing. A real manuscript on a real desk, most likely reformatted to Times New Roman and double-spaced, the way pros do it, he’s sure, with red pen all over it too where there are things to fix—but he’ll fix them alright, it’s no worry, really. What’s important is the message inside. The message his whole life has been building up to.

Lloyd opens the binder and flicks to the first page.

Times New Roman. Double-spaced. The way pros do it.

No red pen.

Lloyd looks at him. Then his zit. Then him again.

. . .

“It’s just not very good.”

Well, I mean. What do you say to that?

He wants to ask Lloyd if he noticed all the tricks he used. The motifs, the metaphor—the carefully calibrated melody of it all. Had it really all been for nothing...? Look, he hadn't assumed stardom was upon him. He knows he’s no Pynchon, no Dostoevsky. He’s no Beckett, no-one is. But he was at least clever, wasn’t he? If something’s wrong, he’ll fix it. Maybe he got carried away at times, that he’d understand, but the potential is surely there, something publishable is there—it has to be. Look at the way he... you know, the arcs and everything… he had been clever, damn it! Something must have gotten mixed up. Mistaken. No red pen. What the hell man, no red pen? You read it, didn’t you? Didn’t you see the way I was clever?

But he doesn’t say any of that.

All he says is

“Okay.”

Lloyd looks at him. Closes the binder. And that’s that.

    He chooses Subway for lunch. Needs to lose some weight. Eat fresh. The bread’s not that bad—not compared to anything nearby. And a vegetable’s a vegetable. They’re busy today. He’s one foot indoors and already in the queue. Happy to wait. Not long, and.. a footlong, please. Rye, please. Pepperoni and mozzarella, please, toasted. A little of everything. The Sandwich Artist is very good, despite the rush. She cuts through the sub all the way—some don’t—and wraps the paper up tight. She rings it up. His card has barely touched the terminal before she's gone again, toaster-bound, serving another customer. She didn’t even give him time to say thank you.

    He catches the metro home. He used to cycle. Not anymore. Needs to lose some weight. He’s working too much and exercise was the first to go. Too much today as well. All hands overtime—client changed the scope. Lucille had a ballgame. Quarterfinals. Or was it semifinals. He would have liked to make it. Nothing he could do. His wife usually sends him photos of the game. Not this time. Battery dead, perhaps. He thinks about texting anyway. Asking her to warm something up. He’s staring at his phone and doesn’t realise it’s his stop until another passenger—he sees her often—taps his shoulder as she gets out herself. Startled, he grabs his briefcase and leaps off. Looks for her. No luck. She didn’t even give him time to say thank you.

    He gets home at nine. Keys the lock, heads inside. Something’s wrong. Things are gone. Not furniture. Photos. Books. A light is on in the bedroom, its door closed. He calls out and the door opens. His wife is there. But she turns away at once. Keeps packing a box—sweeping clothes into it, hangers and all. Where’s Lucille, he says. In the car. Where are you going. I don’t know. Her face is wet, but her hair is perfect. The hair he’d always loved. That he’d swept his fingers through all these years—but when was the last time? He can’t remember. She wrangles up the box and shoulders past him. Struggles with the door. Do you need help, he says. No reply. She elbows the handle and is all a sudden free, free!, a dove uncaged at last. She is beautiful. And she is gone. She didn’t even give him time to say thank you.

I1 am2 not3 who4 you5 think6 I7 am.8

Naturally, any “I” that may write such a sentence is not the same person that you will perceive upon meeting the body thought to contain this “I”. No self is perfectly consistent over time, and arguably a multiplicity of selves are constantly waxing and waning in dormancy inside us at the behest of external stimuli. It is possible (indeed probable) that multiple are active at any given moment. Moreover, even were “I” to possess a singular, coherent, and dominant self,ᵃ it is obvious to any rational human that the apparent man who converses with others is radically distinct from the man who scribes alone by candlelight, the latter of which I am doing now. Even were you to meet me—and if you have had such fortune—you would not perceive the same self that writes these words. “I” write, then, as a self fundamentally and tautologically unknown to you.ᵇ For our purposes, you should interpret “I” as “a self that occupies the same bodily structure as the self I perceive the author to have, and which while not identical, shares sufficient memory and properties of being that I may safely conflate the two for practical purposes that do not require a full treatment of the scatteredness of the human mind”. Certainly this definition dramatically oversimplifies matters, but do not begrudge me this convenience—I make it only in service of a concise and direct treatment of the remainder of the phrase above. For a somewhat more rigorous definition of “I”, albeit still necessarily compact due to publishing constraints, kindly refer to pages 1017-1302 of my previous volume.

My previous volume—which I shall assume the reader is quite in command of—thoroughly dispensed with the absurdity of Descartes’ dubito, of which absurdity his “am” represents the highest zenith. I shall not repeat the argument at length here. Suffice to say that my colleague Pierreᶜ was altogether far too gracious on this travesty of reason, for not only does it presuppose the “I” and that one may know definitively that “I” thinks, but this very presupposition renders the conclusion entirely meaningless and circular. If “I” (which is) thinks, one already concludes that the “I” is and need not say more. I invariably amaze my students at the Collège Royalᵈ by demonstrating that not only do the three words of the dubito contain no useful insight of any kind, but despite this calamity, Descartes nevertheless manages to use thrice the words necessary to express even this utter tripe! He would have done as well with simply dubito, or better still, ego—though I suspect such a reduction of the phrase to its essentials in this way would have exposed the intellectual farce therein too greatly for it to ever grace the page. If the reader is still in any doubt as to the veracity of the dubito—or worse, his subsequent necromancy of his stillborn cogito, for thrice useless words were apparently still not enough for the thought-devil René—then once more I invite the reader to consult my first volume.ᵉ For now, let us proceed with the indisputable truth that “I” presupposes the “am” of its own object, and therefore in this way “am” here pertains not to existence nor operates at all on the “I” but entirely on the subsequent negatio of the “not”, serving wholly as a linking verb without which phrases like “I not he” and “I am not he” would be mistaken for one another. We will return to the operation of the “not” shortly.ᶠ

We now return to the operation of the “not”. It is a common error among amateurs and Germans to consider this “not” (or more properly, as I have proven, the “am not” union) wholly a negatio in essence. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the establishment of a negatio in a premise—or the establishment of its counterpart aequalis, for that matter—also constitutes an epistemological claim.ᵍ For “I” to be “not” anything, one posits that one sufficiently comprehends both the “I” and what it is “not” to satisfactorily discern between the two. Crucially, this epistemological claim also elevates the premise as a whole beyond a mere question of existence. For if the mere use of “I” implies its existence,ʰ then so too must our statement of something that it is not—that is, that we reference something that it is not implies that such a thing exists. Our statement, therefore, is neither that “I” is not non-existence, nor that it is not something else about which we only know that it exists—for if all we knew about “I” and this other entity was that they both exist, we would not be able to discern them. In this way, the establishment of the negatio, in contrast to the negative quality of the negatio itself, positively implies both the existence and knowledge of some quality (or its absence) belonging (or not belonging) to both the “I” and the other entity such that we may tell them apart.ⁱ

At last—the punctum saliens, la pièce de résistance of our entire operation! We journey now from the epistemologicalʲ to the metaphysical in our consideration of the “who”. For if we understand the sentence to have been written by the “I”, then this “I”—in union with the “am not” negatio—speculates not just the existence of the “who” (as conception)ᵏ and sufficient knowledge of it to make a claim, but also that the properties of the “I” and the “who” are not operated on by some other metaphysical property that renders them identical.ˡ Others at the Collège Royalᵐ have postulated, for instance, that an “I” is but matter’s aggregate conception of itself, and by this view if all was known about the “who” was that it is likewise a conception, then the “I” could not be sure that it was not also the “who”. While obviously incorrect, my students often nevertheless find this line of reasoning to illuminate—much as a housefire illuminates—an entrance to the grander metaphysical labyrinth at play. I retain it in my lectures and publications for this reason. For now, we may not discern the exact nature of the metaphysical properties that the “I” attributes to the “who”, for in doing so in the context of a claim that simultaneously disputes the aequalitas of these entities, the “I” also assigns metaphysical properties to itself—posing an irreconcilable double-variable quandary that may not be resolved without additional verbiage.ⁿ I will shortly release a supplementary volume elucidating the implications of similar phrases (most curiously of all, “I am going to think”) and in the Appendix I shall provide a short outline of how said implications would modify the “I” and “who” we consider now. I expect that the Collège Royal, after the success of this volume, will promptly request that I expedite such a focal tome—in which case, I urge the reader, if he feels he holds tight any pending contributions to the metaphysics of “who”, to either make them forthwith and profit thusly—lest I sweep his livelihood aside in but a year’s time with my subsequent publication—or forever still his pen on the matter.

We need not discuss the assertion by the “I” of the existence of the “you”, for any diligent reader may prove this to their own satisfaction given the truths established by footnotes 2, 4, b, g, j, and k. What is of supremely more interest is the choice by “I” to construct the “who” via an entity engaged in a present tense verb (the “who” that “you think”) as opposed to a past tense verb (the “who” that “you have thought”) or one without an attached entity at all (“that was thought”). Only a moron of scientific significanceᵒ could interpret the present tense as absolutely literal—that is, that the “I” believes that the “you” is currently conceiving the “who” at the very moment the sentence is written. Nevertheless, the choice to insert “you” here as a thinker of thoughts raises two questions: one metaphysical, and one practical. The metaphysical question relates to the “I” and its conception of the “who”. Does the “I” believe that the “who” must be constructed by an entity (“you”) in order to possess the elements being contrasted via the negatio (“not”)?ᵖ Or does the “I” believe that the “who”, rather, is the recursive union of the “who” and the “you” that thinks it? The practical question is of markedly less interest—perhaps the “I” is an uneducated man or a Swede, and does not appreciate the value of the rigor that could be added by amending his claim to “I am not the who of the thoughts in your head”.

To “think” is to construct or experience a “thought”.ᵒ̴

Refer to footnote 1.

8

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The juxtaposition and interplay between the “I am” unions that initiate and conclude the sentence is of extraordinary consequence to the remainder of our investigation of this subject. It will be immediately evident to all that the latter “I am” is more definitively a conception than the former (given that it is something being thought by “you”), and that what it means for “you” to ascribe being to “I” via “am” is not synonymous with the actual being experienced and asserted by “I”. However, the cascade of logical deductions we may make from the coexistence of these two premises is at once exquisite and treacherous—a pandorae arca that promises tremendous insight into the very nature of reality, and more importantly still, the quintessence of “am” . . . if only one can avoid the myriad and quite fatal traps laid by Logic herself across its lid! Alas, having substantially truncated the planned contents of this volume in my lifelong pursuit of brevity, I now expect to publish it several days before the final examination of my current students will take place—a final examination which will consist entirely of the words “I am” duplicated on forty-five sheets of otherwise fresh paper, around which they must, after deducing the intended nature of the task, essay forth on the true nature of these two words. As no suitable replacement examination could possibly be developed in time—being less than a season away from the date—I am therefore unable to provide any further explanation of “am”, “I am”, or indeed anything else in this volume lest I imperil the academic integrity of this process.ʳ⸴ˢ

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⁣   
𝐚) A tragically ignorant hypothesis that has nevertheless recently arisen in certain, shall we say, Discours—to mystifyingly positive reception.

𝐛) Any reader of mediocre talent ought to observe at once that the same caveat, naturally, applies to “my” knowledge of “myself”. While true, we will return to this epistemological claim shortly in footnote 2. A reader of more remarkable perceptive abilities will observe that, by the relational property, any claim that the reader cannot under any circumstances know my mind also supposes that I cannot comprehend what conception the reader has of my mind. It is perhaps even the case, therefore, that the epistemological claim I will attribute to the establishment of the negatio “not” shortly in footnote 3 has, in fact, already been presupposed merely by the “I”! The halfwit René Descartes has attained celebrity for nothing more than a banal extrapolation of the ego,ᵝ yet one that he earnestly—insofar as a charlatan may be capable of earnestness—believes unassailable. I, for whom humility is supreme virtue, commit no such sin of hubris. It may be, and indeed as I believe weᵞ shall discover through further study, that the entirety of this claim, in toto, is likewise reducible to the ego alone.

𝐜) The Disquisitio Metaphysica, while now unfortunately made redundant by the sum of my previous volume and the volume gracing your hands at this very moment, remains of some historical importance to our piercing inquiry of the ego, and would be an excellent introductory text to the subject for a precocious boy of twelve. My colleague Pierre will be happy to provide a free copy to any of my readers, I am certain, given the extravagant funding that he has recently received—and which, therefore, I did not—from the Collège Royal at which we—as I remind him often—serve.

𝐝) I have amazed, at minimum and in chronological order of such amazement, the following of my studentsᵟ with such a demonstration: Étienne du Montreuil, Jacques de Affamé, Claude Bouchard, Louis-Henri Beaumont, Guillaume d’Aubigné, Matthäus Wackelkopf, François Valfort, Henriette de La Faye, Tommaso Bellavicini, Jean-Baptiste Sourdière, Théophile d'Argentmure, Castel de Roqueblague.

𝐞) Due to insufficient dissemination of the release of my first volume—against all policy and good sense—several copies remain available for acquisition at the Collège Royal libraries. This state of affairs, obviously, will not remain for any longer than a week after publication of the volume you now hold. If such a period has not yet lapsed, I suggest one makes haste immediately to attain a copy.

𝐟) In footnote 3.

𝐠) Observe that it is the establishment of the negatio that introduces the epistemological claim, not the negatio itself. This nuance frequently takes students the entire duration of their studies to comprehend at even a surface level. Pending further publications, I invite the reader to muse upon this curiosity for several dinners before proceeding further. I shall unravel this mystery once and for all in a future volume.

𝐡) As demonstrated in footnote 1, and despite the ludicrous ramblings of one René Descartes—who, for all his pomposity that I have worked to expose, I understand now calls home a bugridden tavern in Egmond-Binnen. Suffice to say that the quality of one’s thought will eventually reflect itself in the quality of one’s abode. (You may quote this freely.ᵋ)

𝐢) The reader will note with great pleasure that even a simple “not”, used masterfully, makes more sophisticated claims about the ego than the entirety of the dubito and cogito combined.

𝐣) A former student—who, as will be shortly evident, did not complete my program—once asserted that by the very logic of footnote 1 as applied to the existence of the “I”, the “who” also constitutes an epistemological claim of its own existence. This is nonsense. Where “I” stands alone as an entity asserted in its own right, “who” is introduced here as the summation of the subsequent “you think I am”. That is, “who” is to be what “you” understand of the “I”. If what you understand of the “I” is that it does not exist,ᶿ then “who” would quite simply be nothing more than a nullus, and the negatio of the nullus hence becomes the “I”  asserting its existence, rather than the “who” asserting its own. One would think that this revelation alone would prove sufficient to quell all doubt. I myself, despite my possession of considerable mental power and resilience, was laid flat in bed for weeks by its force. And yet, reader, not only did this student remain standing—radiant Truth having had no effect on them—but they found the nerve to wonder if my earlier argumentᶺ that our contrasting of the “I” to the “who” supposes the existence of both might also imply that “you” cannot conceive a “who” as nullus! I naturally had no choice but to remove them from my course at once for this apostasy. My colleague Pierre has since taken this student under his own tutelage, which I consider an admirable but misguided display of charity.

𝐤) A quite separate matter to the error made by my former student in footnote j. The metaphysical “who” does not assert itself, nor does “you think I am” necessarily assert that the “who” is anything other than a nullus. But the manner in which the “I” asserts the existence of the “who” by referencing it is a thornier quandary to adjudicate. One may at first believe that as “you” may think that “I” does not exist, in such case “you” would hold that the “who” is indeed a nullus, and the “I” is merely to disagree. However, for “I” to claim that “you” conceives of a nullus is also to potentially modify the “who” into no longer the nullus itself, but the conception of the nullus that the “you” holds—a conception that necessarily exists, but in different form. I once delivered a public lecture on this very subject at the once-prestigious Université d’Avignon, referring colloquially to it as the “you-who dilemma”. However, I no longer care to discuss the matter, after a gaggle of cretinous d’Avignon students—but I repeat myself—maliciously and vociferously reinterpreted the dilemma as a reference to the perplexing refusal of several former pupils to respond to my greetings in public.

𝐥) Which would refute the negatio. One might wonder if the “I” and “who” are necessarily dissimilar, for how could an “I” be identical to a mere conception of an “I”? One might also drink poison or lick rocks. Such is the calibre of reasoning at hand.

𝐦) Among them, regrettably, my colleague Pierre.

𝐧) I have thus set upon a mathematical approach to this problem instead (for, by grace, I seem as competent a mathematician as philosopher) and believe myself imminently upon a solution. Unfortunately, for reasons of privacy and propriety, I kept my notes on the matter in the back of a janitorial closet at the Collège Royal mathematics department, and arrived one evening to find the closet newly locked. Despite my two decades of professorial servitude to the Collège Royal and renown throughout its halls, my inquiries to administrators, janitorial staff, and fellow mathematicians of note have as of yet been unable to remedy this egregious incident. However, I have recently acquired a prybar, and by the time you, dear reader, peruse these words, I expect that I shall possess and resume this vital work once more.

𝐨) I am thinking of one such man in particular.

𝐩) The interaction of the “you” and “not” was similarly elaborated upon at length in my lecture mentioned in footnote k, where I similarly invoked the shorthand “the you-not dilemma”. I was later informed by a colleague who transferred from the Université d’Avignon to the Collège Royal (to his eternal credit) that several studentsᵠ subsequently found great humour in postering caricatures of my visage around the campus with the mocking caption “THE YOU-NOT EUNUCH”. Although it is certain that the Université will have apprehended and expelled these students for their treatment of a visionary such as myself, I would appreciate if any readers from the Université d’Avignon would forward me the family addresses of said villains, so that I might properly ensure that the effects of their harassment are known to their kin.

𝐪) A “thought” is something that one may “think”.⁶

𝐫) Afore some curmudgeon write to quarrel on this omission, I shall add that due to my unforeseen absence through most of the semester—a dab of pleurisy, nothing to worry over, meae admiratrices—I had no choice but to set the final examination as the entirety of their grade. Would you, reader, truly endanger the sanctity of the Collège Royal given these stakes? Allow a precocious student to slip through the sacred net of learning, the process by which our faculty weeds out charlatans and fools, merely by gaining access to a vaunted first edition of this volume and regurgitating its faultless logic to attain full marks? This is an unacceptable risk, and I permit it not. I have not graduated three students—soon to be five—from my teachings at the Collège Royal through any but the utmost care for their education.

𝐬) In service of this noble aim, the remainder of this volumeᵡ shall feature only assertions of what I—and, therefore, humanity—find absolutely certain to be true. I shall provide my reasoning in a later publication—if indeed our progress as a society, building upon these truths to follow, has not reached such dizzying pace as to render my handwriting illegible through vertigo. Til then, rest assured that every premise, nay, every glyph in this volume has been meticulously verified by an objective and impartial editor: myself. Should the reader wish to study, and no doubt emulate, the methodology of this peer-reviewᵚ process—for I am truly my only peer—kindly refer to pages 2712-4055 of my previous volume.
   

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β I refer primarily to the public’s bewildering and uncritical reception of La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle—a patently rushed work, no doubt intended to mend the resounding blow my previous volume dealt to his reputation, but which has only made matters worse for him. If the Meditationes defied reason, La recherche spits at it. As a courtesy, I have personally written to René in advance of this volume to advise of its intended publication date and the likely effect it will have upon his welcome in de Nederlanden. As of my writing, I have received no reply.* Nevertheless, I expect that he shall shortly flee the country—doubtless to accommodation of even greater ill-repute.

γ I.

δ For thoroughness, I also include pupils who, sadly, whether due to inherited defect or a habitual refusal to see reason, failed to complete their tuition under my wing.

ε So long as one properly attributes the title, volume, page, and esteemed author from whence one received this rhetorical pearl and a short summation of its surrounding context, id est, the name and recent residences of the scoundrel René Descartes. I do not consider a supplementary recitation of common inn vermin to be mandatory, but certainly highly desirable.⁺

θ An absurd and self-contradictory view, per the penetrating logic of footnotes 1 and 3. Albeit, therefore, one that a certain Noorderkwartier taverndweller could likely sustain without any apparent embarrassment.

𝚲 I had managed to deliver the arguments made in footnote 3 in the very same lecture (for, by grace, I seem as competent an educator as philosopher), despite the constraints of but a five hour room allocation that the Collège Royal inexplicably declines to extend further.

φ Presumably the very same d’Avignon cretins—but I repeat myself again—responsible for the shameful behaviour noted in footnote k.

ꭓ I do not here include the remainder of this exordium, of which we have only just begun to partake.

ω Not to be confused with a Pierre-review process, which, alas, has fallen out of favour between my colleague and I in recent months—myself, now preoccupied with the very frontiers of knowledge and requiring a higher standard of proofreading, and Pierre, now preoccupied with wine and extravagant meals.ꜝꜝ
   

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* Dubito quin fortitudinem habeat. Ha!

† Though, come to think of it, one would have already begun.

‼ Pierre has begun to suffer from a lung complaint, though he hides it from his students. I often tell him: Pierre, you must not eat so much. You are of ill-health. You mustn’t stress your body this way. Such damages, once accrued, are by no means simple to treat. At this rate—this I tell him also—you will likely be forced out of teaching entirely and leave the Collège Royale forever, perhaps regaining your strength elsewhere in France for some years before returning to Paris, outwardly rejuvenated, feeling strong, but inside unwell as ever, the lung complaint soon to return and worsen in the winters, terribly so, such that you will be bled by doctors  in the home of some French patron and die a death before your time, the full extent of your works only to be published posthumously so you shall never see them bloom. Alas—were I as skilled a physician as I am philosopher, perhaps then I could make my colleague Pierre see reason. As matters stand, he has not taken kindly to my advice.
   

The other view is that killers are really normal, maybe even more normal than normal, which is scary because then you dont know if theyre around. Obviously theres a difference but you wouldnt even call them a psycho, they dont hate or lust for flesh or so on, they just kind of killed one day in a fit of anger and then went back to being a regular joe. There are killers like that too.

But from what I gather most killers are in between. Which is what you would expect but theres so much mystique around killing that people think it cant be that simple. Theyre like you in a lot of ways, definitely a bit angrier or weirder but also not so angry and weird youd think oh man that kids going to shoot up a school for sure. Youd probably just think of them as a bad person who gets in shouting matches a lot and has a bit of road rage. Thats the sort of person that kills, most of the time.

And you know its confusing to me why this is so confusing to you because to me it seems quite obvious. Bad people do bad things ecktsetera. But people like you are like sorting people, what’s it, ODC people who need everything organised. So from where Im standing its like if you lot cant point to something that makes a killer special then you gotta deal with maybe theyre not special at all and it coulda been you, which makes you all very uncomfortable.

I mean how do you know youre not that guy? You been angry before, look at you. Youre just like anyone else. Theres been plentya time in traffic or work or a breakup where youve gotten real mad and if other people have gotten from that real mad place to killing, no tumor no bipolar whatever just normal thinkin, then why couldnt you?

See I figure if the thought of killin occurred to you and you turned it down, youre not really any wiser as to why others couldnt turn it down in the same circumstance and maybe itll still get you eventually. On the other hand if you didnt get the thought at all then howre you meant to know youd resist it if one day it comes knocking? You cant. You just got to wait and see what happens.

I watch a couple documenaries on before I got catched, on guys like me, and youre all so determined to make a big story its cute. Like you gotta know what his mom was like and his school and was he touched and yah yah ya. And that lets you go oh well thank god I grew up in a good home and things are stable so its not gonna happen to me. Killing, I mean. You think you aint gonna kill or your environment and genes woulda already made you.

But documenaries only get made for the guys who got good stories for tv. You dont see the guys for who its like, someones trolley hit his in the checkout and he pushed the guy and got pushed back and all uva sudden his guns out and the guys dead. Because what do you do with that? Guys got issues but he wasnt shooting up schools everyday, he just went psycho in the walmart for ten seconds tops because his brain was sayin self defense is okay, but really it wasnt so he goes to jail.

Now you been perfect so far, mister. You gotta good job, lookin out for people like me in case we getcha. But see, I dont wanna get ya. Uh-uh. You done nothing wrong by me and niney nine point nine nine of the time I dont wanna get noone. Reason Im here is because niney nine still means sometimes someones gonna get hurt and I made sure it wasnt me.

And you know what? It was realll normal. Mmhm. Wasnt some jeckel shit where I came a different guy or what have you. It was same old me, same exact anger I always get and you always get, cept this time my noggin said kill and I guess I just followed through before it had a chance to look back. Im telling you this because its important that you know. That youre not off the hook just because your lifes going ok. Sfar as I know, sorry if it isnt. But either way Im saying theres some path through your brain, doesnt have to be a large one but some zip zap of electricity that would put the thought of killin into your brain and make you do it. And all you can do is wait and see if its gonna happen. Like I been saying.

You know I wonder bout the guy whos gonna do it tomorrow. What hes like. Why he got into it and yeah. You think the guys a weirdo? Ahh, you do, you cheeky bugger! I saw your eyes just then. You think hes one of those disorder guys that masks it real well but hes a psycho deep down. I guess youd have to be, to do it for a living like he does. Strap em in the chair knowin youre about to kill em. See thats weird even for a guy like me, which probably means weve got more in common than you two do, hey? Somethin for you to think about.

Ill look him in the eye for you. As he puts the sponge on my head or whatever, Ill look him in the eye and figure out what type of killer he is for you. And Ill tell you when I next see you.

You been a good buddy, man. Shame we couldnt hang more. Dont kill anyone, will ya?

    “You’re a skeptic now?”
    “Hardly. Skeptics place their faith in doubt. Very suspicious.”
    “A nihilist, then.”
    “Don’t see the point.”
    “Postmodern?”
    “Didn’t happen.”
    “Didn’t happen?”
    “Didn’t happen.”
    “Christ, insufferable is what you are. What do you mean it didn’t happen?”
    “We never got past modernism. Not really.”
    “You’re a modernist.”
    “Too old.”
    “Neoclassicist?”
    “Too young.”
    “You’re fifty.”
    “Too young.”
    “Argh. Will you just tell me what you believe already?”
    “I believe this gentleman is here to take our order.”
    “Yes, sir. What can I get for you today?”
    “I’d like a cappuccino.”
    “Very good, and for you, sir?”
    “So you do like things.”
    “Everybody likes things.”
    “But you like things. Why do you want a cappuccino?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know?”
    “—are you having anything today, sir?”
    “He’ll have a piccolo.”
    “No, I won’t.”
    “Yes, he will. Watch.”
    “Fine, I’ll have a piccolo. Thank you.”
    “A cappuccino and a piccolo, right away.”
    “...”
    “...”
    “He looked a bit like James.”
    “Don’t look so smug. Why did you want a cappuccino?”
    “I told you I don’t know.”
    “You don’t like the taste?”
    “I do like the taste.”
    “Then that’s why you want a cappuccino.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “What do you mean you don’t think so?”
    “I think it’s incidental.”
    “The taste?”
    “That’s right.”
    “You’re telling me that you have no idea why you just ordered a cappuccino, knowing full well that in five minutes you will very likely enjoy the taste of it.”
    “Not at all. Look how busy they are. We’ll be waiting ten, at least.”
    “You know what I meant.”
    “Do I?”
    “I know you do.”
    “Alright, I do. I still think it’s incidental.”
    “Then you’re— there’s a word for this. Not hedonism...”
    “Aleatoric. You’re thinking of Boulez.”
    “Yes! You know it. Aleatoric, that’s what you are.”
    “I'm lucky that I'm not. I’m fifty, remember? My heart couldn’t handle it.”
    “A heart attack will be the least of your worries if you won’t just tell me what the hell you are these days. I haven’t seen you in years and this is the way you behave?”
    “You really want to know, then. What I am.”
    “I do.”
    “Really, really?”
    “Yes, for chrissakes.”
    “...”
    “...”
    “I’m well, Michael. How are you?”
    “...”
    “...”
    “You’re a bastard.”
    “Always was.”
    “...”
    “...”
    “I’m well, too. How are the kids?”

    Just a little white noise. That’s all he needed. Just a little white noise to blanket the auditory highs—motorcycles, ambulances, joggers and the like—and uplift the eerie lows. The lows are worse, for him. His thoughts need to bounce off something, or be soaked up, or he would feel very alone. Or was it that in silence he thought more, to ward it off or illuminate it, and in the breaks between his thoughts the silence won and dark came in and he would feel very alone. Either way. The lows were worse.
    Just a little white noise was all he needed so he put on a white noise generator and thought a second in it and itched very badly so he turned it off. A thought itch. Too constant, that’s what he thought. TV screen static. Pressurised. Even worse, so he turns it off and looks again. White noise, pink noise, brown noise. Try the brown, and... heavy. Heavy heavy heavy. The whole weight of the ocean crushing him in, a cargo ship breaking water with its heavy bow, pointed right at him, unstoppable, all mechanical and heavy, he can feel his heart stopping so he turns it off and breathes. Breathes. Breathe.. Alright. Pink noise, let’s try the pink noise and the pink is the worst of both worlds so he turns it off and breathes. He doesn’t itch. Just for a moment. Relief. His ears slowly attune back to the world—the passing riff of a sedan. Can tell it turned by the volume—now it's off again, now gone. Silence... the sting of thought comes back.
    He puts on rain. A loop. He puts it on very soft and he couldn’t tell you but it’s the white noise he needed while the white noise wasn’t. Very soft. He works awhile. The loop stutters. The transition between tracks. He increases the crossfade. Still no good. Finds another loop. It says continuous. Very soft, very soft. Eyes on the track timer.  two fifty eight . . two fifty nine . . three . . zero . . oh one . . oh two , no break, continuous. Very good. Keep it soft. He works awhile.

    Four Thursdays pass. He feels looser. He doesn’t slouch as much in his chair. Has been productive, actually. A small habit bundle comprised of tea, menthols, and the rain loop at volume 14 has set in. Always even numbers, with everything, and 14 is the right number. He’s comfortable, and he works awhile.
    Then—the sting of thought. Echolocating and finding nothing. A low. The lows were worse for him. The lows are back.
    He checks the rain loop. Still at 14. The right number. Nothing to worry about. So he works. But not awhile. The low remains. The low remains and is something to worry about. It is at 8, by his estimate. A loud silence. And climbing. The low is climbing. How long has it been climbing? The thought stops and the silence is there at eight. Eight . . eight . . . . eight point one. The low daggers at him, reaches up with its dark wet hand and nicks him from below. Enemy. Enemy enemy enemy he reaches out and puts the rain at 20 and waits.
    Nothing. The right kind of nothing. A rain nothing, distinguishable now as a porch rain or a forest rain, some earthy frequency there, a dampening for the low. 20. The right number. He works awhile.

    Two Thursdays pass. He feels alright. He is out of menthols. He works awhile.
    There is a sting of thought. A low. But this time he doesn’t think about it. He puts the rain up right away. Rain at 32. The new number, and the right one.
    He can make out more about the rain at 32. It is a porch rain, as he thought. He knows this before he knows how he knows, but he listens a little, and figures it out. Raindrops are landing at different heights, and on wood. The heights he can tell by the volume. The wood he can tell by a moderate smack—dampened less than on grass, more than on metal. Altogether, a porch and railing. A porch and railing at 32. He feels alright and he works awhile.

    No Thursdays pass. It is Sunday. He feels very badly and is out of tea and menthols. He does not work awhile but wishes he would so he sits at his desk and puts the rain at 32. Things are very loud, his thoughts are loud, but the rain is at 32 which is the right number so he sits and waits for a working mood to creep up on him, but instead of a working mood he finds only thoughts, his thoughts, and then thoughts about thoughts, thoughts about thoughts about thoughts and in the very loud there is a thought that he simply must quiet all this and get to work so with all he can he thinks not to think, thinks it as hard as he can, and in his brief successful still of mind he finds not solace but a low. The lows are worse for him. The lows are worse for him and climbing.
    He is not going to fuck around this time. He puts the rain at 66. To kill the low. To kill the low but always at even numbers, right numbers, right numbers like 66. The rain is unbearably loud and his skull threatens to cave in but he must drown out this low so he closes his eyes and listens awhile as best he can to everything, anything else. There is a porch. Yes, a porch—he starts there. There is a porch and railing and stairs, half metre stairs, sagging down into what once was a garden. A wooden roof, loose boards... creaking, all. A heavy drip from a hanging plant or feeder. Somehow he knows that it is nighttime and that behind him is a damp wooden door, slightly ajar, encapsulating a hallway that never dries. At the end of the hallway a pale trapezoid of light expands outwards from the kitchen—a prospect of home, of warmth and food and wet coat off at last, but turning the corner he finds the kitchen just as cold and wet as all the rest of it. Wretched olive tiles... the decor threadbare, dim. Nothing but condiments in the pantry and no-one home to use them. Not now. Not ever again.
    Back on the porch, there is another light on, too, cobwebbed and sputtering into the dark where a sharply pitched wind he hadn’t noticed at 32 rises and falls and cuts at him through the rain. It is sharpened to a point. It is sharpened to a point and nicks and cuts at him, and as it cuts he sees out along its white tail, kitelike to its diamond head, stretching across the yard and into the forest where it has worked its way serpentine through trees to get to him, and as he sees along its tail and hears it pitch up again he thinks he hears voices underneath. Underneath that which was underneath, he thinks, and pricks his ears, hearing rain and porch but——
    He can’t make the voices out. His head is pounding. The rain is at 66 . . the rain is at 66! He can't hear the voices because the rain is still at 66...! Sixty six is the wrong number !
    He puts the rain to 100.

    Oh—!
    (in surprise)

    Naturally, you might think, in surprise. Oh—! What else but surprise? But then you already imagine alternatives— the songsaid Oh— of a launching into ballad, or the delighted Oh— with which one greets a pup. (You are not surprised that you adore the pup; you adored it from forty metres and only now release your happy vowel* within earshot of your friend the pup’s owner.) Alright, reader. So you grant such counterexamples.
    More relevant, though, and not yet considered by you, are simulations of surprise which we mistake for the thing itself. Frequent, very frequent, such sims., and it is precisely this ubiquity that renders the marine engineer’s Oh— (in surprise) just a little more remarkable than the Oh— (undefined) that truly you would have interpreted without any such parenthetical. How frequent? Where to begin...
    [ I ] THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: town, daylight, weekend if you must. Populated, is the gist. You are purchasing whatever you care to purchase—make it normal, please—when bang!, to your left, a hard clatter which you shall shortly discover to be merely that of a man-carried desk very suddenly ceasing to be man-carried, for the man has fallen, and everything is quite alright—he has fallen in a good way and the desk is strong—too strong to be man-carried this far, evidently—quite alright, but for the noise. So you say: Oh—!
    Is this surprise, this Oh—? It feels it. You would say so; none would disagree. You will even recall so, in a damning appropriation and contortion of the facts that in theme we will oft return! But in fact** this Oh— is post-surprise, and more the matter it is correlated and, yes, caused, but caused of your own volition—by which I mean that this Oh—! is not an essential winding down of surprise or the tail-end of its effect, but the first breath of an entirely new matter: the Signal.
    What do you Signal? This, that. Your eyes betray you. Some look at the desk-laid man, or their scenario’s equivalent, the Oh— expressing their presence & pity & altruistic potentiality. (I say ‘potentiality', mind, for in this moment a firm desire to help has not yet taken root. One calculates: how far is the desk-laid man? Any bruise, blood, pain physical or other? One does not wish to half-trot over, too eager to be of assistance, and embarrass a man already recomposed.. or worse, make oneself seem foolish for having assessed the situation improperly, dramatically. Such an Oh—, then, is not altruism in itself but wanting the man to know that one is processing whether or not to help him, the implication being that this in itself constitutes virtue, of a sort, even if one decides to continue on with no aid rendered.)
    Others will look around. A searching Oh—, this one...  a placid Oh—, were you all frightened, too? for most, I assume, (I think fairly), though of late I have been of a certain si vis pacem, para bellum bent—conflict being in the news—and in this way or for such a generally dispositioned person, there is also of course the Oh— , were you (like I) also verifying whether the fallen desk constituted a threat? comradery and shared ironic relief. Male, almost always.
    What I convince you of here is that such an Oh— in either case is neither in nor of nor resulting from surprise. It is but a separate social Signal that one is conditioned to emit as a consequence of surprise, and not the surprise itself, nor said in surprise for the surprise has perished and, safety having been reestablished, has given way to reputational and civilizational obligation. And this social Oh—, we might say, or I myself shall say at least, is a subcategory of what I will call the Not-Surprised Oh—, which is very frequent indeed.*** 

    The marine engineer’s Oh— is not one such Not-Surprised Oh—. 

    Oh, no. It is very much, essentially, with heart!, a Surprised...

    Oh—!

    It is the Oh— of a man underground, not deeply but sufficiently so, in the burnished wet maintenance tunnels of Greenwich Spit; thirty-six miles of them thumbing the culverts and pumps round the isle, cheaply and crudely built by the Conglomerate all, costs cut, not so much unfit for purpose as never purposed to succeed...

    And it is the Oh— of a man who, having read from his meter thrice and double-checked the implications each—a sextuple reckoning, in all— has come repeatedly to the conclusion that the tunnel walls will fail and the peninsula will sink—not by a touch, not by the 0.5m Worst Case Sink he’s seen (& dismissed) in the corner of his Likelihood vs Consequence risk matricies, but the whole thing gone, people too, and with its fatal sense of humour the Universe permits this man—one Burgess, M., mainland graduate—to comprehend this horror and futility in full**** for but a second before the dripped concrete at his eyeline gives out and Burgess, M. is claimed by sea, victim numero unum.

* for Ah— or Ee— or Ooh—, the last being a /u/ phonetic, would have sufficed just as well.
** I will shortly disabuse you of this notion also, that of ‘in fact’, and I indicate my foreknowledge of this to you here only so that upon reread of this text you remain unworried by, well, worries! of any inconsistency in approach. Rhetoric, here. Move along.
*** Or, if one prefers, the “Oh— (in not-surprise)”.
**** At least, as fully as one man may.

V1

 

   . . one . .  . . one . .  unities draped over formless geometry and blinking in the dark . .  one . .  . . two . .  !  a multiplicity, neither of mitosis nor creation . . what are you? he wonders . . in one moment — no, in the moment — infinitesimal twin stars that exist — it sounds tripe [to whom?] but that exist — and in the next — still the — mere shreds in cosmic tapesty draped over some larger and infinite light, a spherical one, now, rippling invisibly at the surface like hot spring mud, the perturbations only detectable through the spatial [temporal?] relationship of the unities spiraling — were they spiraling? he’s lost focus, his head throbs, ocular muscles working overtime — an iron grip on his iris — to steady his vision back on the orbs, let him see . .  . . one . .   . . another . . reassuring, then . . another, three, four, a million..!! unities [multiplicities..] booming into kaleidoscopic — Thane — kaleidoscopic encapsulation of his body — interesting, he is embodied — whether to investigate the body or this enveloping field, hm..? — one and the same, for a moment — for the moment — he’s been here before, the epiphany slips away — all the while white slices glide across from eyecorners and trace out spirals on the cosmic hot spring dark, winding up, surface tension, here, of all places? — Thane — is that...? THANE, again, insistent — a voice, her voice,
     -THANE-
            -THANE-
                 -THANE!---    

V2

     ֎

     ֎

     ֎

  a unity - 

     ֎

     ֎

  a unity - 

     ֎        ֎

  two - grogy, hello? spose

     ֎

  back t’won, nthin, better rst . . .

     ֎                ֎

  two’wgen, grmm, — somebd payfer this BLArst s-
   
               ֎           

  bright bright   turn’t’dn’f’th’lovvagod

  . . .

  No-one turns it down.

V3

          Unity blinks blinks on blinks off. Off unity. Unity off blinks on blinks off. Unity blinks blinks blinks off. Unity blinks on blinks off. Unity blinks unity blinks both blink off blink on. Off unity blinks on off unity blinks on both unities on. Unity blinks off. Unity on unity off on unity blinks off off unity blinks on. Off unity blinks on. Multiplicity on. Multiplicity on blinks off blinks on. Off multiplicity blinks on. Both unities on. Multiplicity on. Both unities on multiplicity on. Both unities multiplicity on. Both unities a multiplicity on. Mulitiplicity on blinks off. Hangs. Hangs. Off. Unities off multiplicities off hangs off. Off in the dark. Dark multiplicity blinks on and hangs. Hangs off . . . -hang on.
          Unities two hang multiplicity on. Two. Two unity dark multiplicity dark. Two. Two. Two one. Two one unity one. Unity one off. Unity one unity two. Two unities. Unity two off. Unity one unity two one multiplicity off. Hangs off. Hangs off in the dark hang on blinks on. Multiplicity on on in the dark multiplicity one blinks on. Two unities one multiplicity all on. All. All one multiplicity on on in the dark all one. In the dark one. All hang on. Multiplicity on in the dark undark multiplicity on undark. Undark light. On light. All light. Unity light all dark on light undark blinks off blinks on blinks light blinks light in dark in dark and light and and is light and dark undark and and and all and all blink light. All light. Blinked on, hang on, a multiplicity light, a unity two and unity one blink light in the dark and multiplicity light both light in dark both unity light and multiplicity light. Two unities both. Two unities a multiplicity. Unity one and unity two a multiplicity. One and two is one multiplicity. Hang on. Unity one and unity two, two unities, unities two. One and one is two  . . . -hang on.
 
 
 

That was my approach, anyway. How I won my first Nats. I was never the strongest at a comp, or the best or most technical, but I was the guy who sized you up—your levers, body language—and made you hurt until you either quit or gave me everything I wanted when you tried to slip.

Some people thought my tendons were just good. That when my elbow was way back behind my shoulder there was some iron there holding off the spiral fracture. Or if you forced my wrist way down, like a failed low-hand sorta position, there was something about my ulna that made it immune to the searing shooting pains everyone else gets being bent that way.

Not really. Probably my tendons were better than average, but I went home in more agony than anyone—got sent home from how many work sites cause I couldn’t lift a hammer. Broke my arm lots. What they say about it healing back stronger, it isn’t true, not always. Most people don’t feel their humerus flex like a suspension bridge when they open a fridge. I do.

I sometimes wonder that if I’d been stronger or stuck to a training plan for once, could I have gone pro. Been up there with the Devons and Johns and Ermes of the world.. sit around 240 in the off and come down to 225 for a title. Maybe. It’s nice to tell myself, think nostalgically on as though it really happened.

But in life you can never change just one thing. It’s all mixed up. If I’d been stronger, maybe I don’t train so hard ‘cause I can’t get my self-destructive fix anymore from local table time. I hear it’s like ninety percent gym work for the top guys. That’s not me. Or maybe if you fix my head so I train more consistently, I also lose that fire that makes me me and lets me kill myself on the table when it’s needed. I’d be just like any other guy. Who can say.

I spread it around, at least. Made a point of rotating between all the trainings in my state, sometimes a three, four hour drive just to do it. I figure it’s poor etiquette to show up once a month and hurt other guys—’cause they get hurt too, we all do, but especially if you pull with me—hurt them so bad that they don’t fully recover till I show up again at the start of next month. If I’m gonna fuck your elbow up for four weeks then you should get at least twelve before you pull me again, is the way I see it.

That’s the culture, though. It’s something chicks don’t get, most of them, why there aren’t many women in the sport. We tell girls about it and the first thing they ask is Don’t you break your arm? and—okay, for me the answer’s yes, but not for most guys because there are safe ways to pull, so their answer is No, you keep your elbow inside your shoulder line to reduce the risk of a spiral fracture, but there is a lot of tendon pain. They ask why we do it if there’s so much pain and we say Because it’s fun. And that’s kind of it. But not really.

Truth is that I’m just an extreme case of the mentality that all guys who armwrestle have. It’s a bit of the cutter mentality—we hurt ourselves to feel alive. And it’s a bit of the big mountain climber mentality, those guys who climb Everest just because it’s there. But those are activities you do yourself, mostly, and armwrestling takes two.

So then you think about combat examples. Why do guys join the military, why do they do UFC. And those are close as well. But there are too many other things going on. Dudes join the army thinking about serving their country and seeing other countries and getting abs. For fighting sports there’s money. Ring girls. Perks.

Armwrestling really doesn’t have that stuff. How many people watch East vs West each year? A thousand? Less? And those events are like twenty top guys getting paid like $10k tops two or three times a year. If you’ve always wanted to see Turkey, or Georgia, okay then AW’s your thing. Some YouTubers do alright. But there’s nowhere to go in the sport, not materially, accessibly… not even enough to hang a rags to riches dream on. You either like pulling or you don’t. It’s not something you can explain to people.

The closest I think anyone has ever come to it was this Slovak named Alojz. As in carbon alloys. I remember cause that's how he corrected me on saying it. I was fairly new at the time, two or three years in the sport and he was this big guy with catcher mitts I couldn’t do anything against.

I’m pulling him and doing my usual thing where I’m just throwing myself into pain. Surging a flop wrist press over and over, king’s moving under the table with my arm locked out full—ugliest battles you’ve seen. And each time Alojz is catching me and letting me work because that’s what the stronger guy does.

At some point, there’s this pause between our rounds. Not a chatty one, Alojz quiet while he figures something out. Then he sets up for this posting toproll that’s the most hookable thing in the world. I mean, his elbow’s planted down so hard on the pad that there’s zero chance he’s blocking a quick surge forward around his wrist. It’s golden. A clear gimme, even despite our gap in strength.

But the thing is that hooking a posting toproller doesn’t hurt. It’s just the mechanics of it. They’re not gonna slip out of your hand so there’s no chance of a wrist getting spun out, and all the force you’re applying on each other is just trying to open up the others’ bicep—no lateral elbow involvement, no pressure on your frame. It’s just muscle on muscle, the hooker oughtta win with all the leverage they get, and everyone’s perfectly safe.

So pain hungry me doesn’t take the hook. I go in for a low-hand toproll instead, exactly what you shouldn’t do, and consciously I’m thinking something stupid like wanting to test if I can overcome the hard counter regardless, but in retrospect really I was hoping he’d cup my hand painfully down and back—it’s easy to do when you’re given the height like this—in another ugly match.

Alojz doesn’t cup. He doesn’t even drag back. There's no need to, not when I’ve given him everything already, everything he tried to give to me. We just stay there, locked in that starting position, I’m struggling to force the pull somewhere bad and he’s gently rehabilitating it, a dad playing with his son, figuring me out all the while, and eventually he says in his thick Slovak timbre: Getting hurt won’t make you a man, Mitch. It just makes you hurt.

Maybe I remember it funny. Time does that to memories, makes movies of them. But the way I remember it is that we both let up some, so I look at him, wondering, and he nods the slightest nod I’ve ever seen and finally I give him what he wants and hook him down gently to the pad. Then he claps the back of my hand with his free left and walks off while I’m standing there with painfree elbows and wondering the fuck just happened.

I never saw Alojz again. But I think often ‘bout what he said. That yeah, somewhere in me, there’s this assumption that I can hurt my way to manhood. That we can—armwrestlers, I mean. That for all the tradie jobs and sheds between us and good stable blonde wives that we banter about in the straps, something never clicked that said You’re a man now forever. There’s no more to be done. Good job.

Instead we live with this perpetual coming-into manhood. Always reaching for it, but with all the normal societal rituals associated with manhood long-ago complete we’ve got to invent our own, and for some fucked up reason we think—or we’ve been taught—that pain is a prerequisite for this to work. Or at least a reliable pathway to it. That being a man is about always going through shit and that implies the shit’s existence, so if you already largely solved the shit life gives you you’d better make some more.

So we keep coming back. We’re all the same, doesn’t matter the town I’m in. Every practice a mess of boys, in garages or in parks, clustered round rickety homemade tables blessedly free from the OHS shit we deal with all day—tables that creak and twist during the match and threaten to run off completely so another guy will put his foot on the base to hold it down for us—and between pulls all of us hold our arms in the air and rub our tricep tendon as much to feel the pain as to relieve it, someone will pass around a massage gun if you're lucky, and at 8 we all leave men. Referees giving funeral rites.. gawking passersby witness to our lives.

It’s good.

It sounds like Fight Club tryhard shit too, I know. Maybe it is. But we’re not schizophrenics, misogynists.. not cultists out to burn the system.. don’t mix us up with that. It’s just there’s lots of reasons guys like that movie and one of them is that it gets at this getting hurt thing that lives in some of us and if you have it, you have it, and if you don’t, you don’t.

It’s not something you can explain to people. Mostly we’ll never say it, even among ourselves. We’re not a bunch known for being good with words.

But if you want to pull, I’ll be there. And if you hurt me, I’ll be back.

     It was “ethical trade” that broke me—that pinpricked my balloon of everything as surely as it had the silence, the expectancy of our little group. Goodpostured smart-cazsh yuppie shits, me included, nestled into the wall in this conventionally idiosyncratic café that screams its business plan at you with its Pantone™ 13-0116 Pastel Green walls & cork-propped white marble tables that gives wagyu blush. Some fern spikes into my neck but I've adjusted its pot already, kickshoved it insufficiently far so now it's here for good & so very obviously an irritant that none of us acknowledge my failure. Them, polite; myself, falsely blasé.
    Anyhow. Maybe it's some ritual no-one ever tells you, I hadn't cottoned on last time, but this was the second time our group had been somewhere and ordered our coffees and—you could have timed it—a heavenly precise thirty point oh seconds after Laura gets hers, out comes the "how's everyone's coffee?" schtick. Exquisite Copernican motion... Starbucks cultural critique gliding over the rings of Saturn for a thousand years to arrive perfectly, predictably, horribly on cue. So then you get the clockwise sounding off of our perfunctory analyses of the brew, smooth, exotic, rich—I can't fucking stand you people—and fern-spiked me is last and the caffeine slut joke isn't taken yet so I babybird it out for laughs. But that's not what breaks me. Not yet.
     There's a silence, not in fact but of the mind, because Charlie yawns real loud and stretches and Arith—obviously 'our' brown one, by the way, literally never mentioned in all five years so you know they're shit scared of saying it but I mean come on, *Arith*! three whities and their token, what's it they say, every token's spent, I love Arith but let's all just verbalise the race thing this once and ask where he's from, no? Bandaid off, desacralize the bloody subject, no?—well Arith checks his phone, fuck knows what Laura does, physically speaking, my eyes are in the wall and my focus on this Fern Invader of My Neck, this photosynthetic rapist lil frond, but none of us are present socially. We don't know what to say.
    Finally Laura resumes, a thoroughly unnecessary follow-up, might I add, says something about how she loves that this Pantone™ juggernaut of Sunday mornings does ethical trade too, and from too I don't hear shit because everything is stripped of everything. Laura shoots the fuck away from me; hyperspaces out of there to the other side of the suddenly three-mile-long Death Row of liminal space. Fern Invader draws blood and god is that thing serrated and behind the paint is a rusted turquoise jail cell of nihilism that I've been trapped in all along. My coffee's black. Warden-made. Saturn goes out with a soft confetti bang above me and embers of coherence sting my eyes.
     It's in that moment that I realise, I really really really realise, that I just don't LIKE you people. I don't like your cashmere or your listicles or Charlie's new big job in Schmoperations, Charlie, it's killing you! I'm sick to death of this coffee-tea-leaf reading horoscopic bullshit, how none of you ever say weak, you won't say normal, it's a normal goddamn coffee and you know it, look at the clientele! Look at us!
     Laura, I want to deposition her, Laura, you're always reading and girl that's great but say something about it! All you ever have for us is a name, a nationality, backcover blurb & minority shit, "I love her work" yes but tell us what you T.H.I.N.K! I see it all at once, the whole literary desert of her soul, ten thousand vultures circling the carcass of some bastard postmodern Romanticism and plucking out its eyes for prose. Half-chunks, tendon, they're getting desperate now, all books about how sadness is ok and society doesn't let us feel and Laura nods along because she feels and slowly this is substituted with more of a desire to feel than a true feeling itself and Laura, Laura, think something, and—! ! !
     Baritone automatic gunfire seizes the world. The windows waterfall down in unison, the long cafe cubes itself back up. My neck is really gushing oh, fuck it's on my hands and I'm struck that the blood has the same brown translucency as on a chopping board just-done with steak. Three men have entered. Conventionally idiosyncratic—AKs, sure, but street garb, bracelets. Young. Brown, obviously, and I feel awfully guilty about this and look to Arith who is prostrating himself to some WaPo article about Ecuadorian Arabica, Laura Charlie nodding sagely you're no more Latin than us, Arith I think and he meets my gaze and smiles. Well, Arith is shot immediately, his head explodes and I feel a little better because that's brown-on-brown & therefore not a racist visual, right?- anyhow I'm up out of my seat and charging, leaping, a bullet of my own fired through this pale green cafe-barrel and down onto Gunman #1.
     Dream sequences have a non-linearity to them, don't they, esp. the lucid ones, so I know already that to be properly, cinematically injured for my culminating takedown of #3 then #2 must shoot me and #1 must stab me, so, how shall this arise? #1's AK is pinned to the floor by my left hand and so it's his left that unsheathes something—I never do see where from—this small near-perfect-diamond obsidian dagger with a delicate gold pommel, more sacrificial than practical, snarling up at me with haste that catches skin. We struggle for it and I win and I stab him a great many times through the throat. A slaughter for the greater good; I could drink his blood. It's not brown anymore, it's Hollywood hot red and everywhere soaking into us like dye. Something crunches under the blade so I lean all my weight on it and #1 is still at last but for the river deltas from his neck. All this occurring under the heated jets of gunfire into innocence, the deafening museum echo of violence imposed on order—I have to be quicker, more aggressive, kill fast and well even as everything slows and slugs along... the glass waterfalls still going and twinkling like champagne flutes, inexplicable sunset—the sun two storeys tall—streaming horizontally to silhouette everything vantablack.
     What to say of Gunman #2? Rinse and repeat. Up, charge, shot, tackle, down, slicesliceslice. I never said this was one of my creative finest, chrissakes, not the point at all—this is my Chernobyl, not Chopin. Down, slice, something says I oughtta remember their faces forever in this PTSD glamour for the journos should I live—at least one of them—I long to be the sullen type—so #2 it is. I invent a face for him, this small moustachioed ratty face that somehow I forgive, blooming metal in my gut and all with another in my lung. I figure that's survivable but tragic, moreover permissive of some death rattle breaths as the ambos hoist me up- I'm ahead of myself. But, well, #3 gets it all the same. Charlie 'wow's far behind me, a tether to my former realm, and events dutifully fast forward even as I am reluctantly sucked back towards the group. 
     It's the oddest thing... to giftwrap your life and put a bow on it, to be there and dead and celebrated and speeches given over you & loved ones mourned, this whole long outta-body good guy thing, and yet to come back to reality where it's still Arith and fucking Ecuador! How long was I out? Could anyone tell? But no—I've nodded 'long the whole way through, ahh, right, hell- pulled that cheap trick where the moment someone uses a new noun—Arith says something about the 'Guayas' province—you mispronounce it back to them in concern to get it right. It's a cheap win for them & shows you care, shows you're filing the knowledge away for something. Something what? No-one asks. No-one cares. Even Arith doesn't care, Arabica not his thing, merely flashing his memory and readership around like a pervert, his yearly subscription-adorned cock laid out on the table for the whole café to see. At least the man appends a hot take to his diatribes— not like Laura— applies some conversational lube even as he fucks you. God, my head's all in the wrong place now, isn't it? Sensing something, Arith tries to meet my gaze again and gauge my thoughts. Not this time, friend. I busy myself with the Fern.

Written for my partner in 2020 as part of a birthday present. Dug out while sorting old presents into cloud storage, and posted with her blessing.

Interestingly, my present to her in 2016 (primarily an eccentric digital collection of writing, media, and puzzles) organised the writing into a folder similarly named Scrapbook — and makes repeated reference to the ‘scraps’ within. It seems this project dates back much longer than I thought.

Total word count ~6,000, ~30 minute read.

“I don’t get it. Does it talk?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t look like it can dance or sing.”

“It can’t dance or sing neither, Anita.”

Anita considered this for a moment, then knelt down on the carpet to get a better look at it. Father sat down with her which Anita knew meant he was sad. He never let his big salmon work jacket touch the floors unless he was in a sour mood.

“But then what does it do, dad?”

“Well,” Father began, averting his gaze from hers and instead watching the milky yellow shadows that spilled across the carpet. “It can do anything you want, you see? You just have to help it along and pretend a little.”

Her eyebrows furrowed slightly and her curiosity started to give rise to annoyance. The thing still hadn’t moved, except for tiny sags and flops of fabric that no-one could confuse for real animation. It just... sat there, all dumblike and vacant.

“Help it along? How, dad?”

Father sighed one of his long, heavy sighs that made his whole body slump afterwards and peeled off his disposable trirubber gloves that still stunk of disinfectant. One at a time, he tossed them towards the door, not seeing or caring where they landed. Turning back to the thing sitting in front of him, he reached out reluctantly, grabbed its stubby little brown arms, and started to gently wiggle them in circles.

Anita lasted only a few heartbeats before bursting into tears. Her bob heaved in sobs with her shoulders and Father knew she would be inconsolable for the rest of the afternoon. Eighth birthdays were meant to be special, very special, for families below the Plaque at least. At eight, you were allowed to ride the hermetic elevators by yourself—any child’s first big test of independence.

But he had blown it, and there was no use in it now. He stood and walked to the showers to scrub down, waving over one of the bots to console her instead.

A small grey Feline bot padded its way across the carpet to Anita and began to circle her, brushing its smooth platinum surface and fishingline whiskers against her skin. Analysis of Anita’s voice suggested upwards of a ninety percent probability that she was upset, cuing a synthetic purring track that girls her age in focus groups had rated as most reassuring.

Soon enough, Anita’s tears slowed to a trickle and her shoulders steadied, and she gratefully accepted a tissue held up to her by the Feline’s paw.

“Thanks, kitty,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Anita,” the bot replied, completing a final loop of her knees with a swish of its tail and coming to rest in front of her.

“Kitty,” Anita murmured. “What did Father get me for my birthday?”

In answer, the bot’s eyelids clicked once like a camera-shutter, and suddenly one of its irises was missing—rolled back into the Feline’s head to make way for a holographic projector. The bot spun away from her, and a crisp white shopping catalogue interface filled the centre of the room.

TEDDY BEARS, the catalogue began. The vintage toy of choice for Lower Plaque dwellers!

Anita’s lip trembled and she could feel tears pressing at her eyes again. She made a gesture in the air with two fingers, like bunny ears flopping forward, and the catalogue page scrolled down for her.

BEAR MODEL: ALTON, 75 KRONOR, she read. Tagged “Bargain”.

BEAR MODEL: AYURO, 31 KRONOR. “Bargain”.

BEAR MODEL: BAYER, 56 KRONOR. “Bargain”.

It was too much. She sliced her hand across the page to fade it away into soft light. The cat’s eyelids clicked as its projector shut off and by the time it turned back to her she was already facing away, staring through the wall length glass panel that stretched cross their entire apartment and looked out onto the Plaque.

Every seven, no—every eight year old, Anita reminded herself bitterly, knew all about the Plaque, even though the subject was studiously avoided in schools. You couldn’t help but learn about it. It was everywhere and everything and it swallowed up every conversation like a big whale gulping down plankton. You learned about it in pieces, sure, with a jigsaw puzzle of rumours… but you learned nevertheless.

From what she could gather, the Plaque wasn’t always the snotty yellow mist that eddied past her eyes now and made your lungs feel all shrunken and wet if you breathed it in too long. Once it was simply a clear and greasy film that coated every window in the city, and nobody minded it all that much or where it came from as long as their cleaners abraded it off in the mornings before they came in to work.

One day though, the Plaque began to change.

Anita didn’t know how the big oily no-brain mess changed itself or if it could happen again. The thought of the Plaque being alive somehow was very frightening to her. She sometimes dreamed that the apartment’s long glass windows would break in the night and the film would come in to get her, creeping wetly across her chest and squeezing her so gosh tight that her ribs would crackle. Father said she had nothing to worry about, but Father worried all the time too, so Anita didn’t believe him.

Either way, the Plaque stopped coming off the windows so easily. It spread faster. And it started feeding off the dirty air coming from the factories and vomiting out the sepia gas that most people knew as the Plaque today. No sector could contain the Plaque for long and it spread so far across the megalopolis that the city Mayor had to take extreme measures.

She knew the Mayor’s name. Everybody knew his name, though Anita had never seen it written down anywhere. For all his other civic accomplishments, Mayor Sonosa’s legacy would forever be the Plaque, and his now-scorned family name embodied all the bleak historicity of a Nero or a Robespierre.

A month after scientists had discovered the Plaque was feeding off pollution, Sonosa and his yes-men abruptly announced new bylaws that would effectively bar all ungreen economic activity from the next Circuit onwards. Every factory, every smogstack, every condenser, all of it shut down and dismantled and thrown away or you’d be sent to the grimiest jails in the city to choke on your own waste till you’d learned your lesson.

Well, even Anita could have predicted how that would end. What else would people do, knowing they only had half a Circuit to keep making things? They’d make as much as they could as fast as they could, while they had the chance—if only because they knew everybody else would be doing so too and they had to keep up.

Instead of pollution shuddering to a halt as Mayor Sonosa had intended, it accelerated. If a megafactory could safely produce a thousand autos a day, well, the manager wanted two thousand. Quarries that would have taken months to dig were blasted into shape in days, chemical runoffs be damned. New companies raised billions of Kronor in capital to make products that nobody even wanted, just in case somebody would want them ten Circuits from now.

Almost overnight, the Plaque rose two hundred seventy stories up the skyrises and it had stayed there ever since.

Nowadays your life depended on whether you lived above or below the Plaque. With new building projects virtually forbidden, there would be no more climbing above the Plaque for the masses; you either earned the Kronor to purchase one of the few Upper Plaque apartments for sale at any time, or you kept staring glumly out into the icky yellow fog each day longing for a change of fortune.

Switching skyrises was practically out of the question—the hermetically sealed tunnels at the foot of the buildings were too few and too tight for many people to carry goods through, and the handful of licensed removalist services down there operated as a cartel, charging extortionate prices so as to live fashionably off a mere handful of ultrawealthy, building-hopping Upper Plaquers.

Don’t waste your dosh, the wisdom went. You can’t outrun the Plaque, and the grimey phlegmish film on the windows doesn’t care whether you live East or West. All you can do is climb, climb!, and if you can’t do that then stop being selfish and set your kids up to take a shot instead. This wasn’t about *you* anymore.

Anita felt a soft tug at the hem of her polka dot dress and looked down. The Feline bot had decided she was still gloomy, perhaps, or its pseudo-random mood generator had chosen to simulate the cat needing attention. One way or another, a smooth platinum paw rested atop Anita’s foot, and the cat’s animatronic face looked up at her expectantly.

“Hey, kitty.”

She picked the cat up and cradled it in her arms, lowlylike so as to avoid the still tear-soaked ruff built into the dress. The last Feline had been manufactured pre-Sonosa, and Father said you could never be too sure how their epoxy sealings would hold up. The cat began to purr again, the same purr of reassurance as before, and Anita rankled at the implied assessment that she was still not in control of her emotions.

“Skip.”

The purr rasped a little more, and it began to rise and fall more noticeably, and Anita recognised this as the Feline’s default sleep track. Better.

“Thanks, kitty.”

“You’re welcome, Anita.”

See, Father, this is a companion! My kitty is always happy, always helpful. It never needs cheering up and it never needs telling off. I don’t need to pretend that kitty has a personality; it has dozens! And they’re all real personalities, not some stupid illusion that breaks the second I stop wiggling its paws. Why did you have to ruin my birthday, dad, with a stupid dumblike budget bargain bear!

Anita moped and watched a wisp of Plaque fog curl it on itself as it swept past the window. She reckoned she’d spent about twice as much time talking to the imitation cat as any human, even including Father. Lower Plaque kids spent almost all their time at home alone, unable to have friends over without revealing they lived below the Plaque line and risking ostracism. 

Oh, there were a few reckless kids that found covert ways to signal their status, alright, but most had the good sense to keep their big mouths shut. No friend was worth tarring your name like that, and once the secret was out, it was out for life and stuck to you like glue. What Upper Plaquer would ever befriend one with so little to offer them beyond resentment and covetousness? And what Lower Plaquer in their right mind would acquaintance their very own competition, as likely to push your head down in the mud for a stepping stone as to lend you a hand up?

No, you told people you were an Upper Plaquer, and that was that. Don’t question it of others, and they’ll leave you alone too. Friendship is for those who can see the sky and toil for those who can’t. Be happy with your bots—or not, what does it matter?

A snakelike hiss sounded behind her, which Anita recognised as the hermetic seal to the kitchen decompressing. Father was signalling her in for dinner. 

“Scram, kitty.”

The Feline bot leapt out of her arms, settled on her rucksack by the door, and happily mimicked chewing on Father’s still-discarded black gloves. Anita’s nose still wrinkled slightly from the trace disinfectant on them, but she supposed the bot didn’t have olfactory sensors, or it did have olfactories and nobody had ever told it to care.

How lucky you are!, envied Anita as she trudged to supper. I wish I were you, kitty. 

By the window, the small brown bear sags into the carpet, already forgotten.

“I don’t want you chitchattering like I do, alright?”

“I know, dad.”

“Even if we talk to them all regular. No exceptions.”

“I know, dad.”

Father wasn’t worried about her, not really, Anita decided. He always looked people in the eyes all grufflike and pleading when he needed to get his way, and right now he was only lobbing stray thoughts over his big salmon jacketed shoulder as they came to him. That meant his real focus was elsewhere—probably still on breakfast, if she figured right. Best to appreciate the last vestiges of warmth in your belly before leaving home in case the elevator heating had conked out again.

This was a common pattern for the two of them and both knew it. Father went through the motions of parenthood well enough to keep her safe and to convince himself that he’d done his civic duty, and little further than that. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—he loved her as much as any parent could. But a fourteen hour shift as a Plaque abrader will burn the caregiving capacity out of anyone, and Father worked them daily.

In exchange, and old enough now to know that Father was working moreso for her future than his own, Anita helped him to believe their little masquerade. She feigned more rebelliousness than she felt just so Father could seem to quash it. She repeated his maxims back to him months later, so he might feel heard. And sometimes, like now, she would cautiously play up her irritation at his warnings, giving him the satisfaction of being thorough without seeming overbearing.

“If the membrane closes early, don’t try to catch it. Wait for the next one.”

“Da-ad, I’ve ridden the hermetic elevators a million times already, okay? I’ll be fine.”

Father shouldered his rucksack and handed Anita her own, finally making eye contact again as they prepared to leave. His face was stern, but his eyes were soft with gratitude and Anita knew he’d appreciated her theatre.

“Alright, Anita. It’s like we always say, you can’t—”

“You can’t be safe tomorrow unless you’re safe today.” She smiled at him earnestly, and that was that.

The front door hissed open and the two of them parted ways almost immediately in the hallway beyond. Father joined a stream of similarly salmon jacketed workers heading right to the deep-dive elevators that would take them over three hundred stories down into the maintenance network. Anita slipped into a left-facing queue for the regular elevators, unaccompanied for the very first time, and felt an unexpected surge of exhilaration. She had thought herself too mature for the social milestone to have any impact on her, but now she felt... electric.

As it turned out, Father needn’t have worried about Anita chitchattering; she knew nobody around her in the queue, likely because eliminating his safeguarding trip had allowed them to depart fifteen minutes later. Life was so heavily routinized down here that you could consistently live only a minute apart from someone else and yet never be made aware of their existence. Everybody crammed into time and space like those dreadful sardines she hated, packed so gosh tight that you couldn’t even turn around to meet your neighbours and you may as well have none.

Still, she couldn’t deny that she was having fun, as her queue shuffled forward. How beamingly silver the hall trusses were, now that she looked at them! Was all that workboot scuffing on the floor new, or had she forgotten it a million times over? Did that big-nosed man in the next line work as a historian or a teacher to need so many books? Neither, Anita decided with an unconscious condescension written in the lines of her face, for he stared ahead too stupidly. Perhaps an archivist.

Despite the massive size of the hermetic elevators, the morning crowds were so dense that you could only see the elevators once you were practically upon them. The end of the gleaming chrome hallway abruptly dropped away in every direction, so that you looked out into a thin black rectangle of nothingness, so pitch dark in contrast that you might have believed the universe ended right there too, if the elevator hadn’t arrived.

The hermetic elevators were colossal grey orbs that floated slowly into view, hanging somehow menacingly in the abyss. They were preternaturally smooth and showed no signs of propulsion, except for the sounds they made—a doleful, ominous hum that always seemed to be descending, and higher-pitched warbles that could have been language. Anita thought they must have recorded a sea leviathan and played it through hidden speakers so as to scare people away from the elevator shaft for their own good. At least, it scared her.

Next, an inky-green membrane grew from the orb’s surface, spiralling across it in fractal patterns and swallowing it whole like florescent lichen. Camera-shutter panels slid back into a recess to reveal a circular entranceway in the centre of the orb, enclosed by soft yellow neon glowsticks that kept you from distinguishing anything beyond. For an instant, Anita felt she were staring into a human iris framed by the eyelids of the corridor, and she wondered if the orb could see her, too.

Oh! The membrane had shot out towards the waiting passengers, earlier than she had anticipated, forming a shimmering tunnel that led them into the elevator. Dutifully, the queue began to shuffle forward, stepping into the umbilical structure that looked as though it had no right at all to hold their weight. With each step you took, tendrils from the membrane reached out and sucked at you clumsily—tugging at you just hard enough to unbalance you if your steps weren’t even and strong. Father said the membrane was the best they had to keep the Plaque from spreading between the floors, and she grudgingly admitted it was a necessary evil. Still, Anita hoped they’d come up with a better way soon; she didn’t like the way it plucked at her blouse and mussed up her hair.

Once you were inside the elevator, through the neon-lit entrance and onto the mesh platform that let you see the full expanse of the sphere, there was little to do besides wait. No effort had been made to beautify the elevator and no muzak played over the intercom that Anita knew existed. It was just you and a hundred other civilians, all on your way to do something, somewhere, but for now stuck in the same shared purgatory and counting the floors until it was your turn to shamble off. At least it was warm in here today; one time, they’d had to—

“Hey, Anita!”

A straw-haired boy in a maroon jumpsuit was making his way over to her from across the lift and she unsuccessfully tried to suppress a smile. Errol was two grades above her at school, but she’d been paired up with him one day for auditorium cleanup duty and maintained a light crush on him ever since. She didn’t quite know why, and part of her supposed she’d liked the rare sense of proximity more than the boy himself. Still, she enjoyed getting occasional glimpses of him around the school hallways… and he was pretty, after all.

“I never seen you on the ‘vators before, Anita!”

She blushed, and hated herself for it immediately, because it was a stupid thing to blush at.

“Well, I’m eight today, Errol,” she bragged matter-of-factly. “No need for Father to tag along this time.”

Errol thought for a second with his head cocked slightly, then satisfied himself with a nod. “Makes sense. Hey, I get on at the four-oh-first—why didn’t I spot you earlier?”

He was lying, she thought, though she couldn’t be sure. The best way to convince others you were Upper Plaque was to claim it proactively at every chance you got, but Anita had no stomach for it and worried about being caught out. Safer to only lie when you had to, and change the subject as soon as possible.

“Father never let me really see the Lower wards before, so I hopped off early and looked around. That’s why.”

“Hm,” pondered Errol, and he cocked his head again. “Corridors are way different down here, huh?”

“Way different.”

The opportunity to elaborate further hung in the air between them, but neither took it. You lying, dirty fibber, Anita said to Errol with her eyes, though she didn’t hold it against him because she was one, too. His own gaze was inscrutable and she decided to switch topics.

“Say, did you ever figure out that Logistics problem you told me about on cleanup?”

“Which? Oh, yeah. Turned out it was one of the prof’s tricks—just a demonstration of Furlini’s Theorem.”

That made sense. Errol’s Logistics teacher had given the class what looked like a normal homework question, but no matter how you solved it, you kept getting nonsense answers; the city should build an infinite number of bridges, or remove all residential zoning, or fire all its non-essential personnel. Furlini’s Theorem proved that a whole class of similar errors could usually be attributed to setting up the problem incorrectly, assuming a linearity between infrastructure and productivity that could never exist in the real world.

Technically, Anita wasn’t meant to cover such theorems until next grade, but she liked to learn and there wasn’t much else to do while waiting for Father to finish his shift. He would often return home to find her asleep on the lounge, curled up with the Feline bot still projecting instructional videos onto the ceiling. Errol was smart, too, and Anita thought she saw a chance to flirt with him.

“You’re so clever, Errol. I never could have worked that one out. I bet you’ll get accepted into the Institute any day now!”

Errol’s face brightened so much that she could see every detail on his face, even in the dim lighting of the elevator. The Institute was the city’s best school above the Plaque line, and there weren’t many to begin with; it had been vastly more profitable to build luxury apartments up there, before Mayor Sonosa’s construction ban, and even most Upper Plaque kids now went to school in the Lowers accordingly. To get to the Institute, you either had to know the Mayor himself, or prove you were a generational intelligence… probably both.

“That’s real nice of you, Anita. I’m sure I will.”

Errol paused a moment, as though to muster up something inside him. 

“Say, I was thinkin’—would you like to show me round that Lower ward after school today? You know, the one you explored this morning.”

Her face flushed again and Errol grinned broadly, and she knew he had seen it. No sense trying to hide it, anymore.

“I’d like that, Errol.”

“Good,” he said, triumphant. “We’ll meet here, after the bell. Speaking of school, ain’t this your stop?”

It was; her classroom was one floor above his and other children were already starting to file out through the membrane. Anita flashed a parting, jubilant smile at Errol and rushed after them, barely making it through in time before the membrane furled back in on itself again and the elevator dropped out of sight with its leviathan hum. Breathless and ecstatic, she slowed her pace to a dawdle, trying to extend the moment for as long as she could before class started.

For the first time all year, and despite her heavy rucksack, Anita felt as light as air.

“Was it two-eight-eight or two-eight-nine, Anita? I forget.”

Errol was waiting for her inside the elevator entrance, so close to the edge that she would have barrelled right past him if he hadn’t called out. Anita turned to find him stood in a ridiculous contrapposto, half his torso swivelled away from her even though he’d obviously just watched her enter. He was trying too hard to show nonchalance, she thought, and it gave him away; he was excited, too.

“Oh, I never paid attention in the first place,” she replied, wincing internally at being held to her bluff. “I didn’t think I’d be coming back, did I?”

“’Course not.”

“Does it matter, anyway?”

Errol smiled at the corners of his mouth. “’Course not.”

They stood in shy silence for the remainder of the trip, watching the other passengers swash in and out of the elevator like waves. All the adults looked so browbeaten, so played out, she noticed. Was every job as soulbattering as Father’s? Is this what she had to look forward to if she forever lived below the Plaque? She shook the thought off as best she could, determined not to spoil her own mood.

“Two-eight-eight, Anita. Let’s go!”

The camera-shutter panels opened and the lichenlike membrane shot out towards a chrome hallway that looked just like the one on Anita’s floor. Perhaps the layout would be identical, Anita hoped, and she could fake that it was the same floor she’d lied about exploring earlier. But as they darted outside and the membrane closed behind them, she saw that the hallway curved left at the end instead of right, and a series of ramps connected to the hallway where she was accustomed to blank space.

“Is this the right one?” asked Errol, seeming to read her mind.

“I don’t think so.”

“Never mind, we’re here now, ain’t we? Let’s check it out.”

They rounded the corner at the end of the hallway and at last they talked freely, delightedly remarking on every detail of the environment as though it were a revelation to their Upper Plaque sensibilities. Errol tentatively offered the first direct comparison—the ceiling cornices were more rounded down here, weren’t they? Oh, yes!, she agreed, and yet not as delicate somehow. 

Errol concurred, and with that successful experiment conducted they launched into a shared verbal construction of what the Upper Plaque must be like. They built a world together as they walked; not a fantastical world, but one rich in the kind of intimate and trifling details that only a local would volunteer. Anita felt a sense of pure creation, of liberty and wonder, and she was so enamoured by the dream they dreamed together that it simply had to be true.

“Do you think this is one of them ‘cafeterias’, Anita? I suppose your family mostly goes to restaurants, too. Still, you must have heard of cafeterias.”

“It has to be, Errol, I think you’re right.”

“Why, I wonder if the slop is any good here. What do you say we try some?”

“I’d like that, Errol,” and she wanted to hold his hand all of a sudden.

They walked on up and read the menu, or at least pretended to, for there was a similar cafeteria on Anita’s floor where she always ordered the same dish. He ordered first and conspicuously showed off a fancy sun-red wallet that complemented his jumpsuit. The flamboyance of the wallet gave Anita pause—was he an Upper Plaquer, after all? Why then take a needless risk eating at a Lower cafeteria, which she was sure would have revolted any genuine Upper Plaquer on sight? The wallet must have been a birthday present, she deduced, and he’d seen the opportunity to make dual use of it as a sign of status.
 
“Anita.”

“What? Oh. Hello, the egg-fry, thank you.”

She set her rucksack down to fetch her purse, unlatched the top compartment, and opened it wide. The unmistakable stench of disinfectant assaulted her senses immediately, short-circuiting her thoughts, and they returned carrying an awful, premonitious sense of dread with them. It was too late to close the rucksack again—Errol was already next to her, stooping down and plunging into her bag to confirm his suspicions. Anita could only watch him, paralysed in fear and shame, knowing what he would find—the only possible source of that nosewrinkling pong.

Slowly, and without even a glance at her, Errol pulled out a pair of Father’s black, disposable, trirubber gloves.

“Where did you get these, Anita?”

She tried, feebly. “They’re for our garden—”

“I know what they are. They’re abrader gloves, and only Lower Plaquers work as abraders. Where did you get them?”

She had blown it, and there was no use in it now. All she had at this final moment was the truth.

“They’re Father’s. Our kitty must have dropped them in my bag after it was done chewing on them.”

Her head drooped, and she waited for Errol to decide her fate as a prisoner might await the guillotine. He was still, dead still apart from his quivering hands, perhaps sensing a crux in his own life too. Was he an Upper Plaquer?!

At last he stood, and at last he looked at her again. Errol’s gaze was again inscrutable, apart from a raw intensity of… what? Sorrow? Disappointment? Loathing? If it was loathing, was it directed at her, or turned in on himself and his class obligations? Give me something, Errol! But there was nothing there for her, and then it was over and he was gone, vanished behind her into the chrome labyrinth of floor two-eight-eight.

The cashier had already cancelled Anita’s egg-fry for her, and ordering had quietly and awkwardly resumed beside her kneeling figure. Wiping tears from her chin, Anita stuffed the dropped abrader gloves back into her rucksack and set about finding her way back. Right, then left, then up the ramp and right again and now she was staring into the empty eyelids of the elevator shaft once more, hurtling towards it as fast as she could run. She wouldn’t later remember seeing the vast grey orb or its lichen-membrane tunnel before she leapt, but they must have been there for she crashed down onto the mesh stage—barely mindful of the pain—and sobbed the whole way home.

Her front door swung inwards with its usual hiss, and a mercury-vapor lamp embedded in the frame bathed her in ultraviolet as she barged through. Shoes off, socks off, rucksack off! and thrown against the wall in anger, for Father’s shift kept on till nine and he wasn’t around to scold her. With nothing more to do with herself, Anita huddled up onto the lounge and waited for the world to just go away forever.

Before long, she heard a familiar, low, focus-group-reassuring purr approach the lounge, and felt the brush of fishingline whiskers against her bare feet.

“Go away, kitty,” she said hatefully.

“What’s wrong, Anita?”, replied the Feline bot with obstinate adoration.

“I said go away!” 

The cat’s tail swooshed around her legs, snapping through a love-heart pattern that Anita had once found cute before its deliberateness and cynicism dawned on her. Now it just reminded her of what she had lost in the cafeteria—that insipid cultural myth called love, a pathogen of an idea that had not survived contact with the disinfectant.

“I am here to help you, Anita,” the cat purred at her. “I am always here for your comfort.”

A dam inside Anita burst, however unfairly, and she stood on the lounge and screamed down at the bot with all the air in her lungs and then some.

“I don’t want your comfort, kitty! I don’t like that you’re so happy when I’m sad, and I wouldn’t want you sad neither, because every time you miaou at me all I hear is circuits whirring round and this whole wide awful world trying to get me back on my feet just so it can knock me down again!”

Anger spent, she sighed. It was one of Father’s long, heavy sighs that made his whole body slump afterwards, and she felt a little better.

“Gosh, I know you can’t help it, kitty, but how am I supposed to escape from my problems when you represent everything that caused ‘em in the first place? And I’m starting to think that if I always let you cheer me up, I’ll never learn how to do it proper myself. One day you’re going to break down, kitty, and dad will too, and I need a part of me ready to go it alone—to laugh and cry and play and hurt all by myself or this world is gonna break me next.”

The Feline said nothing, purred nothing, played nothing. It just looked at her, lovingly, but with no programming for this scenario to tell it what to do next. Anita felt sorry for the bot, not least because she didn’t know what to do next, either.

“I’m sorry, kitty. I know it sounds stupid and maybe it is. But right now I just want to be alone.”

The cat turned silently and left, and Anita guiltily unballed the fists she found at her sides. Her knees weakened and she stepped down from the lounge, now mournful and empty and tired—so very tired. She had given today all she had and lost, and now there was only a shell of Anita left, an anaemic interface personality that could walk and talk but no longer felt much of anything, and she was sure this would be so forevermore.

Father kept a small stack of blankets by the lounge, in case of heating failures rather than company, and Anita shakily leant down to grab one. As her fingers grasped the blanket, they brushed against something else, something furry still but different, and she looked at it and froze. Father had placed her bear, her small brown bargain bear, atop the stack of blankets.

Was he hoping she would see it again?, she wondered. Or was it a surrender, stuffing the bear somewhere out of the way where it wouldn’t bother her? It didn’t matter, for nothing mattered, but she briefly remembered her dad wiggling its stubby little arms, and she loved him for it and knew that he loved her.

A heartbeat passed, and then another, and finally she picked up the bear and dragged her blanket over to the window.

Setting down beside the glass, she pulled the blanket over, clutched the bear in tight to her chest and in no time at all fell fast asleep, still gazing out towards the Plaque.

    “You bastard.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “My KPIs. You almost got me. Good one.”
    “I don’t know what you mean. Was there something wrong with them?” Matheson genuinely quizzical. A fine actor, or—
    “Come on,” Pincio chastises him, dragging a cursor through the email. “Emptiness of desk? Return of company vehicle? Har-har. Swing me the real ones.”
    “Those are the real ones.”
    Gravity ratchets up a notch, forcing Pincio’s brow into a truthfinding furrow. Matheson’s forehead likewise wrinkles, but in bemusement, not play, his eyebrows tipped-over question marks that at last conceive the possibility in Pincio’s mind that the man truly is playing it straight. Then—
    “Then what the hell is this? This looks like a termination checklist.”
    “Ah! No, never,” reassures Matheson, who is at last able to chalk the conversation up as Pincio’s problem, not his. A simple matter of employee anxiety. “We’re all family here at Terklee’s. The company is just undergoing a realignment. Going back to our roots, core competencies... nothing to worry about.”
    “Request account closure from IT..?” says Pincio, leafing through the affronts as vigorously as one can digitally leaf. “This is a Terklee’s core competency?”
    "It's about being agile.”
    “Confirm unused leave to be paid out..?”
    “We are operating in a complex economic environment.”
    Pincio steams. Matheson lifts a hand that makes it halfway to the man’s shoulder before being preemptively shrugged off, then smoothly reversing course—as though it had only ever intended to reach chest height—and settling back by Matheson’s side against an overlong reversible leather belt that pokes out like an uncut ziptie.
    “Jim, there is no way in the world that this is a serious list of performance metrics. Somebody is fucking with me. How are you not seeing this?”
    Fucking is a mistake. Matheson will tolerate anxiety—we’re all family at Terklee’s—but never an appearance that everything is not under control. Matheson the Manager is managing the situation, thank you, Lena, who is spying through the balustrade with INNOVATE stenciled across it. His hands rise to perch on his hips, left hand cocked behind the belt. Draw in three, two...
    “Those are your KPIs, Pincio. The market decides, not me. This is the direction we are moving in as a team and I need to know if you’re going to play ball or spit the dummy.”
    The mixed metaphor clips Pincio’s unpatted shoulder, spins him on his heels so his return shot goes astray. “And if I don’t meet the KPIs?”
    “You’ll be put on a PIP.”
    “Say I don’t meet the PIP targets.”
    “You would be fi— let go.” Matheson smirks with confidence that he has just averted the one potential blunder remaining for him in the conversation. Cleanup duty now. Erotically denied, Lena swivels back to a document she hasn’t edited in months.
    “So my job is to prepare for getting fired, and if I don’t do my job I’ll be fired. Do I have that about right?”
    “Roles change.”
    “Has yours?”
    Matheson’s grin is trying to pierce his ears. “My job is to take care of you, Pincio! We’re all family at—”
    Pincio’s broken hand is the best he’s ever felt.

     In our village, the custom was to float all problems down the river. An elder would etch your worries on sal bark and cast them into the water at dawn. Then fisherwomen by the ocean would look for aloft bark and scoop it in their nets. If your problem made it downstream by evening, it was worth further effort or arbitration. If it caught on a branch or rock and vanished, or swept out to sea through the fisherwomens’ grasp, it was time to move on.
     Over time, we caught fewer and fewer problems. The rains coming over the pass grew stronger and the river faster with them. A road connected our village to a market and soon we had scarcely any fisherwomen left. Even our problems grew weaker—the sal were cut down for timber, leaving only younger trees with bark that crumbled in our elders’ hands. Day by day, it became harder to hang onto our worries. And we learned to let them go.