The Sealed Temple

“Just as a pool is of little use when the whole countryside is flooded, the Book is of little use to us now. So we will read it everywhere. Together we will find it on the pillars, on the walls, on the street itself. It is present all around us.”

At some level I know he is here to help me; or at least I believe he is sincere in his wish to help. But I am still hesitant to trust him completely. He is a stranger, a complete unknown, a kind of latent danger walking beside me. I look away even as he walks by my side.

***

A large group of school children in uniform gather right in front of us. The boys wear green shirts and blue shorts, the girls wear blue shirts and brown skirts. A line of buses waits at the end of the block to take them somewhere else, a field trip of some kind.
I overhear the children talking.
“There is no God,” a boy says, “no truth, no spirit, no moral order. Nothing. The basis of life is sex. What else can it be?”
“Lust is the highest that life can offer,” a girl answers in a mocking tone.
“Fuck ‘til you drop!” another boy says. And they all laugh.

***

I see a single half lit gas lamp at the northern gateway to the Sealed Temple. ‘Maybe there is water behind these doors, maybe there is blood.’ Maybe there is only solitude.

“You know me” he says.
I nod. I know what he means but I can’t explain it, even to myself.
Without a pause, he continues:
"I think of you most often when I'm in airports. It’s the same for you."

I see a white ghost standing by a stone pillar. I see her as somehow everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of the Sealed Temple. She's missing a face, part of her head, her arms, parts of her hip and leg. She is still recognizably a woman even through the thick scales that cover her skin. I sense that she cannot be pierced or burned, she cannot be wet or dry, she can barely exist.

***

“The Book says:
You will see a large skeletal bat flapping its dark wings above your head. You may look up but only briefly. If you look at it too long, it might look back at you. Then all will be lost..."

***

September 26

A second cracked pillar was discovered today.
At the base of the cracked pillar I found a little white bird. The bird was missing a wing and had a black mark above the eyes, on its head and on its beak. I took a photo of the black mark. I had seen this black mark before painted on a sidewalk. A small black box. Some kind of icon.

The Builder says the pillars were constructed in January. The cracks could have happened any time after that. The Temple is expected to remain closed.

***

(With my old friend, I once met a man who taught people how to meditate. I sat among other young people that my friend had invited and I quietly listened to the man talk.
At one point the man looked at me and asked me if I had read the Book of War and Understanding. I said I had read some passages but I had never read the whole thing.
He looked at me quietly for a long time and then said:
"There's no need to read it, you know? The Book is all around us right now if you only look carefully - if you know how to look."
Later we did a group meditation. He asked us to imagine the night sky. I looked up within my mind and I saw that the stars had become numbers, zeros and ones flashing in the dark. I saw them glittering over a long cement bridge that was also covered in lights.
I heard his voice then, talking very quietly to all of us:
"This is a liminal place, a space of transition. Like an airport or a train station. A place where you are not there yet but you are no longer here.")

***

The Builder says the Temple has become a place where people feel afraid.
“It's just not a safe place for kids or families. We have missed the mark. We have missed our opportunity.”

***

(From the distance I saw the dome of the inner sanctum, covered in yellow and black. I couldn’t find my way inside that day. I might never be inside. Not even within my mind. The trees waved in the wind up above me, like a forest suspended in the air - a forgotten paradise floating in the sky.
The meditation teacher said: “You will return to this place many times. This place is yours. As you return to it, it will become more and more specific, more and more real. Eventually you may not be able to tell any difference between what you think is real and this place you have created in your mind.”)

***

The Builder made very clear promises.
“You will be able to enter and leave the Temple at any time. For periods of seconds, minutes, hours or years. Enter at any time. Leave at any time. The choice is yours.”

***

(I saw a simple greeting written in orange letters. It was nailed over a door made of silvery steel.
Large orange letters with an exclamation mark to emphasize them: “Welcome!”
But the doors were closed and the greeting was empty and touched with a melancholic sadness.)

***

(I met a man by the side of the road. He asked me if I had read the Book of War and Understanding. I told him I hadn't. I said: “I’ve read some pages here and there. Or people have read them to me. But no, I have never read the whole thing.”
He smiled and said: "No need to read it now. That time has passed. Instead, I will guide you through it. We will walk together around the perimeter of the Sealed Temple and the Book will reveal itself to us. Its pages are even now wrapped around the Temple and over the streets that surround it. The Temple may never open again. But all that matters is that the Book is easily accessible. You can walk by it and not be aware of what you see. I will show you how to find it and I will show you how to follow the shifting shape of its thoughts.")

***

I see crystalline flowers flipping back and forth on elastic stems, a dance of wind and weight and color, a gentle teasing - the flowers get very close to each other but they never touch.

***

“The Book says:
You will see three musicians made of bronze and silver dancing slowly through time, so slowly they may seem to be standing still; but the movement will always be there, the dance will continue. You will see bolts holding their limbs together and the curves of their bodies will draw shapes over the sky. The musical pulse will be so slow as to be physically heavy, the beat will be so long as to be lost for days… and even longer.
These musicians have no attachments. They are equally disposed towards their family, towards their enemies, towards their friends, to those who support them and to those who are hostile, to the good and the evil alike. They are unaffected by the results of their music;
even while playing, they really do nothing at all.”

***

I see a black tree in the shape of a church. A sign on the tree announces that this is a public place, a place where anyone can sit, where anyone can talk and rest and meditate.
But it warns that there will be no sleeping here. Sleeping is not allowed.

“You ask yourself who I am, how is it that you know me, how is it that I know you.
What I can say is: of all that measures, I am time. I am the destroyer of all; my hunger consumes the world. But my hunger never ends, and the world is infinite.”

I see triangles over cubes over rectangles over more triangles, pure shape, pure form. I sense that this is where it all comes from, and this is where it all goes.
I sense the man nodding even while I look away. I haven’t said anything out loud.

Whenever I turn around to see him, his face has been subtly transformed, as if the light is changing it. It makes me feel dizzy, confused. It makes me feel as if, even while walking outside, I am alone in a small room with this one other person, a familiar stranger, someone I can almost recognize.

***

September 25

Today a crack was discovered in a steel beam beneath the hanging forest. The beam is on the eastern side of the third level of the Temple. The entire Temple was immediately evacuated and closed.

***

“The Builder fights for his creation, knowing he has no way of winning. But he does it anyway. The worse thing that could happen is for him to deny his destiny, his true nature as a Builder. He would then be lost, lost in an endless ocean, a ship without a port. He could stay lost for a very long time, even forever.
The only way to avoid this aimless drift is to continue to be a Builder, even if he is now the Builder that failed. He will forever be remembered as a failure.”

***

“The Temple was a lively place for a brief time. There were two restaurants and a bar, which was happily and noisily patronized at night. There were two stalls actively selling newspapers, magazines, sandwiches, drinks, candy and cigarettes. The stalls were open from dawn until late at night. (Of course, the Temple itself was open at all times.) People constantly circulated in and out. Many of them simply wanted to have a look inside. There was once an arcade located close to the third gateway. The arcade was seedy, as was the surrounding area outside.
I used to play cards in the arcade. I would play for an unusually long time. When nobody was around to play with me, I would just arrange the cards in different orders. In some way they spoke to me in a language only I could understand. On one card was a white flower with wide open eyes, a white flower sliding up on waves of red and yellow. Another card had a single dripping blue point, under it there were blue curving handwritten letters.”

***

“There is a sign that clearly states our destination is beyond reach. It is painted in light green letters over a surface of dirty white metal. It has recently been repainted in red emphasizing its primordial warning. The hanging forest has many gateways, many ways to enter, many ways to leave. Today they are all closed. We don't know if they will ever open again.”

***

(Suddenly it becomes clear. We should have died that night. That was the night of our death. The night when the soldiers took us away. Suddenly I don’t see it as something bad that could have happened, but simply as something that should have happened, something predetermined and certain, an integral piece of the overarching framework of reality.
But we didn’t die. And from then on we have lived in a kind of after life, a life beyond death that leads to a kind of flight, a levity that allows us to fly freely above life.)

***

He speaks again:
“When your mind finally overcomes the confusion of good and evil, of certainty and solid absolutes, you will attain a state of holy nonchalance. Then, and only then, you will be able to hear the things you hear, and see the things you see. Until then you will remain blind.”

I see a couple of giant bloodshot eyes. They stare up and out from under a giant leaf. It seems to me as if they are full of hunger and yet they also hold a certain hint of doubt. The mouth is hidden by the leaf, the head is absent.
I see tall long rectangles of darkness surrounded by pillars of gray stone. I feel a sense of solid permanence. People come and go all around me. The Temple remains.

“You have always enjoyed talking with mysterious strangers who stop you on the street, isn’t that right? Sometimes they speak to you as if they know you. Right? I am just one more. Just like the others. And you can listen to me, just like you have listened to others before.
I am the process and the pain; I am a living drug and the sound that emerges from the breakdown. I am a kind of gift and the fire which consumes it. And you? You happen to be the one to whom this is offered. Today. Right now.”

I see concentric circles around a black box. We stand together at its immediate perimeter. There are other larger circles around us, larger and larger circles getting lost in the distance. We are so close to the center and yet the Temple remains sealed.

***

“The Book says:
You will see flowers birthing interstellar biological spaceships and complex sentient servants made of light. You will see a living garden of delights extending in all directions.
Here you will learn of the five elements, the five elements necessary for the completion of every wish and effort. You will need the body, constructed from binaries that flash across the night. You will need the means, which are predetermined and remain steady. You will need the mind, through which the garden will lose its randomness. You will need the action that may lead you to fall into a state of knowledge. And you will need the secret will, which you must never allow to fall into decay. These are the five elements in all possible actions, right or wrong, good or evil, selfish or selfless, dark or bright.”

***

August 10

After so many years of work, the Temple is about to open to the general public. It is six levels tall. Two additional levels are underground. There is a hanging forest above it and around it, and giant metal spires reach up to the sky like frozen rocket ships. The perimeter is covered in a kind of lacy shawl - a reminder that something fluid and feminine lives among these heavy towers of concrete, among these rivers of steel and asphalt. The insides of the Temple are composed of curving paths that lead visitors through different chambers and halls. In order to create a structure that blurs the distinction between roof and ground, the hanging forest integrates vegetated hills with giant domes that allow light to go through to the halls below.
A solitary woman in a dark thick jacket and a knee length skirt waits for the doors to open for the very first time. She tightly holds onto her purse.

***

(As I continued to see the glittering stars above the cement bridge, the meditation teacher spoke again: “All these visions before you are radiations of your own thoughts. These are your thoughts shining down upon you. They haven’t come from anywhere else or anyone else. They’re yours and yours alone. Don’t become attracted to them- don’t become weak or afraid. Stay in the mood of a man witnessing his own body drifting down a river. Don’t try to grasp at anything. Don’t try to stop the flow of the water.”)

***

(Many years later I found myself inside a small plane. Beneath us was the city I saw when I was a boy. I recognized the clock tower, the bridge and the waters of the bay. I could even see the dome of the temple, the spires seemed so close I felt the urge to reach out and touch them. To my young self, this looked like an exotic and romantic place. I could see masses of people going everywhere, a throng of ants moving in all directions. A boy in a sleeveless jersey and long blue shorts, a woman in a blue dress that showed her bare shoulders, a tall black man wearing a white hat backwards, holding a phone in his hand.
With me in the plane were two young girls I barely knew. They were looking for a man I used to know; an old friend, a friend I hadn’t seen in many years. They had asked for my help in finding him and I had agreed. From the plane, we looked in every corner, every street, every empty lot. But it was impossible to find him no matter how carefully we looked and by the time we landed, I was ready to give up. I felt as if we were hungry ghosts looking for something we would never find.
Later that night, the girls managed to find my old friend in the flashing darkness of a dance club.
Both of them rushed towards him with wide open eyes and mouths. My friend looked like a giant next to them, a thick solid brown giant covered in tattoos and scars. They looked like vicious tiny wasps running after him. It then became clear that they were very angry and they were looking for some kind of payback or revenge. If I had known this, I would never have agreed to help them in their search. I left the club right away, unwilling to be part of this unfolding scene. I heard later that there was violence and blood in one of the club’s bathrooms. My old friend got taken away by the police and I never saw him again.
I felt sympathy for him. I knew what it was like to be taken away by fearsome men with guns. One night my mother and me got taken away. We were meant to die that night. It was all agreed and pre-established. But somehow we didn’t die. There’s a kind of privilege in living beyond the night of your own death. I see us now as ghosts, beings beyond death whose only goal is to explore the dark, to search and search, without any clear sense of what we are looking for or what we can find.)

***

“I remember when I’d stop in at a store in the lower level to buy candy, nuts, juice, magazines and even a plant. I loved to walk past the cocktail lounge and look inside.”

***

A thin old woman approaches us. She holds an even thinner old cat in her fragile hands. She looks at me and speaks:
"She's getting so thin. I've tried wet food and animal vitamins. I took her to the vet. He offered nothing but a lack of bright ideas. We've lived together for 9 years. She helped me find a home. She never judged me... she was the best friend I ever had! Maybe there’s still hope somewhere nearby, somewhere I can't find at the moment"
And then she walks away.

***

“The Book says:
I have given no persons permission to sleep, lie or in any way remain within the doorway to my Temple while the doors remain closed.
It must be understood that perception is higher than matter, and your mind is higher than your perception. Above your mind is the sign, and above the sign is the eye. Once you know what is most high, let the eye remain open. Read the sign above your head: ‘Wake up’
Once awakened your first impulse will be to triumph over your enemies. Don’t forget. This is not just the Book of Understanding. This is also the Book of War. It is not enough to Understand. It is also necessary that you fight. It is precisely through this violent victory that you will know
that you have finally come up from the abyss of deep sleep. It is only through the violent struggle that you will finally open your eyes.”

***

(I can’t help but think of her, of her hopes and dreams, of the things she was told and the things she believed. She still believes she can unseal the Temple, or that she must try. Or that she must appear to be trying.
At this moment, I know that I don’t need to change anything. The Temple is precisely as it is and as it will be. As it should be. As it ever was.
I can explore it, I can walk its long perimeter, I can find new things each time I come around. Here and now I live at the doors, I brush my hands at the gates, I feel the subtle shaking of the pillars.)

***

“I understand it’s hard to look at me. But listen. Something that may seem like poison at first,
may taste like nectar in the end… this is the joy of walking the perimeter, the joy that emerges from a mind at peace with closed gates. I stand next to you, as the taste of cool water when you are thirsty, the radiance of the sun when you are cold. I am the gentle word that alleviates all fears, I am the sound that makes your heart burst, I am the courage that makes you human. I am the smell of wet earth and the red burning of the fire; I am life. You don’t have to turn around yet, but you will.”

***

July 10

“The hanging forest will be open to everyone. The Builder says he envisions school children coming through for tours and lessons under the shade of the tall trees.
‘When you climb high above street level and you find a dark dense forest, your perception changes,’ the Builder says.
The hanging forest will also be accessible by plane.”

***

(When I closed my eyes, I looked for indications for when and where to enter and found all the doors crossed over by yellow tape. All the gateways had been annulled, forbidden, placed on permanent hold. It may take a while before this place opens again, I said to myself.)

***

(I went back to that night of nights, and I saw a ghostly cup which held a tiny blue bottle inside.
I knew immediately that the blue bottle held some kind of deadly poison. It had been waiting so long for us to arrive. I saw again that I had been given a kind of privilege. We had left the blue bottle unopened. Somewhere it still waited for us. But for now we could fly high above the city and explore it without any rush.)

***

(I say the teacher’s words softly to myself: All these visions are radiations of my own thoughts. They haven’t come from anywhere else or anyone else. They’re mine and mine alone.)

I saw four white arrows that pointed towards each other in a self referential circle. The circle wrapped upon itself. At its center was a simple message: "Too much information can make you fall within yourself. It may then be difficult to find a way out."

I saw a mountain of many colors, all these bright waves of color slipping and sliding against each other. I saw a kind of mouth at the top of the mountain, a gaping mouth hinting at a deep hunger, a restless appetite for disintegration.

(I won’t become attracted to these visions, I won’t become weak or afraid. I will stay in the mood of a man witnessing his own body drifting down a river. I won’t try to grasp at anything. I won’t try to stop the flowing motion of the water.)

***

“A struggle developed between two opposing factions - one faction hated the very idea of the Temple; the other faction wanted to defend it.
The faction that hated the Temple wanted to destroy the very process that would lead to its construction. The Builder wanted to set the process moving again but he had made a mistake.
According to the Builder (this was narrated by him many years later, after all these events were almost forgotten history) one night a stranger appeared in his office and spoke to him as if he knew him, as if they were old friends that hadn’t seen each other in a very long time.
The stranger said: ‘You have been an idiot in the way you have dealt with these things.
I will guide you but you have to obey me.’
The Builder, realizing he had no choice, agreed to obey.”

***

(I have always talked to strangers who stop me on the street. Especially the ones that speak as if they know me. I am one of a million diverse forms, an infinite variety of color and shape. Among all those forms, these strangers seem to recognize something in me, something they think they know. The least I can do is listen to what they have to say.)

I see an old chariot left behind by the side of the road. Its sides are a bit rusty, the paint is fading and falling away. But it still retains some element of its former glory. I can almost see the outline of the powerful individual that once commanded it into battle; the supreme War commander who entered the field of battle and offered death while manifesting life.

***

“The Book says:
They should have died. Soldiers took them in the middle of the night. That night they should have died. It would not have been good or bad, it would have simply happened. That is all that death is. Something that happens. And it should have happened to them.
On the perimeter of the Temple there are only two orders of creatures: the perishables and the ever changing forms. They were perishables and they should be gone by now. Now they live beyond their death. Now they live by the side of the road, in the afterlife.”

***

He stands for a moment and points up at a sign above a gateway.
“The Temple is closed. It will remain closed from some time in the past to some time in the future. The secondary streets will also be closed during this window of time. Invisible guardians will remain on site. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.”

I see bright red arrows that curve and turn and point in all directions over a surface of gray and white; broken, cracked, dirty.

“Stay close to me. We can enjoy a kind of solitude as we stray away from the crowd. This is how you read the Book. This is how you seek the knowledge of the Temple while the gates remain closed. Of course you wish to enter. To seek anything else is ignorance. But you will forever remain outside. This is where you belong.”

***

June 5

“Following many years of construction, the Temple is almost ready to open.
A dirty homeless man outside the construction site loudly proclaims its imminent closure:
‘The pillars will shiver and crack, the beams will start to break. The Temple may open but its glory won’t last long! Once it closes, it will be closed indefinitely. Entire generations will come and go and the Temple will remain closed!’
The Builder continues to struggle but he has a growing sense that he has no chance of success. He continues to struggle anyway. The worse thing that can happen is for him to simply surrender. He would then be lost, like a ship in an endless ocean, and he would stay lost for a very long time.”

***

The Builder once claimed that he had seen a giant female creature made of black ink
bathed in rainbow blood. By that point nobody paid any attention to anything the Builder had to say. He was at best an obscure joke, at worse a pathetic figure erased by time. His head was bent low and he was getting ready to die. His face was a mask of deep regret and sorrow.
In a voice barely louder than a whisper, he said:
“Both of us were naked, together. She was being very playful and flirtatious. I didn’t understand why. Why would she come back to visit me after all this time? ‘Here’s what I can finally tell you. There is no God,’ she said to me, ‘no truth, no spirit, no moral order. Nothing. The basis of life is pleasure; what else could it be? Lust is the highest that life can offer.’
I refused to make love to her and eventually she got very quiet. Her expression was a mixture of sadness and anger. Then she made her way out of my room through a rip in the red fabric that formed the walls. Neither of us ever said goodbye.”

***

(One day I received a single written note from an old friend I had not seen in a very long time. The note had only a single word written on it: my friend’s name and an exclamation mark. I closed my eyes and pictured him floating on the surface of a tall blue wave or maybe sitting on a small fishing boat off the coast of El Salvador. I saw him putting on a black hat. Something I might have seen in a children's book. I sat in front of him, eager to finally talk to him again.
I tried to tell him something I had seen, something I had been wanting to say for many years but I had never been able to say it. It was hard to say it - not just hard, but impossible. So I mostly listened as he told me about his life off the coast of El Salvador and where and how he had found the black hat.
Later that night we played with a set of cards with pictures on them. We played for a hours and hours. We both kept arranging the cards in different sequences. One card had a bridge floating over green cubes. The cubes repeated endlessly in all directions. Another card had a few clouds on it. Another card had a few birds. Another card was just a picture of an empty sky.)

***

(When I think back, I imagine a small room. There’s one other person in the room with me. Their face keeps on changing subtly - sometimes it’s a man, sometimes it’s a woman - sometimes I recognize the face, sometimes it seems to be a complete stranger. The light keeps on changing.
I don’t know how long I’ve been in this room. But I know I’ve been talking and talking and talking for a very long time.)

***

“The Book says:
You will see a green arrow wrapped around a broken circle. The arrow will come from nowhere and it will point to nowhere. The inner circle will be broken but complete. Above it, in large block letters you will see the word: system.”

***

During an afternoon walk, I meet a man on Market Street. He stands behind a table covered in books and pamphlets. He asks me if I have read the Book of War and Understanding. I tell him I have read some pages.
“When I was young, my mother would read it to me. She was always into these kinds of things. But I have never read it in its entirety.”
He says: "You should read it. I will give it to you. But I will do more than that. I will guide you through it. All the stories and poems in the Book are written on the walls of the Sealed Temple. But they are hard to see and hard to comprehend without the codes hidden inside. You know, the Temple may never open again. But I will show you how to read the Book anyway. The young think that knowledge and action are different, but I will show you that they are the same. I will show you how to find the Book through action, and I will show you how to follow the shifting rhythm of its thoughts."

***

(I had thought of the Temple as a place to meet, a place for people to come together, to find each other and then leave. But maybe these meetings were too fleeting, too fast. I had thought of it as a kind of hive, a dome covered in curved yellow lines over a textured black background. Maybe at the boundary between yellow and black there was a secret entrance. But I didn’t have the power to open this secret passageway, even if I imagined that I knew of its existence.)

***

As we walk, I overhear a couple talking among themselves.
“In the end, the Builder is real.”
“Yes, based on the story he tells in this book, he could be the author himself.”
“No, but the thing is… that doesn’t prove anything.”
“No, nobody is talking about proving anything… we’re only talking about what we’ve seen, what we have felt through our intuition. Of course none of it is real. It ultimately makes no sense.”

I see paths that wrap around themselves like snakes, I see a multitude of cars driving upon gray surfaces. All the cars are red and the paths have no entrances or exits.

***

“The Book says:
You will find yourself underwater; your will paralyzed, your mind confused. There will be a red squid on your right and a blue fish to your left - the water will be clear but dense. You will feel a yearning to stay there, to close your eyes and slowly float downward.”

***

February 15

“The roof of the Temple will be covered by a hanging forest. It is our intention that this forest should become a kind of liminal space of transition for the many who come to visit. Similar to an airport or a train station but, we hope, with a deeper resonance. We wish to inspire a feeling of being suspended between the known and the unknown. Giant spaceships will land here and you will be able to stand next to these spaceships. ‘It will be a true miracle when it is complete’ said the Builder during a conference. ‘Anyone will be able to enter and leave the Temple at any time. They will be able to remain inside for periods of seconds, minutes, hours or years. We will be ready and equipped for all possibilities.’”

***

I was walking on Fremont street one afternoon when I found a kind of handwritten map that outlined the city in a very rough way. I noticed that certain blocks of Market street had been marked with a peculiar little symbol, a small black box. On the back of the map, in barely legible handwriting, were the words: "don't try to find me"
I walked into a supermarket and found something to drink. Then I very slowly made my way towards Market street.

***

The thought keeps on recurring within me. ‘He is here to help me.’ But I remain unsure, suspicious, afraid. So I still look away. Even as we continue to walk together in circles, large concentric circles.

***

“The Book says:
I will give you two measurements. With them you will construct the black box. The measurements are two and four fifths and eight and a half. That will be all I will tell you.
You may have to work on this for a very long time. As long as the project remains unfinished you will be a ship lost at sea unable to find a port. If you renounce your wish to finish, there will be hope. The wish itself is an obstacle. As long as you continue to work, there will be hope.
Strangers will say they want to help you, and some of them will be thieves and some of them will be lost and hungry and some of them will be friends but only friends and nothing more and some of them may actually help. Those will be very few and far between.
Above all, do not despair, do not fall into sleep. If and when the box is finally finished, you will hold it close to your face, close to your ears and eyes. You will then see a golden circle slowly come to life around you. And large glowing flowers will glitter before your eyes. Large orange letters above your head will announce your arrival.”

***

The man stops walking and turns his head. I stop as well, just as he stops.
“Turn towards me. It’s time.” He says.
I turn hesitantly.
“What do you see?” he asks me.
I am unable to answer out loud. What I see are infinite mouths and arms, but only one man. I see infinite eyes but only one face. I see one body pregnant with all possible forms. I see him everywhere, without beginning, middle, or end. And yet he is here, now, under the sun. Finite, vulnerable, fragile. 
His eyes are shining with tears; his mouth is about to open but he has said enough. The Temple stands behind him glittering in an array of bright colors, its long spires touch the sky.
I look at him and my heart opens painfully. I have lost all sense of place or time.
“Do you remember me?”
“Yes, I do.” I finally answer. "I think of you most often when I'm in airports. When I’m getting ready to fly."

Anything Goes

My grandfather used to have a building where he would do weird shit.
The sign above the storefront claimed that they made and sold shoes; this was back when shoes were made with leather and thread and skilled hands. There were generations of knowledge flowing through each decisive movement of those worn and callused fingers. I spent my early years watching them move, a rough ballet that smelled of grease and men and cigarettes. 
Later, as a young man, I tried to capture those hands in drawings and photographs, never quite able to capture the dimly lit afternoons where the light would filter in lazily off the sidewalk surfaces, or the silence that pervaded the space, the reverence they had for what they created.
Those dusty old men working behind the counter were my family, the worktables littered with scraps of pungent leather and metal tools became the fodder of my dreams. The shoe polish-stained fingertips and aprons, rough wrinkled faces that kept their eyes on their work, their tongues relaxed and silent.
My grandfather would give us new boots or dress shoes as birthday presents and he would teach us how to care for them with polish and bristles and tender attention so that they could shine like new.
So I know that sign outside the building was not a lie. They did make shoes in that old place with the brick façade and black wooden door.
But I know they were doing other weird shit in there too. Someone was.

There was a basement in the building.  I was not supposed to go down there, that was always clear. No one ever warned me, not grandfather or any of the other men there, nothing was ever said. It was more of an open understanding. I was not to venture beyond that door.
Although I knew this, I was a curious child, and the forbidden lair had a pull I could not deny. I had learned to blend into the dark shadows of the building, to step in time with the thumping needle of the sewing machine and the sporadic coughs of the men at their benches. I could open the door to the basement silently, and descend down the narrow dark steps into the dark chamber.
There was one tiny window at the top of the wall which faced the street at sidewalk level. Whenever someone would walk by the light inside would dance erratically on the brick walls. I listened intently for the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps.
I went down there only a handful of times in my whole childhood. The memories and sensations from those explorations have sunk to the deepest part of me and colored my vision.
In this forbidden space I once found a tooth.  Another time a red cloth napkin with gold jagged symbols, another time I discovered a small shell and a ball of hair in a little crevasse in the wall where the cement had broken apart between the bricks.

Whatever was happening there, it was not safe. In a dream one time just a few years ago I saw him emerge from the door at the top of the stairs with a bloody mouth. He looked at me. I was sitting in a chair just beside the door. He said, 'anything goes,' as he walked past me, holding up one single finger.
I woke with my hands fluttering, I gazed out the window, remembering the lingering smell of candles and matches on the brick walls. His silence, his deference to a room he never referred to, to a past never revealed but for one word, 'Nantucket.'

Tonight I will go back into the dream and tell him, 'you don't have to hide from me. I cannot be rattled.'

The Twelfth Hour

Void of stars. How can that be?
I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory…
what could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
The trouble is that I can’t remember.
It seems that I fell asleep.

When I was young and the sky was still littered with stars, the Sorcerer came to visit Yantel. He had been seeking a pupil for many years, and no doubt he visited many other villages and hamlets and perhaps even great cities, all to no avail. There were a handful of applicants for the job in my village and a crowd gathered to witness the trial.
The Sorcerer lined the prospective apprentices up. To each one he posed the same question:

“Who is the great magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green?”

“You are, oh great Askander!” one tried and the Sorcerer shook his head and moved on.

“It must be Philoneous the Second, council to the wise King in Arander.” Tried another. Again the sorcerer merely shook his head and continued down the line.

Various mythic Sorcerers and fairytale witches were named. One somber youth suggested it was the King of the Gods, but all were met with a shake of the head.

“No apprentice here.” The sorcerer announced and the crowd sighed with disappointment.

I laughed and the Sorcerer turned and caught my eyes with his. There were stars in his eyes too, if I remember rightly, or at least there was the fire that burns in stars.

“What is your answer?” he asked.

“Mine? I, I’m not an applicant.” I stammered.

“But you think you know the real answer. Tell me.”

I swallowed, slowly recovering myself.

“The answer is me. I am the magician who makes the sky blue and the grass green.”

“Tell me why you think that is the answer.” The magician demanded.

With a shrug I obliged.

“Well, have you ever had a dream? How do you know that this is not a dream? If life is a dream, if I am a dream, then I am also the dreamer, and if so then I am responsible for giving sky and the grass their color.”

“But life is life, it is not a dream.” One of the flustered applicants informed me.

“Then you have not dreamed as I have dreamed. Nor lived life as I have lived it.” I retorted.

The young man began to object again but the Sorcerer waived a dismissive hand at him and said to me,

“Get your things and come with me if you are ready to learn The Terrible Way and one day become a Sorcerer.”

I did not tell my parents I was leaving, they wouldn’t have let me go, and I did not gather my things. I left the village right then with Askander. I left my family’s land and the sheep it was my job to tend and the girl my parents would have wanted me to marry in a few years. I left my brothers and bread baking in the oven and warm sleepy afternoons watching clouds pass over the hillsides. I asked my younger brother to tell our parents goodbye for me.  With Askander leading the way I walked out of the village and along a lonely road and up the mountain path under millions of stars and a new white moon. There were most definitely stars then, and if the sky was a color, then it was indigo.

I spent 12 years in Askander’s tower doing as I was told each day. There were stars in all of that time. Most often I was told not to do this or that. Do not open that book. If a door appears in the west end of the tower, do not open it. If a maiden arrives and begs for help or sanctuary, do not let her in and do not go out. Do not eat garlic. Do not drink wine. Do not touch my hat.

There was so much that I did not do, but there were some things that I did. Mostly sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing, emptying chamber pots, feeding goats and chickens, weeding the garden. Sometimes, however, I was shown how to do something extraordinary, though I think I occasionally failed to notice precisely how extraordinary they were at the time.

I learned how to breathe as the dragons breathe and walk in the shadow land between worlds. The technique for turning lead into gold was revealed to me but I found it hard to master and was stuck in practice each day. I also learned the names of many stars and looked at them through a magickal glass studying their movement across the sky. Thus I know they were there then, for I was a careful observer of all of their habits and color.

I worked from dawn until midnight each day with time split between chores, basic education, and my more obvious magickal studies and practices. There were never enough hours in the day to complete the tasks given me, and I was always tired when it was time to lay my head upon my pillow of straw. Askander himself was tireless. He worked furiously at his alchemical practices all through the morning as I did my chores, saw to my education through the afternoon, resumed his own research in his vast library as I practiced my magickal work, checking in on me from time to time to critique and adjust my practice, and then when I lay down to sleep he continued his own work all through the night, never sleeping a wink.

In 12 years Askander never slept. I would, now and then, awake in the night and tip toeing from my chamber, observe him on the balcony in his study of the night sky with the magickal glass, or find him creating charts of the stars, or maps of the shadows. Some nights I dared not open a closed door, transfixed in terror of the frightful sounds and voices vibrating through the walls. Other nights I would go down to the garden in the walled courtyard to see the sparks of light showering out of the windows of Askander’s chambers at the top of the tower. Most nights I slept, too exhausted to entertain curiosity.

The night came, I remember there were still stars, when Askander told me that he would sleep. I was now told that Askander would at last take his respite for a period of 24 hours. He unveiled for me a device for keeping track of the time. I was charged with remaining awake as he slept, and awakening him by ringing a bell after the 24^th hour.

He went into his room and lay down on his much unused mattress. I covered him with the blanket and watched him close his eyes and fall almost instantly asleep. Sitting with him for a while my eyes scanned over the titles upon the spines of the walls of books surrounding us. When I was sure that he was asleep I stood and removed one volume from the shelf and leafed gently through the pages before sliding it softly back into place. Askander was truly deeply asleep. It had certainly been a lonely 12 years, but now for the first time in so long I was actually alone.

I went out on his balcony and beheld the constellations blazing bright. I was struck then, by the certainty that each star was a Sorcerer just as Askander and I, and that we drew power and light from one another. In 12 years I had felt cut off from the world and alone with my teacher who was sometimes my beloved father and sometimes an unbearable tyrant as the situation demanded. Now I saw that I could never be alone, that we were multitude, that I was one of a school of stars populating the great abyss.

Lost in thought I nearly did not hear the soft weeping coming from below, but soon it distracted me from my reverie. Peering down I saw a young woman in a torn dress tapping on the tower door. It seemed clear that she had been through some ordeal, so tattered were her garments, so pale her tear streaked cheeks. I hurried down the spiral staircase. I opened the door.

“Please sir, we were attacked by bandits and my father was killed. I escaped but have been lost in these mountains for days. I am so hungry. Can you not help me?”

I invited her in. She was cold so I clothed her, and hungry so I fed her, or rather I showed her to the kitchen larder and she cooked for us both. I had not enjoyed a meal since beginning my apprenticeship as I was the cook, and not good at it. Full and content I sat next to the hearth with her and asked her name. I do not now recall it. She told me that she had seen a bottle of wine in the larder and went to retrieve it. At first I declined when she offered to fill my cup.

“One drink is not vice.” She said as she filled her own cup. I accepted.

 We sipped our wine and watched the flames dance for a while and she began to sing.

It was a beautiful song. One might say, enchanting. It reminded me first of my youth in Yantel, of being a boy watching the grass of the fields sway in the breeze and wondering about the world and the heavens and myself. Then it carried me away to Arander to the white city walls and blue and gold flags whipped by the wind. A princess stood on the wall looking out over the forest, waiting for her father’s return. Inside the forest a starving Cobbler’s son was hunting a golden stag but when the Cobbler’s son drew his arrow the stag saw him and said,

“Spare my life and I will grant you a wish.”

So the youth asked for the hand of the princess. He let the stag go, not really believing his wish could be fulfilled, and left the forest still hungry, but on the road he saw a man besieged by bandits and once more drew his bow. This time he shot true, killing one bandit so the others fled. The man on the road was the King returning from a pilgrimage to the fountain where he had been praying for a worthy husband for his daughter. He brought the Cobbler’s son back to the castle to wed the princess. At the wedding the princess played her lute and sang to her bridegroom with a voice like golden honey. Thereafter she sat the foot of the bed and played for him each night until he fell asleep. On the twelfth night as he was close to slumber, he opened his eyes and beheld an old woman sitting at the foot of the bed, strumming the loot and singing. She was not the fair beauty he thought he had wed, but a gnarled and bent creature with stringy, greasy grey hair hanging limp under her crown. She leered at him with hallow eyes and grinned with a cavernous mouth lacking many teeth.

That was when I realized that my own eyes had shut. Startled, I opened them and found that I sat alone in the darkness before a cold hearth. I searched clumsily in the darkness for a candle and a match. When it was lit I fumbled in my pocket for the time keeping device. Its many moving parts had stopped and the indicator had frozen upon the twelfth hour. How much time had really passed? Full of dread I raced up the stairs to Askander’s chamber at the top of the tower. He was gone. I called out his name. I found the bell and rang it and called for him before I came here to the balcony and beheld the sky. Void of stars.

How can that be?

Even now that I have remembered so much, I am unsure. When was it that I fell asleep? In the field as a child? Have I only dreamed that I was selected to be a sorcerer’s apprentice? Or am I truly the apprentice that failed his master and let all the stars die? My foolishness, my disobedience, my failure to keep my master’s way as it was taught me resulting in disaster. Perhaps I am the Sorcerer himself who is yet to reach the twelfth hour, quietly dreaming of being my own apprentice, letting the fear that he will fail me take sway.  

Or am I really a Cobbler’s son fallen prey to some plot and wed to a witch? Now she sits at the foot of my bed singing me a nightmare of fallen sorcerers and fallen stars. Are any of these dreams more or less dreams than any of the others? More or less real? I search for a reason. I try to trace the lines back in my memory.

What could I have possibly done to turn the sky black?
It seems that I fell asleep, but when?

Origins

He introduced himself as Guisseppe to the Italian waiter- is that what the name Joseph translates to?
“We’re from Livorno.”
When the waiter was gone I asked if he had just made some names up.
“No! That’s where your great-grandmother is from.  A lot of the streets are named after the family- Romero.”
It took him 25 years to tell me that.
“At most the family lived in Egypt for a few generations, but it might have been less than that.” 
I looked around the small elegant restaurant, the twilight of the night seeping in through the plate glass windows.  We were four stories up, the small tea light glittered over the white tablecloths.
I always felt like there was so much they kept from me- why 25 years to mention that the family was from Italy? 
"Your grandfather’s people came from Israel- before it was even called Israel. They lived there before it was even Palestine.”
“What did they call it?”
He was silent.
My mom sat there quietly.  She flipped through some of the free tourist magazines she got from the concierge at her hotel.  She always seemed bored when it came to family history- for years she had deflected questions about immigration and national origin- I wondered if her past was too painful- the father that abandoned her, the other side of the family she rejected after her mother died when she was so young. 
She abruptly put the papers down. They crinkled and we looked at her.
“Do you use your Costco card much?” 
I nodded, stunned momentarily by the banality of the question. 
My dad ignored her. 
“I want to buy a book called The Jews of Egypt.  It’s rare, someone is selling it for 150.00 on Amazon.”
“You should get it, it’s not too much for a rare book.”
“Your grandfather was a Zionist. The dream of the Zionists was to go to Israel and work on the land.  Through history the Jews had never been allowed to own property- that’s why they went into certain professions, like bankers and doctors and merchants.  But the Zionists wanted to be farmers and work the land and be in Israel.”
“Why did it have to be there?  If they wanted to farm, why did it have to be on that particular piece of the planet?”
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Because it's where the Jewish religion started. If they didn’t go there, they might as well go to the moon! It was only place they could go. There was no Jewish population in Egypt until commerce and management brought them back.”
Later we stopped by their hotel room so my mom could get an extra sweater.  My mom asked me if I had talked to any of the old girlfriends from high school. 
“Not since I missed Aryn’s wedding.” 
I saw a look of sadness go over her face and I realized I had said it only to hurt her. 
I could have gone to the wedding if I had really wanted to, but when they withdrew their initial offer to help pay for the trip, I decided against it. 
She lashed back.
“I don’t know what’s important to you anymore, going to a wedding, being in a relationship, starting a career…” 
She trailed off. She had never known what was important to me, not in high school, certainly not now.
They were about to drive me home. My mom turned around and looked back at the room.
“You know, if there’s an emergency, we can ask the hotel to bring in a cot for you to sleep on.” 
I nodded, my mind filling with visions of fires and floods as we walked down the carpeted hallway towards the shiny elevator. 
“Tomorrow we are going to see Les, my old friend from college,” she said. 
“You mean More.” 
My mom looked at my dad with a smile.
“You’ve been saying that for years, his name is not ‘more.’”

The House That Jack Built

People who could be frightened, people who were insecure, people who admired us; these were our prey. We brought them to her house and invited them to play a game with us, a game they had never heard of. It was a game they could not win, a game they could not loose, a game they could not stop. It was The House That Jack Built.

It began sometime in 1990. I had only just become aware of the passage of time, that there were numbers assigned to years. I had found a newspaper in the garage and read a headline about the gulf war. A strange electrical sensation coursed through my body. War. I had heard of war. I changed schools that year and entered into the fifth grade in a program for gifted children. That was when I received my first phone call. That’s when it began.

Other children had called in the past to arrange play dates or invite me to birthday parties. But no one had ever called just to talk to me before. I sat on the dark steps leading into the rumpus room with the black rotary phone between my feet. Brow furrowed, I believe I asked her:
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
“I should go now.” I said, wishing to return to my own inner world, to the sanctity of home and hood.
“Why?” she asked.
“My friend Sarah is coming over.” I told her.

Sarah lived across the street. Sarah and my sister and I had eaten and bathed and played and slept together since I was three years old. There was very little separation between myself and Sarah, myself and my sister, myself and my parents. Just as meals appeared three times a day and bath water ran once after dark, Sarah would appear before noon and we would all play dolls or house or ride bikes up and down the streets or run through the fields playing freeze tag or dance to a Paula Abdul cassette. Other children from the neighborhood might participate or not, but Sarah would be there like sunshine, or spring, or inhalation. It was pre-ordained, habitual, mechanical, natural. I had almost no sense of self. I was the accumulation of these many daily rituals, the appearance and disappearance of these other characters, the texture and variety of landscape, of house and hood.
“Sarah who?” she asked.
“Butler.” I told her.
“The earwig. Tell the little earwig I said hi.” And hearing that sentence uttered in that particular tone, nuanced as it was, changed everything. That phone call was the beginning, although at the time I didn’t know it. That was the beginning of my fall, my descent into the outer world.
Suddenly someone from outside had just created a conspiratorial connection with me. With that utterance, she plucked me from unity and bliss. Sarah was no longer a part of my self. Sarah was an earwig, and she and I could have a laugh at Sarah’s expense. Sarah’s presence in my life diminished. My interest in her as something other than an object of ridicule waned. When her mother remarried and they vanished from the neighborhood a year later, I stood in front of her house feeling the loss, realizing she had been gone for a long time, I had banished her, and now she could never be retrieved.

By 1993 my experience of self had become inverted. My family had moved. There was a new house, a new hood, new kids, a suburban landscape, all alien to me. My parents were strangers as well. Even my own body was unfamiliar. By then I was in middle school and she and I were no longer in the same class. Nonetheless I still received the phone calls, now via a cordless phone that I could carry to my room.
She came to my house to “hang out” or I visited hers. We invented a language composed of two words, “Giba” and “dumbass.” We would converse as if we understood one another perfectly, making observations about those around us, including my sister, most of which were concluded with the word “dumbass”. If my sister attempted to join the conversation and play along, we looked confounded, as though we could not understand her, but we could still communicate with one another, and we would discuss this creature making its attempts to establish contact with us, but we would never speak back to it.

The houses in the new neighborhood were identical. I would marvel over the fact that the boy three doors down was living in a structure of precisely the same shape. As I moved through my own house I was moving phantom-like through his. I would imagine going into his house, which corners I could duck into to go unnoticed as he passed, how I could give him a push down the stairs, his stairs which were identical to my stairs. Or how I might enter his room, identical to my own, while he slept and simply be there, uninvited.

1995. We were high school freshmen. We had some classes together. Sleepovers abounded. She was given the basement floor of her house as a bedroom. It had an exit into the backyard. Our fusion reached its peak. I was now distinctly “I”, a separate, confused, and lonely entity, but together there was a “we”, just “she” and “I” together, and we were ready to unleash our games upon the inferior masses.

We would invite them to her house and pull out a deck of cards.
“Have you ever played the house that Jack built?” we would ask. Invariably they answered “no” or “what’s that?”
Now came the fun. We would invite them to play with us, would shuffle the deck and deal out cards. Then we would play. The only rules in The House That Jack Built were that there were no rules other than those that she and I invented as we went along. Naturally, only she and I knew this, and we would confirm the validity of one another’s plays and confuse and shock those we were playing with.

Gradually, our playmates might begin to suspect that they were the butt of some joke, but we would continue to play with such passion and sincerity that they would doubt their own perceptions. If, smiling, they accused us of making things up, we would assure them that we weren’t, that they’d get the hang of it soon enough, it was really quite simple…
Frequently a card play would be accompanied by a loud pronouncement:
“And this is the house that Jack built!” or “Gone fishing!”
At that point we would collect all the cards that had been “played” in the center, or take away the hand of the other player, or some equivocal gesture of triumph that would leave our victim with the sense of impending defeat. The game would go on endlessly, however, and we’d take pains to steer it away from any form of completion.

Eventually our victim would beg to end the game, insist that they had to stop and we would inform them that there could be no stopping until the game was finished. We would lean in on them, glare menacingly, grin sardonically. Something in the air would change. They could not win, they could not loose, and they could not stop. Desperately some would insist that they had just lost the game, trying to join us in the rule defining, referring back to some similar situation earlier in the game for which we would always have an exception,
“Yes, but you only give up your cards if you have no clubs in hand.” or “No, all the cards must be reshuffled and re-dealt when the eight of spades precedes the queen of hearts.”
Afternoon would turn to evening. Our victim would sweat, grow quarrelsome, or cry.

There were no adults left to monitor either of us at this point in our history. We would decide as school let out to take the bus to her house. On the bus we would select who we would or would not invite for our games.
One night as we walked home from the bus stop we asked a bony acne scarred girl from her neighborhood to come over. Nicole was the kind of innocent who hadn’t learned yet to conceal her emotions. Nicole told us in her high nasal voice, that she would go home and do her homework first, then tell her mother and finally come by around 4:00. She arrived at 3:45. That was the kind of girl Nicole was.

In the basement we sat atop the washer and dryer with Nicole between us taking turns playing with a small hunting knife I‘d coerced from a boy in my Math class. I would pass it to her and she would pass it to me, but we would never pass it to Nicole who watched the blade while talking in short nervous bursts and fingering the hem of her skirt.
Suddenly She grabbed Nicole by the hair and ran the dull edge of the blade along her throat. Nicole gave out a small startled cry. As she was released, Nicole touched her throat, finding it intact, and started to sob. We smiled mockingly. Without a word Nicole grabbed her sweater and pounded away up the stairs and out the front door.

People who could be frightened, people who were insecure, people who admired us; these were our prey. We brought them to her house and invited them to play a game with us, a game they had never heard of. It was a game they could not win, a game they could not loose, a game they could not stop. It was The House That Jack Built and it wore them down, made them loose their hopeful grins, their sycophantic giggles, their pathetic displays of wit or humor.
In the end, they usually begged, especially when we lay the dull edge of the knife against their throats. Most of them believed we would do it by then, after the hours of suspicion turned to self doubt returned again to suspicion. After we had whittled away their trust in us and any tidbits of faith that they had in themselves, they would see the knife, then feel steel sliding against their flesh, and they would believe for a moment that their throat had just been slit. They would sit there wide eyed, waiting for their lives to bleed out.
For some of them, this was the moment when they lost unity, bliss. For others it was just one more crippling blow. And for just a few, it was the first time in a long while that they had lost themselves, completely and utterly vanishing in the moment, only to re-emerge into singularity a moment later, blinking and breathing and staring into our houses, identical to their own.

The Spheres of Galia Part 7

“In my brother Olslo's words, we recognize the strategy of poetry,” the Lucen Master Egrani explained to the small crowd that sat cross-legged upon a plush red carpet in the center of the old stone library deep in the cave of the Othrusa mountains. The scant light that filtered its way through the room was provided by a wrought iron chandelier filled with slowly melting white candles dangling from the stone ceiling. The group gathered were the sons and daughters of Lords, several others that had once been apprenticed to the magician, a few were fresh from the deserts and caves of Vitnu; also among them were a number of young Lucen scribes and a Prince.

Egrani paced around the carpet, moving his hands widely, but slow and fluidly, as though he was swimming through water. “In their most stringent formulations, the poets of the past epochs set forth a magickally charged theory, one which saw ordinary language as an ally of royal oppression.” Egrani hoped up onto a tall wood hewn stool and looked upon his students and a few attending peers with a youthful face. His hair was longish and bleached almost white by the sun and salt of the seas of Southern Astrada in the Second Sphere. His skin, for the same reason, was strikingly dark in comparison. It made his almost straight teeth flash even whiter as he spoke, catching the candlelight. His inconsistent eyes were in the constant, never ending process of shifting from bronze to blue, passing through hues of green along the way, only to then begin the lengthy process of returning to bronze.

“Regardless of what is being said,” he continued in his slow, calm cadence, “use of standard patterns of syntax and exposition effectively rebroadcast, often at a subliminal level, the basic constitutive elements of the social structure-they perpetuate them so that by constant reinforcement, we are no longer aware that decisions are being made.”

He gave the appearance of being no more than 15 years old, with a lean body and smooth, supple face, but he moved with such ease and grace it seemed impossible for him to be so young. He had spent much of his young life in the water riding the AnacarI, the hairless water beasts, which had helped endow him with the physical manifestation of youth, but it was his time in the Lucen pools that allowed this grace to take shape in his mind and presence. For it was there, in the pools, where water is not just water, where molecules transform with ease, that biological bodies mutated into manifestations of the divine.

He continued, “here, the ‘clear’ and ‘orderly’ functioning of language plays the same part in the poets’ magickal mythology that the clear and orderly functioning of secrecy plays in Olslo's view: both are invisible agents of the King, up to no good for as long as no one is looking.”

Prince Suk listened to the young master with a deep sense of awe and just a tiny bit of pride. In a way, he could be considered the boy’s father. Certainly he was his guardian in the physical sense, and had raised and cared for him in the politically neutral Kingdom of Astrada, neighbor to his own Principality in Vitnu. This brief sampling of fatherhood had lasted an accelerated 11 and a half months in which the young baby had grown into a capable teacher. In two weeks they could celebrate the one-year anniversary of Egari’s birth in Taurus. Suk mused that he had in the abstract, participated in Egari’s conception when he penetrated Olslo’s Library in Valance with the scribe Rosh. It was there that Rosh found the “recipe” for Egari. In that sense, Egari was the son of Olslo. The seven sisters in the laboratory at Taurus might be considered his mothers or his grandmothers, or both, with Rosh as his surrogate.

Egrani was not the only child, but he was the first of that initial penetration. His 11 siblings had been born into a variety of households, to a variety of parents throughout the Three Spheres after Egari was successfully brought to term in a matter of 3 months. Even the elusive Illuhuati of the Third Sphere had agreed to foster a child, creating the only child not born to a woman. The Illuhuati’s physiology, being too incompatible with that of a human, required a technology that assembled and gestated the biological data entrusted to them by the seven sisters.

Suk was drawn from his reverie by his foster son’s words, “if language control equals thought control, and thought control equals reality control, then it is not only possible, but imperative to fight the battle for a new reality at the level of language. There, and only there, can real victories be had, as elusive and temporary as such victories may be.”

The Spheres of Galia

They had released a manuscript listing chambers worldwide that the Old Kingdom considered critical to its royal security. This was in the year of the blue Sapphire in the aftermath of the Orzab massacre. The crops were poor that year and the new security tax left the people facing hunger, while the soldiers were sent what bread there was to keep them occupying the deserts of Vitnu on the third sphere. Rumor had it that the perpetrators of the massacre in the capital city were hiding in the arid mountains somewhere in the darkness of Vitnu.

The locations cited in the manuscript from the High Priestess of the Old Kingdom ranged from underwater cities to suppliers of food, medicine and manufacturing materials. A council was summoned to determine the fate of those who had circulated the manuscript throughout the three spheres of Galia. In these meetings the Royal Guard declined to comment on the details of what it called "stolen" writings containing magical knowledge. A local magician called the disclosure "damaging," and said it gave valuable information to the adversaries of the King.

"This is one of many reasons why we believe their actions are irresponsible and dangerous," the magician cried through trembling white whiskers. Even his cloak rippled as if disturbed by a wind, though the great hall was oppressively warm and still.

The scribe Olslo was among those accused of conspiring against the King. His eyes were clear and blue, as placid as a frozen lake. He stood tall at the trial, the son of seven mothers who had worried over his upbringing and education and now were absent in light of his disgrace.

“We felt that this manuscript, along with others, should be available to any citizen of the kingdom, that airing out secrets might help to bring peace to all three spheres by empowering even the lowliest inhabitants of Galia with knowledge. We reproduced the manuscript and others without regard for, or even knowledge of, their content. All information should be available to all beings.”

Even the old magician seemed momentarily stunned by the young scribe’s composure and clear bright voice. He was quick however to re-spin his own webs for netting the support of the council. Olslo would be sentenced to imprisonment in Narion on the second sphere.

Nonetheless, the manuscript had been disseminated throughout Galia. There were many who had become familiar with its content. It was now well known that in it, the High Priestess asked her envoys to help update a list of chambers around the world which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the Royal Kingdom.

The Priestess Amalidia herself was questioned. Though the manuscript was meant to serve the purpose of strengthening security, it could now be regarded as having done the opposite.

“Just who made this manuscript available to the likes of Olslo? He could not have reproduced it without having at some point seen the original. Only the High Priestess and her envoys could have had access to it,” Lord Avin Deloro pointed out to his majesty the King of the Old Kingdom while they hunted the genetically manifested foxus in the revived forest of Avin.

“Your kingdom is ancient and vast. You are the only monarch who can claim rulership of an entire Sphere. It would make an appealing prize for an ambitious woman.” They sat astride their stallions, Lord Avin’s a deep purple, King Domonious’s a resplendent red. It was a strange coincidence unknown to either man that their mounts had been manifested in the same laboratory where Olslo’s seven mothers had conceived, gestated, and birthed him.

Ahead of them the hounds bayed in pursuit of the foxus. “I’ve never known Amalidia to be overly ambitious,” King Dominious said warily through his neat black beard.

“Believe me, every woman in a position of power is there for no reason but ambition. For them there is no brothership such as we know. We must be most wary of our wives and then our magicians, in that order. Amalidia is the worst of both.” King Dominious eyed the landscape through squinted eyes, letting the words roll through him.

Down in the catacombs of Nurk, among the ruins of a long lost civilization of the first sphere, Amalidia sat in her underground tower looking into the darkness. The manuscript had been considered so confidential the envoys had been advised to come up with it on their own: "Posts are not being asked to consult with local strong men in respect to this request," the High Priestess had dictated. In truth only she could posses the manuscript in its entirety. Only she knew of all the chambers it had come to describe. The incomplete manuscript that she had shared with the King was the same that she had leaked to Olslo and the other Lucen scribes. She smiled at her own reflection in the glass window pane. Beyond it, in the darkness, a shinier darkness scuttled through the ruined underground city. Amalidia watched her children moving through the inky depths of the Sphere.

In Narion, on the second Sphere, Olslo toiled in the mines with the other convicted scribes of Lucen. In the gloom, the clarity of his voice and eyes faded. Only there in the throws of despair did he begin to suspect that they had been played as pawns, just like he had once played in the old sphere game his seven mothers taught him in childhood. He had a bit of rope hidden under his bunk. Tonight he thought, would be a good night to die.

In their laboratory, Olslo’s mothers took the information they had gathered when they first conceived Olslo and created him once again. In the laboratory, where the King and his Lord’s fine stallions were born, Olslo was again gestating.

Radical Feet

“DO YOUR PART!”

The letters swept across the face of the floating billboard in a font Dayne recognized as Aero Brazil, something from the pulp adventures of early 20th century North America. Under the excited slogan a there was a picture of a smiling young blonde woman posing with the bulging black hulk of an antimatter gun. Her crisp blue uniform fit her smartly and Dayne felt that she wanted her own breast to stand so pertly at attention, she wished that her lips and cheeks could be so rosy, her eyes so sparkly and blue. She could vaguely remember the ancient black and white films of 1941 and the brighter than life Technicolor of 1952 that her mother had spent hours manipulating on the ComPad, creating new material from the fecundity of publicly accessible digital archives.
That had been before the arrival of the Aeons, before the archives were destroyed and the artists, videographers, musicians, and poets were rounded up and executed. All creative work was banned. The Aeons, emissaries of The Absolute insisted that it was a crime to emulate The Absolute with acts of creation. Creativity was a source of confusion that led to a path of madness like that which led Sophia to steal the creative light of the Pleroma, inseminating herself with it in order to birth Yaldabaoth the architect who in turn created this dimension and the first creatures that inhabited it.

“Where are you now grandfather?” Dayne asked the fallen God under her breath, her feet hurrying away from the billboard, slapping against the concrete with a clack. “They punish the children for the sins of the parents.”
“THE ONLY GOOD ARCHON IS A DEAD ARCHON.”
Another billboard announcement, depicting the Archon Astaphanos being dethroned by the beautiful blue uniformed mob of the New Earth.
Dayne hurried by as it drifted nearer. The children are punished for the sins of the parents. Dayne herself was like Astaphanos, a child of a renegade creator.
“But where are they now Astaphanos? Your father and my mother? Where are they while these angels punish us and pit us against our parents?”
Betrayal was so common. How many shining young faces had proudly delivered their mother or father into the hands of the Aeonic Avatars, other pretty boys and girls in crisp blue uniforms, for a crime such as making up little songs while doing the housework, or whittling a useless little sculpture of an owl? Even the Archon prince Horaios had aided the Aeons after his capture in the pursuit of the terrible architect Yaldabaoth.

“There are no parents in this age, isn’t that right Astaphanos? No brothers, no sisters. An end to family. The end of history.”
Weren’t the sidewalks crowded with the citizens of New Earth? Stations were set up every three blocks or so where a citizen could become a member of the armed forces and fight alongside the stewards of New Earth. One could enlist to help storm the stronghold of Archon loyalists bunkered down on Mars or travel to another sphere of light under the wings of these angels to make war with strange alien demons in parallel worlds. Or one might stay home and police the streets as an Aeonic Avatar.
What will it be Dayne Strothe? The army or the police? A different sort of civil service perhaps? Food industry, garbage disposal, weapons manufacturing? There was an appropriate outlet for that inappropriate urge to create, make antimatter guns or sew little blue uniforms. Forget your mother making videos on the little ComPad, forget the music of Bach, The Beatles, that little band that played in the garage next door…
Administrative work perhaps, making and issuing the papers of identification.

Dayne’s feet carried her swiftly, independent of her mind, clack, clack on the concrete. It was of course always dangerous to walk alone on the street. Only dissidents sought solitude. So hurry, hurry to the place your mind hasn’t fully realized it is traveling to. Ah there it is, now that you see it, you know where you were going, where you meant to go all along…

Dayne slipped into the alley without a hesitating glance over her shoulder. She had been watching the reflections in the glass buildings all along, taking notice of those who did or did not notice her. In the last 8 blocks the beautiful glass buildings and clean but crowded streets had given way to bombed out brick ruins, to buildings of charred plaster and mortar. The streets were empty.
Dayne could remember those films her mother clipped and pasted in the ComPad. In those films, on a street like this, a piece of old newspaper or a plastic bag, or a leaf might have danced a lonesome dance and folded into the gutter.
Not now. There were no newspapers or plastic bags left in the world since before the Aeons arrived, and the trees that were here once had since been burned. It was even more desolate without a desolately drifting newspaper. A little water in the gutter, a few broken windows to search for reflections, but there was no one behind her, no one ahead. So Dayne slipped into the alley without a hesitating glance over her shoulder.
Her feet, her radical feet, carried her to the grimy yellow door. She found herself standing before it, felt her hand lift and tap out a little beat, heard her voice, alien to her own ears, singing waveringly:

“Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine.”

Then the silence rolled over at her feet. The sound of rats scurrying, a sound more silent than silence. Suddenly there was the sound of a bolt scraping and the yellow door swung inward on to a darkness deeper than that of the alleyway.
After a moment she made out the silhouette of a bearded face. It leaned out the door and scanned the alley in both directions and then jerked for her to follow it back into the darkness. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the deeper gloom as he re-bolted the door. Picking up a little saucer upon which a nub of candle glimmered faintly, he motioned for her to follow. They crossed the room entirely concealed in shadow and began the descent down a flight of stairs.
Dayne heard her voice bubble up in her throat once more,
“I am a great granddaughter of Sophia.”
“All of us here are.” The man ahead of her answered and she felt her shoulders relax.
The descent went on and on and Dayne heard the rumble of drums, the wailing of a flute, strange music swirling down in the dark depths. There would be no questions here, no need for answers, no papers of identification. Here perhaps Iao, Sabaoth, Adonaios, and Elaios were hiding from the prying light above.
‘Mother,” she wondered silently, ‘Could you have escaped the executioners? Are you down here, cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting the history of 1941 and 1952? And what about the terrible architect? Is he here too? A golden child nursing at Sophia’s breast, still dreaming worlds for us to inhabit, spheres where we may sing and dance and cut and paste without regulations, without jealous eyes watching?’
The music was growing louder the deeper they descended and Dayne’s feet drummed on the steps, clack, clack, radical feet carrying her to the place she dared not imagine.

Hot House Flowers

Each house had its own unique smell dictated by the habits of those that dwelt within its hardy walls. This one smelled faintly of cigar smoke and coffee and roses, of cologne made from orange blossoms and the wood of the floor and of course, clean linens. Elsa washed these herself once a week and ironed them before folding them away in the linen closet. Now she changed the bedding, stripping the navy blue cases from the pillows and peeling away the old sheets from the large mattress in the master bedroom.
There was a bar of Belgian chocolate wrapped in gold foil under Mr. Gardner’s pillow with a wilted wild flower and a small note card hidden between the foil and the paper wrapper. The note card had only a time scrawled in the banker’s flowing script: 1:00. Elsa smelled the chocolate and the dehydrated little flower with a smile before pocketing these items in her cleanly starched apron pocket. Mrs. Gardner would get fresh roses this evening, but her maid felt that she was the one getting the better part of the bargain. At 23 she was still young enough that hot house flowers seemed befitting only of grave yards. She finished making up the bed with the clean set of avocado green sheets and pillow slips and moved on to the dusting and emptying of waste bins.


Mrs. Gardner would have friends for tea at 11:00 and enlisted Elsa’s help in preparing the table before she left. She was paid weekly with a check from Mr. Gardner’s book for basic housekeeping, but never minded being asked to help with something extra. In particular she liked handling the fine bone china with little pink roses painted on them. She couldn’t imagine bothering to drink from cups so small and delicate herself, and never coveted such items. She was content to handle all of the belongings of Mrs. Gardner only momentarily, becoming acquainted with their textures and shapes and odors without ever having to worry about loosing them. She even helped fasten the pearls around her employer’s neck before she departed, thereby adding their smoothness to the storehouse of her memory. She neither envied nor pitied Mrs. Gardner, but felt something like disdain for this woman who knew so little of her husband and her house that one could hide notes in the other without fear of discovery.


The Finch household was another arrangement all together. Elsa tripped on the garden hose left carelessly in the walkway on her way to the front door. The houses on this street were smaller than those on the street where the Gardners lived and nestled together like pigeons on a rooftop. The yards were composed of neat little squares of green grass protected by white fences and within their confines, clothes lines were strung flying brightly colored shirts like flags. The screen door hung crooked over the threshold of the Finch residence and Elsa opened it and let herself in. The odor of bourbon and old grease from frying greeted her nose along with the scent of stale cigarette butts and bleach. Dahlia Finch was hanging off the sofa in a nude toned satin slip surrounded on all sides by half drained glasses of bourbon and Jim Bean. She appeared to be sleeping with her mouth wide open and a burning cigarette dangled from the fingers of one hand.


Elsa gathered up the glasses and put out the cigarette, taking them all to the little kitchen. Elroy Dean, Dahlia’s brother was sitting at the round wooden table solving crossword puzzles in his rumpled undershirt and boxers. His greasy dark hair was turned every which way.
“Oh. Hi Elsa, how are you doing?” he asked her in his soft almost lisping voice glancing up at her over his thin spectacles.
“Fine Roy. You?” she asked, filling the sink with hot sudsy water.
“Uh, very well under the circumstance.” He said shuffling one black sock clad foot around on the linoleum under the table. His big toe protruded from the end of the sock.
“What circumstance would that be?” Elsa asked him.
He sighed deeply and stared intently at the crossword puzzle, penciling something in.
“Oh, uh, Bertrand hasn’t been home for a few days.”
Elsa shut off the faucet and dropped the glasses and an assortment of dirty dishes that she gathered from the countertops into the hot water. Then she turned to face him drying her hands on the apron.
“Really?”
Roy looked at her and nodded.
“Where did he go?” she asked and he shrugged.
They looked at each other silently for a moment, Elsa forgoing the formality of asking why. One glance around the house supplied enough “why”. The disheveled brother in law in the kitchen and drunkard wife in the living room were adequate explanation for the departure of any reasonable man.
“You want to smoke a reefer?” Elroy asked her after a while.
She shook her head,
“I have an appointment in an hour.” But then she walked across the kitchen and ran a hand through his stringy dark hair. She bent over him, bringing her face close to his. Breathing the scent of his unwashed hair and searching over his pale face with her blue eyes she brought her mouth to his and whispered,
“But I might take one for the road.”
She pressed her lips against his. Slowly she worked her way from his mouth, down his throat and chest under the shirt and beyond, until she had sunk to her knees and Roy unraveled her bun so that the blonde hair spilled out over his lap like liquid gold.

At 12:30 Elsa stole a shower and borrowed some black lacy undergarments and a dress from Dhalia’s closet. By then the Matron of the household was stirring and volunteered to help the other woman doll up. A cigarette dangled from her lip as she applied the make up to Elsa’s face in the bathroom. Roy, partially clad now with a pair of gray slacks and fedora to accompany the rumpled undershirt offered to drive Elsa to her appointment. She accepted and had him drop her off a block away from the hotel. Before she climbed out of the car, he fished three joints out of his pocket and pressed them into her hand.
“For the road, remember?”
She put them in her purse and walked the block to the Hilton.


1:00 at The Palace. Hotels too had their own smell, clean and impersonal. One might catch a whiff of polished brass or the detergent used to clean the carpets. Bell hops smelled like soap, desk clerks like after shave. There were lilies and carnations and roses mingling together in crystal vases in the lobby and under mirrors in the halls and in the rooms. The heavy drapes had been pulled shut blocking out the afternoon sun and a view of the street. Elsa felt the glorious starchiness of the white sheets on her naked body and the warm softness of Agnew Gardners great paunch under her arm. The scent of his cologne, familiar to her from her daily visits to his home blended with the impersonal hotel odors forming a collage of worlds in her mind. She pretended to sleep because that was the way he liked to leave her, no good byes, no promise of future encounters, and a fold of bills on the nightstand, to keep things fair and impersonal.
She let him slip out from under her arm, a great round man with thinning flaxen hair and large pouty lips that covered her whole mouth when they kissed. She listened to the shower run briefly, then as if it were all music, to the rustling of his clothes as he dressed himself, to the sound of the door opening and closing with a soft hiss as it scraped the plush carpet, and at last to his footsteps fading in the hall. She could picture him in his dark blue suit and hat strolling down the street, traversing the three blocks back to the bank, whistling to himself and tipping his hat to other pedestrians cigar in hand. She rolled over and tossed back the sheets, then paused before rising. There on the night stand rested the customary fold of bills, but on top of it waited a little crystal vial of perfume. She smiled broadly, fingering it, feeling a rush of warmth spread through her body.


Mrs. Peffing answered the door when Elsa rang the bell at 2:45.
“Elsa!” she exclaimed throwing both hands into the air, “I forgot you were coming. It’s just as well, come in.”
Elsa followed her inside and into the kitchen, cheered by the aroma of citron candles and sunflowers and vinyl.
“Please sit down and help yourself to a piece of lemon cake. Baked it this morning. I know how you like cake, though you’d never know it by looking at you, you skinny thing! I’m running late for a dentist appointment. Would you let Henry in when he comes? He lost his key again.” She shook her head of shiny brass curls, “I don’t know what he’ll do when he goes away to college year after next.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine.” Elsa told her, admiring Mrs. Peffing's creamy skin and thick arms as she set out the cake and knife, a plate and a fork. “And I can let him in today.”
“Wonderful, thank you so much!” Mrs. Peffing’s apple shaped cheeks shone rosily as she smiled.
“Just let me go and cut you a check before I leave. I’ll be right back.” She said and hurried out of the kitchen.

Elsa’s hand was on the knife slicing the cake when Henry popped in a moment later.
“Hello Miss Daning.” He greeted her. She clapped a hand to her heart.
“Oh, Henry! You startled me. I didn’t hear you come in the front door.”
“I’m sorry.” he said coming closer to her with his sunny smile, “Are you alright?”
His hair was brassy like his mother’s, his jaw square, his teeth straight and white. In his yellow and blue sweater he looked like a young Apollo, the lean muscular chest and arms evident under his school colors.
“I’m fine,” she assured him.
“Is my mother home?” he asked her.
“She’s just on her way out, she has a dentist appointment.” Else explained putting the slice of cake onto the plate and pushing it towards him.
“I know she does.” He grinned breaking a piece of cake off with his fingers, “I’m the one who had her appointment moved to today instead of Friday.”
“What? Why?” Elsa inquired.
“So that I would be here alone with you.” Henry answered pushing the plate with the slice of cake back to her. His brown eyes bore into her. She fumbled with the fork and managed to knock it from the table.
“Why would you…would you want that?” she stammered.
Henry moved quickly, kneeling beside her chair to retrieve the fork before she could. With one hand he set it on the table while with the other he stroked her calf and turned his eyes back on her.
“Don’t you think you should look for a nice girl your age?” she asked him striving to maintain an icy demeanor.
“Oh, I’m not looking for a girl. And I was kinda hoping you aren’t too nice.”
Elsa’s jaw dropped slightly but she found that she could think of nothing to say to the young man who’s hand was traveling from the back of her knee to her thigh under her dress.
“Here it is.” Mrs. Peffing said from the hall just before entering the kitchen. Henry slipped swiftly under the table where he was concealed by the long linen cloth. Mrs. Peffing handed the check to Elsa.
“Did I hear Henry come in?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.” Elsa answered. Henry’s cheek pressed warmly against her inner thigh under the table and his hands caressed her calves. She picked up the fork and smiled.
“I worry about him sometimes.” Mrs. Peffing said, “He spends more time at the drug store after school lately, socializing, which I think is healthy, but I hope he doesn’t loose track of his studies. We have such high hopes for him.”
He now had her gripped by the thighs with both hands and his face was well nuzzled between her legs so that she could feel the heat of his breath through her panties.
“Well, I don’t know him well, but he seems like a nice boy.” Elsa said and he pressed his nose and then his mouth against the thin undergarment.
“Thank you.” Mrs. Peffing smiled. “Try the cake before I go.” She gestured to plate sitting before her house keeper.
Elsa sunk the fork into the moist slice of cake and brought it to her mouth while Henry chewed the panties with his perfect white teeth and his mother looked eagerly on.
“What do you think?”
“Delicious.” Elsa answered breathlessly.
Mrs. Peffing clapped her hands together.
“That’s what I thought too!” she exclaimed, “Now I really have to run. Oh, Elsa, before I forget, we’ll be out of town next week. Could you come again this Friday before we go? ”
“Of course.” Elsa told her, feeling Henry’s tongue dart daringly beyond panties.
“Excellent! See you Friday.” Mrs. Peffing said and hurried out of the kitchen. Elsa waited, straining to hear the front door close before she moaned.

They lay on their backs in Mr. And Mrs. Peffing’s bed afterwards sharing one of the three marijuana cigarettes that Roy had given her and eating the chocolate left by Mr.Gardner.
“What made you so bold?” Elsa asked after they had passed an eternity in restful silence.
“I don’t know.” Henry said as if he too was full of wonder. “I mean, you want to know something? I never did it before. I told guys I did, and they pretended to believe me just like I pretended to believe them, but I never have. Until now.” He rolled onto his side and gazed at her. “You’re just… your just so very beautiful.”
“I wish I wasn’t.” she sighed, “I get into more trouble…” she passed the joint to him and the quiet settled over them again. Sunlight slipped in through a crack in the curtains and the muted tinkling of wind chimes reached their ears from beyond the pain of glass.
“What kind of cigarette is this?” Henry asked her. He laughed his easy happy young laugh.
“It’s marijuana.” She told him with another sigh.
“Really? Well I never tried that before either.” Again he laughed.
Again the silence and the shadow of a tree branch dancing over the sunlight that peeked in past the curtain. He passed the joint back to her, “Miss Daning, I think I love you.”
She turned her head so that they were face to face.
“I doubt that Henry. You don’t really know me, but you should call me Elsa now.”
“Elsa. I think I do love you. And I know all that I need to know. How could I not love you? Now that I’ve really seen you. I used to watch you dusting and pushing the Hoover, and think ,‘man she’s something!’. But that wasn’t like this. I never saw you like this before today.”
She smiled and he kissed her softly, with renewed fire.


A fresh vase of red roses expelling their perfume into the atmosphere of polished wood and coffee, cologne and cigar smoke. That same familiar smell. Hot house flowers for those who have something to loose. A card under the pillow reading, 7:00pm, beside it a lavender blossom stolen by Mr. Gardner’s plump fingers from some hedge. A check signed by Mr. Gardner handed over by Mrs. Gardner while in the living room white gloved friends waited to commence with a game of bridge.
“Miss Daning, I regret to inform you that I will no longer require your services. On account of the short notice I asked my husband to write you a check for two additional weeks of pay. I’m sure you will find it generous of us. Good bye.”
Nothing further was said by either woman. No questions asked no explanations given.
On the way from the front door to the street Else asked herself again and again,
‘Does she know? Does she know? Or was it something else? Forgetting to dust the mantle?”

Walking to the bus stop, the smell of fresh cut grass. She passed a hedge of lavender. Could it have been from this bush that Mr. Gardner selected a bloom? And from that house over there, yesterday’s daisy? Would there still be 7:00pm at the Palace tonight, 1:00pm tomorrow, 3:00pm or 5:00pm the next day?
“Does she know? Does she know? Or was it something else?”