Quill of Thoth

The things which are in this world are finite. Perhaps something essential, an inner fire, was removed as the fruits came through your envelope? Or maybe I do not have eyes that can see the thin sheen of beauty over the mechanical surface of the universe anymore.

Or maybe what I have done has leached the world of color, just as it has smothered the house.

All that I had gained, all that I had built, it’s… gone.

The futile cardboard skins of instant dinners have returned to the refrigerator, replacing the variety of foodstuffs and persistent salami. The stacks of books have given way to shelves of emptiness, a neat and orderly shelving of tome after tome of blank pages. The smug yellowness of the house, the oily beigeness of its air, is no longer a part of the knowing emptiness. It is simply silent.

The windows do not look out on the same gardens, or any gardens at all. There is no flickering change in the corner of my eye, no gleam of other sunlight, and in fact no weather at all.

I may as well tell you the rest. It couldn’t hurt. You and I are figments of each other’s imagination, a story passed hand to hand around a fire in a whisper that is older than words.

It won’t hurt to tell you.

At least I hope not.

It is good that you have made another friend. I am… not ideal to be a person’s only contact with humanity, not least because I don’t match the precise definition. Perhaps this Sabrina will know more than I do about house care and surgery, the making of furniture boxes and the installation of refrigerators.

Still, I am afraid that what I am doing now – what I should have done a long time ago – will not be easy. That I do not yet have the right answer, that the third option I have finally begun to search for will evaporate as so much smoke and dust.

I have been to the night garden.

It was not very pleasant at all. Have you ever had one of those dreams – no, not the one you’re probably thinking of, but one where you’re still almost awake, unable to move, observed by something that cannot be seen, a stranger in your own body? How slowly, the terror rolls over you, how deeply you feel the regard of something not quite live, not quite universal, something that judges your very soul with scorn but might still eat you anyway.

The night garden is worse than that. It does not watch in a recognizable sense. There isn’t a word for what it does, chill in your brain and thick like peanut butter in your lungs, teeth aching with the salt-smelling silence, the certainty that, should all go wrong, it is not death that awaits you.

I had almost forgotten.

The night garden is not safe. I am also not a safe, tame thing, so I supposed it would be better than it was.

It was not.

You have to understand, they’re not ordinary doors.

There are many doors and drawers and other hinged pieces of wood over holes in walls, like empty eyelids, that exist every day. They stand where they should be, in walls, silent and concealing. Anyone can open them. Anything could be behind them, so that the simple act of walking through could change your life, but walking through one will not dissolve you and reform you anew.

When I speak of doors they are not metaphorical. I am not talking in terms of tired aphorisms for opportunity, a misplaced cosmic sense of justice that says you are not lost because there is a puppet master pulling your marionette strings. One day, in a place, there will be a door where none should be.

They have been in the middle of train tracks. On the sides of mountains. Standing out in fields under the fuming yellow tornado sky.

Once I walked into a door that was grown into the side of a tree, but I did not fall down a rabbit hole. I think, however, that I grew taller, or small.

There are so many layers of memories that I can’t… I can’t sort them properly. I haven’t been able to since I came here. I don’t know if I could before.

If Sarah can walk through the doors, your doors do not stalk you as mine stalk me. Perhaps this is why the sun is not hungry for the taste of my skin, no toothlight devouring me. The doors have already hollowed me out from the inside like a pumpkin, smile carved on no matter how I feel.

I have only now noticed that I feel empty.

Alone in this house, with the wallpaper and the aching empty sky, that is a dangerous feeling. No one is watching me, and no one will care what I do, not even myself. I have never been completely alone in the world before, and I don’t know if humans can truly go on living with no one and nothing to live for. Perhaps if this goes on I’ll collapse into a singularity of howling dark, the black hole absence of all things that I cannot imagine.

Have you ever wanted to not be? Not to die, but to leave awareness for a time. To sleep like a tree, with no dreams but the wind and the sun. I am so tired.

Perhaps I should go back to the beginning.

Hello, Seth. I am sorry that you could not go outside today. Perhaps you should move the desk. Or buy curtains.

I think it would be very hard for me to live with another person again, unless I went through another door, because it has been so long and other people press against your eardrums and leave their dishes on top of the refrigerator. At least when it’s only you, you have only your past self to blame for any inconveniences that you have. And you can press yourself into a corner behind a bookcase and wait for the view outside the window to change.

People are like trees, I think. They need space. But not too much.

Today I waited for the window to change, but it never did, so I went down into the basement and climbed the ladder that goes down and down and up into the blank garden. Nothing lives there, so I thought that the red sun in that desolate sky might be starving.

Desolate comes from the word for loneliness. Or perhaps it means “without solace.” The dictionary that lives in the kitchen cupboard always works, but I don’t know if I trust it. Humans have a habit of sucking the meaning out of words, like spiders suck the juice out of flies and leave the husks.

Here, in the corners, there are no cobwebs.

Spiders do it for hunger. Perhaps humans feed on truth.

If your sun is a spider and the earth is a web perhaps that explains the stickiness, the liquefaction of going through a door and coming out on the other side, parts of me left behind and torn off in the web. Perhaps the sun will not eat me because I have walked between the strings, tearing off my wings and a few legs, and you’re caught on a tripline.

The languages of the encyclopedia are square and grey, or looped round and round indefinitely , or spike shaped and dull with a tearing sound. When the letters are familiar the words are not, a long scream of vowels or a string of consonants ticked one by one out into the void, perhaps by something with a beak.

Then I open the book again and find an entry on something I can read, and all the pages seem normal.

I remember the process of dying so clearly that it has drained so much else of who I was from my mind. I remember a grey-green office and all sorts of faces. People who thought that what they were doing was very important and synergetic, and used a lot of big words that they didn’t understand, which rang hollow as they shattered on the floor, carpet over concrete. I remember leafing through a glossy magazine full of white houses, white kitchens, white linen living rooms, white fluffy bedrooms like sterile clouds.

I had a tank full of lizards, in that life or another, and I hope someone is looking after them now that I’m gone.

In my most recent life I don’t think I knew who I was, really, until very close to the end. I remembered things that I shouldn’t and buried them deep, living the dream-logic life of someone who got by. I am nearly certain you wouldn’t have liked me then. I’m not sure I liked me.

I have a bed. Other than the kitchen chairs and the chair in front of the computer, it is the only place in the house to sit. On the piano bench, you have to perch. The bed looks out the three great windows that look sometimes into the crater, sometimes into the garden.

The downstairs windows are the only ones I crawl out of, though.

At night all the lights in the house come on and I have to run around and shut some off, one by one, hunting for light switches in dark twisty corners. The computer has a long tail of a power cord that disappears into the wall, so I suppose that the house has electricity.

By day, in the dust and the silence and only the sunlight battering against the windows like a panicked bird, you wouldn’t know. There are no power lines crackling overhead, though I suppose they could be lurking underground, feeding the mushrooms in the cellar.

Except for a couple photographs above the piano, the house is eyeless and faceless. It does not have to watch. It knows I am here and that I cannot truly leave.

Sometimes I think that all humans are real, sometimes I think that none are. No one else remembers things from before they existed all tangled up in layers of self, so maybe we’re all a very tiny real caramel center wrapped in layers and layers of chalky, powdered sugar emptiness. Or it could be just me. I might be the one that isn’t real, staring up in bewildered cardboard envy at humans from the front of a cereal box.

In the refrigerator there is a single ginger root, two yams, brown mustard and a bag of marshmallows. There is an empty gallon of orange juice, and the cardboard skins of microwave dinners. In the box on top there is a box of instant ramen cups.

I suppose I could always eat one of the mushrooms. Though, perhaps only once.

If I could have anything, even the non-edible things, in the entire universe, I think I would like to lick the bright flicker fire of an event horizon. The edge between falling into nothing and being ejected out from the rim of nonbeing to tear across the universe as a free photon.

When it comes to something material and theoretically edible, I would like my first taste of chili back. I don’t even know which one it was.

I’m not sure we can bottle the whole sun, out in the freezing void, but perhaps some small part of its toothiness could be extracted, or delayed, so that you can slip through the gaps in the web. Perhaps the fire can be bottled and the hunger extracted, so that it will be nothing but chemistry, carbon chains snapping and turning to smoke once again.

Maybe other people control what they have as a symbolic gesture, preserving themselves somehow from the hunger of the sun.

I warn you that walking off the sticky line will hurt. I don’t know how it’s done, either, if you have no new doors coming for you. I’m not sure it’s better. I might be a juiceless shell.

But I have to do something. And it sounds like you do too.

This is a reply to Seth's most recent letter to Anya.

Hello Seth,

The computer showed me your letter, and I assume this means we have been matched as pen pals. What’s it like, living with another person? I mean, I’ve done it before, in another life, but the past is thinner than the present.

You say that the sun is trying to eat you. I crawled out the window into the Tuesday garden, where the sun was shining brightly, just this morning to see if I could tell if my sun was hungry. I stood for a long time with my eyes closed, every part of me floating up but my feet stuck on the earth, all my weight pinned against the soles, bare and cool in the crying grass, while the rest of me soaked up warmth like a sponge. But the sun did not eat me. My weight returned, and I sat and listened to a tree’s heartbeat for a while.

Maybe I don’t taste as good as you. If you are what you eat, I taste like cream of asparagus, and the ramen you get in tiny plastic cups that boil over in the microwave.

It’s also possible that the sun has it’s pick of tasty things here, or that something is eating the sun before it can eat me. There are lots of trees and flowers in the Tuesday garden, and they may be gobbling up the toothed rays before they can get to me. I’ll have to repeat the experiment in the blank garden, when it comes back. For safety’s sake I should perhaps not attempt it at sunset.

I do not believe anything too bad will happen to me if I try. The doors always come when things are going to go wrong, and this morning every door in the house was where it should be, including the ones that aren’t always there.

Since you mentioned rats, it occurs to me that since I came through the door, I haven’t seen another living thing that wasn’t a plant. Or fungus. There are no flies, or birds, or earthworms here, unless the earthworms can hear me coming and squirm their pink panty-hose bodies deep into the earth when I dig. At the house, if I go out a door, its mostly dirt and sand anyhow.

Earthworms are not native to North America. This is a fact that I found in the encyclopedia, which sometimes has an entry in a language I can read.
I understand missing your work. There is not much that requires doing, in this house, not in a way that will keep your head above the water and give you purpose. If there is dust, there is no one to see it but me, and the house does not seem to like it when I pry too much into all its secret corners.

Not that there are many of those. Like I said, it is a tidy house. There’s barely furniture, nothing but beige yellow wallpaper and the crater walls outside the windows.

No one is watching me. The vast emptiness presses hard on my shoulder blades, makes me creep along the baseboards like a mouse. I think it might be better, to have someone watching, sometimes. To consume the parts of you that otherwise might spin off into an endless void. Even if there’s no help for the fact that we’re all locked into our own skulls, drowning in words that dangle off the fluttering shapes of thoughts.

I’m afraid that, as a pen pal, I won’t be very useful for relationship advice.

Except – I hear you. Well, see your words on the computer screen, that is. We will proceed with the assumption that both of us are real. That the sun can be bottled up, and kept from eating you.

I volunteer my services in trying, at any rate. I’m something of a multi-lifetime expert in disappearance.
Anya

P.S. I don’t suppose you know anything about cooking, do you? My last two breakfasts were raw potatoes. It seems I lost anything I once knew about it in the jumble on my way through the door.

Author's note: This second entry in the Pen Pal Project is a direct response to Seth's profile, which can be found here. The chapter masterpost is here. Anya's profile is here.