Multi-column

Against the Day

Thoughts

Highlights

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One
The Light
Over the Ranges 🔗

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From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor. 🔗

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When the Sieges ended, these balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly only to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, never-ending state of siege. 🔗

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periphery 🔗

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appliquéd 🔗

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vanguard 🔗

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avuncularity 🔗

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fulminate 🔗

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furtive 🔗

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pedagogue 🔗

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salubrious 🔗

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psychogastric 🔗

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“Tell the house physician the bullet is only in her leg,” said Scarsdale Vibe helpfully. 🔗

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“So we always hear the plutocracy complaining.”
“Out of a belief, surely fathomable, that merely to need a sum is not to deserve it.”
“Except that in these times, ‘need’ arises directly from criminal acts of the rich, so it ‘deserves’ whatever amount of money will atone for it. Fathomable enough for you?”
“You are a socialist, sir.”
“As anyone not insulated by wealth from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.” 🔗

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“Suffering fools is unavoidable,” said Ray Ipsow, “but don’t ask me to be ‘glad’ about it.” 🔗

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To put up money for research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate—hell, betray—the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be.” 🔗

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“If such a thing is ever produced,” Scarsdale Vibe was saying, “it will mean the end of the world, not just ‘as we know it’ but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon, Professor, surely you see that—the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our Economy’s long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present.” 🔗

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iniquity 🔗

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“But what are they saying I did? I swear, Troth, I can’t remember.”
“If I told you, I would have to hear it once again, and once has already been more than enough.” 🔗

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contrition 🔗

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gelid 🔗

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penitents 🔗

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lurid 🔗

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“Many people believe that there is a mathematical correlation between sin, penance, and redemption. More sin, more penance, and so forth. Our own point has always been that there is no connection. All the variables are independent. You do penance not because you have sinned but because it is your destiny. You are redeemed not through doing penance but because it happens. Or doesn’t happen. 🔗

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Think of this as a productive sort of delirium.” 🔗

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He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed more than he could bear. 🔗

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transfigured 🔗

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Lew enjoyed wandering around, trying on different rigs, like every day was Hallowe’en, but he understood after a while that he didn’t have to. He had learned to step to the side of the day. Wherever it was he stepped to had its own vast, incomprehensible history, its perils and ecstasies, its potential for unannounced romance and early funerals, but when he was there, it was apparently not as easy for anyone in “Chicago” to be that certain of his whereabouts. Not exactly invisibility. Excursion. 🔗

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gumshoe 🔗

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repute 🔗

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as smart neckties were soaked in suds 🔗

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Women in surprising numbers, bearing the marks of their trades, scars from the blades of the meatpacking floors, squints from needlework carried past the borderlands of sleep in clockless bad light, women in head-scarves, crocheted fascinators, extravagantly flowered hats, no hats at all, women just looking to put their feet up after too many hours of lifting, fetching, walking the jobless avenues, bearing the insults of the day . . . 🔗

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Avarice 🔗

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Love never spared a sinner,
Hate never cured a saint,
Soon is the night of reckoning,
Then let no heart be faint,
Teach us to fly from shelter
Teach us to love the cold,
Life’s for the free and fearless—
Death’s for the bought and sold! 🔗

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malcontents 🔗

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panatela 🔗

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and the rodeo clowns jabber on in some incomprehensible lingo not to distract the beast but rather to heighten and maintain its attention to the single task at hand, bringing it down to those last few gates, the stunning-devices waiting inside, the butchering and blood just beyond the last chute—and the cowboy with him. 🔗

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stereopticon 🔗

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“The frontier ends and disconnection begins. 🔗

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euphemisms 🔗

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furtive 🔗

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expostulated 🔗

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peripatetic 🔗

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propensity 🔗

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truculent 🔗

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fervid 🔗

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interferometer 🔗

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“It’s like these cults who believe the world will end on such and such a day,” Roswell opined, “they get rid of all their earthly possessions and head off in a group for some mountaintop and wait, and then the end of the world doesn’t happen. The world keeps going on. What a disappointment! Everybody has to troop back down the mountain with their spiritual tails dragging, except for one or two incurably grinning idiots who see it as a chance to start a new life, fresh, without encumbrances, to be reborn, in fact. 🔗

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The absence of a light-bearing medium is the emptiness of what my religion calls akasa, which is the ground or basis of all that we imagine ‘exists.’” 🔗

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“What I worry about,” said Roswell at last, “is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?” 🔗

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somnambulism 🔗

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vulcanized 🔗

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stultified 🔗

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remunerative 🔗

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Alarmed at what seemed a dangerously morbid lapse, he uncovered all the plates he’d taken and left them out in a vacant lot under the daylight, to return to blankness and innocence.
As if the light of Heaven had performed a similar service for his brain, Merle understood that he must never if he could avoid it set foot within the limits of this place again. “If the U.S. was a person,” he later became fond of saying, “and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness.” 🔗

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itinerant 🔗

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beaux 🔗

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interloper 🔗

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galvanic 🔗

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It might have been only the lip-rouge, but he thought he saw a smile, almost cruel, he hadn’t much noticed before, self-sufficient to be sure, but determined enough now, no denying it, on a separate fate. From her eyes, the lids and lashes darkened elaborately with chimney soot and petrolatum, he could read nothing. 🔗

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Merle waited in East Fullmoon as long as he could, waited for mail, a telegram, a rider, a carrier pigeon circling in from the winter skies, and in the meantime learned how straightforward it would all be, taking care of this baby here, long as he didn’t fret about the time or any need he might’ve thought he had to get on with some larger plan—with Erlys gone, anything like that was out the window and down the turnpike anyway—and that long as he just kept breathing smoothly in and out, just staying within the contours of the chore of the moment, life with young Dahlia would provide precious little occasion for complaint, bitter or otherwise. 🔗

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Next thing you knew, the haircut was done, a whisk-broom all over her back, and clouds of scented powder in the air. A palm out for a tip. 🔗

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AS MERLE WATCHED HER SLEEP, an unmanly warmth about the eyeballs would surprise him. Her hearth-colored hair in a careless child’s snarl. She was somewhere off wandering those dangerous dark fields, maybe even finding there some version of himself, of Erlys, that he’d never get to hear about, among the sorrowful truths, being lost, being found, flying, journeying to places too detailed to be anything but real, meeting the enemy, dying, being born over and over. . . . He wanted to find a way in, to look out for her at least, keep her from the worst if he could. . . 🔗

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His next thought was, Dally better not see this, and then immediately, sure Merle, good luck. And when he caught sight of her just about then coming up the street to find him, her hair in the wind a banner flown by the only force he had ever sworn allegiance to, he added, reluctantly, and it’ll have to be me that tells her. 🔗

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Bloviating 🔗

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“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.” 🔗

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Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. And maybe his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity, from all the silver he’d been developing out into the pictures he’d been taking over these years—as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice, and he’d been working for it as much as it for him. 🔗

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winsome 🔗

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circumspect 🔗

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the same folks who die when the army comes charging in. Not that any owner ever cared rat shit about the lives of workers, of course, except to define them as Innocent Victims in whose name uniformed goons could then go out and hunt down the Monsters That Did the Deed. 🔗

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pernicious 🔗

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Every time a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertible at the end of some chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have to be a corresponding entry on the other side of God’s ledger, convertible to human freedom no owner is willing to grant. 🔗

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If you are not devoting every breath of every day waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself? 🔗

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“Remorse without an object is a doorway to deliverance.” 🔗

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“Remorse without an object is a doorway to deliverance.” 🔗

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phatic 🔗

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ineluctable 🔗

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“I’ll never see you again.” No. She didn’t say that. But she might’ve, so easy. A look from him. Any small gesture of collapse from his careful, young man’s posture back into the boy she wanted, after all, to keep. 🔗

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desuetude 🔗

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“Explosion without an objective,” declared Miles Blundell, “is politics in its purest form.” 🔗

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“I say let’s set off our barrage tonight in honor of the Haymarket bomb, bless it, a turning point in American history, and the only way working people will ever get a fair shake under that miserable economic system—through the wonders of chemistry!” 🔗

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was the signal going around the planet, or through it, or was linear progression not at all the point, with everything instead happening simultaneously at every part of the circuit? 🔗

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punctilio 🔗

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Was it any wonder that when the opportunity did arise, as it would shortly, the boys would grasp unreflectively at a chance to transcend “the secular,” even at the cost of betraying their organization, their country, even humankind itself? 🔗

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vatic 🔗

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scherzo 🔗

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unscrupulous 🔗

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plangent 🔗

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contretemps 🔗

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inukshuk 🔗

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From time to time in the difficult days ahead, each of the boys was to gaze at the enigmatic miniature he had purchased, representing a faraway disposition of rocks he would probably never get to see, and try to glimpse, even at this degree of indirectness, some expression of a truth beyond the secular. 🔗

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promontory 🔗

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imbrication 🔗

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Ginnungagap 🔗

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toroidal 🔗

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Tibetan prayer-wheel 🔗

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THE TRANSNOCTIAL DISCUSSI 🔗
WHEN KIT GOT BACK from Colorado 🔗

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And what of colonizing additional dimensions beyond the third? Colonize Time. Why not?” 🔗

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“What cannot be resolved inside the psyche,” put in the Expedition alienist, Otto Ghloix, “must enter the outside world and become physically, objectively ‘real.’ For example, one who cannot come to terms with the, one must say sinister unknowability of Light, projects an Æther, real in every way, except for its being detectable.” 🔗

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up to the present, including a record of each day of this very Expedition now in progress, even of days not yet transpired.
“Fortune-telling! Impossible!”
“Unless we can allow that certain texts are—”
“Outside of time,” suggested one of the Librarians.
“Holy Scripture and so forth.” 🔗

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jocularity 🔗

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Down where the ‘Hidden People’ live, inside their private rock dwellings, where humans who visit them can be closed in and never find a way out again. Iceland spar is what hides the Hidden People, makes it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself as ‘real,’ provides that all-important ninety-degree twist to their light, so they can exist alongside our own world but not be seen. They and others as well, visitors from elsewhere, of non-human aspect. 🔗

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declivity 🔗

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“For us it’s simple ability to see into the future, based on our linear way of regarding time, a simple straight line from past, through present, into the future. Christian time, as you might say. But shamans see it differently. Their notion of time is spread out not in a single dimension but over many, which all exist in a single, timeless instant.” 🔗

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précis 🔗

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pestilential 🔗

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confab 🔗

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“Not literally, then . . . but we do use one another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience . . . each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step—human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood—a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.” 🔗

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incursion 🔗

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“But always in our business there are natives, and then there are natives, don’t you see? Us and natives. Any particular tribe, the details of it, get lost in the general question—who is laboring to whose benefit, sort of thing.”
“There’s never a question. The machines, the buildings, all the industrial structures we’ve put in out there. They see these things, they learn to operate them, they come to understand how powerful they are. How deadly. How deadly we are. Machinery can crush them. Trains can run them over. In the Rand some of the shafts go down four thousand feet.” 🔗

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“Appropriate? given the great loss of property, not to mention innocent life . . . appropriate to what, sir?”
“To urban civilization. Because we took the creature out of its home territory. The usual sanctions—bad ice, blizzards, malevolent ghosts—were no longer available. So the terms of retribution assumed a character more suitable to the new surroundings—fire, damage to structures, crowd panic, disruption to common services.” 🔗

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Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes. 🔗

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Figures which late at night appeared only in levels of gray were now seen to possess color, not the fashionable shades of daytime but blood reds, morgue yellows, poison greens. 🔗

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stultified 🔗

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Though what future could there’ve been for the “territory across the bridge” but sooner or later a suburban history and culture to be undergone? 🔗

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So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. 🔗

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Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.
To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing. 🔗

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propitiatory 🔗

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well . . . on the Tibetan prayer-wheel principle, repeat it enough and at some point something unspecified but miraculous will come to pass. Harvard in a nutshell, if you really want to know.” 🔗

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iniquity 🔗

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It had been often commented upon that Vibe offspring tended to be crazy as bedbugs. ‘Fax’s brother Cragmont had run away with a trapeze girl, then brought her back to New York to get married, the wedding being actually performed on trapezes, groom and best man, dressed in tails and silk opera hats held on with elastic, swinging upside down by their knees in perfect synchrony across the perilous Æther to meet the bride and her father 🔗

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floridly 🔗

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The adjoining town houses, ever a scene of license and drollery, shimmered within a permanent and agreeable fog of smoke from recreational sources, including hemp and opium, as well as the mists arising from seltzer bottles discharged sometimes into drinking vessels but more usually at companions in what seemed eternal play. 🔗

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Thus Edwarda and Scarsdale found themselves together every day and yet leading almost entirely unsynchronized lives, inhabiting each his and her own defective city, like partial overlays in some new color-printing process, Scarsdale’s in gray tones, Edwarda’s in mauve. Puce sometimes. 🔗

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“They don’t actually know I’m here,” he confided to Kit. “If they do, it’s only in the way some can detect ghosts—though you may have noticed already these are not the most spiritual of people. 🔗

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“When I came up here by myself, it was to look at the city—I thought there had to be some portal into another world. . . . I couldn’t imagine any continuous landscape that would ever lead naturally from where I was to what I was seeing. Of course it was Queens, but by the time I had that sorted out, it was too late, I was possessed by the dream of a passage through an invisible gate. It could have been a city, but it didn’t have to be a city. It was more a matter of the invisible taking on substance.” 🔗

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“There are stories, like maps that agree . . . too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking. . . . It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.”
“Home.” 🔗

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“There’s home, and there’s home, you know. And these days—all my colleagues care about is finding waterfalls. The more spectacular the falls, the better the chance for an expensive hotel. . . . It seems all I’m looking for now is movement, just for its own sake, what you fellows call the vector, I guess. . . . Are there such things as vectorial unknowns?” 🔗

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“You know,” he continued, “out there you run into some queer characters. You see them go in, they don’t come out again till months later, sometimes never. Missionaries, deserters, citizens of the trail, for that always turned out to be what they’d sworn their allegiance to—trail, track, river, whatever could carry them to the next ridgeline, the next bend in the river emerging from that strange humid light. ‘Home,’ what could that possibly mean, what claim could it have on them? 🔗

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colloquy 🔗

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“What is the modern state,” Yitzhak declared, “but a suburban house-lot taken up to a larger scale? 🔗

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Any who live outside property-lines of any scale are automatically a threat to the suburban order and by extension the State. 🔗

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the suburban imperative. 🔗

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ebulliently 🔗

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“I don’t understand it. This money is coming from nowhere.”
“But it’s real,” Foley Walker pointed out. “What they’re buying with it is real.”
“I feel myself turning goddamned socialist,” said Scarsdale. “Communist, even. Like you know when you’re coming down with a cold? My mind—or the part of it I use for thinking about business matters—aches.”
“But Mr. V., you hate socialists.”
“I hate these climber sons of bitches worse.” 🔗

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intercession 🔗

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avarice 🔗

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At any given time in the world, there would be enough towns like Johannesburg to keep occupied a certain type of energetic young fortune seeker. It would be necessary to plunge in, from whatever condition of bourgeois stultification, whatever prevailing weather, market narrative, fluctuations in harvests—including Death’s—might have defined his average day, to leap as stoically as possible into the given fever and conduct himself as survival and profit might direct in the way of intoxication, betrayal, brutality, risk (deep descents into the abysses of the gold reef proving minor next to the moral plunges available, indeed beckoning, at every hand), sexual obsession, gambling for epical stakes, seduction into the haunts of the dagga rooker and opium slave. Everyone white was in some way caught up in this, it was a no-limit game 🔗

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That came later, in the dreams, along with the unavoidable face of the dead man, dust-whitened, looming close. As if looking out through holes in a mask, the eyes moved and gleamed, shockingly alive in flesh that might as well have been artificial. Seemed to be whispering advice. Warning that there was some grave imbalance in the structure of the world, which would have to be corrected.
Then each time Fleetwood would be not so much overcome by remorse as bedazzled at having been shown the secret backlands of wealth, and how sooner or later it depended on some act of murder, seldom limited to once. He learned to wait for this revelation, though sometimes he woke too soon. 🔗

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Of course, nobody ever’d been sure about who was in Butch Cassidy’s gang either. No shortage of legendary deeds up here, but eyewitnesses could never swear beyond a doubt who in each case, exactly, had done which, and, more than fear of retaliation—it was as if physical appearance actually shifted, causing not only aliases to be inconsistently assigned but identity itself to change. Did something, something essential, happen to human personality above a certain removal from sea level? Many quoted Dr. Lombroso’s observation about how lowland folks tended to be placid and law-abiding while mountain country bred revolutionaries and outlaws. That was over in Italy, of course. Theorizers about the recently discovered subconscious mind, reluctant to leave out any variable that might seem helpful, couldn’t avoid the altitude, and the barometric pressure that went with it. This was spirit, after all. 🔗

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Lew began to find himself entertaining seductive daydreams about picking up some surrogate bomb, a chunk of ice or, better, a frozen pile of horse-droppings, to sling at the next silk hat he saw serenely borne along in the street, the next mounted policeman beating on an unprotected striker. 🔗

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In crazier moments it seemed to Lew that the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the hour, answering some invisible command. He found himself out lying at suburban tracksides in the deep nighttime hours, between trains, with his ear to the rails, listening for stirrings, quickening, like some anxious father-to-be with his ear to the abdomen of a beloved wife. Since then American geography had gone all peculiar, and what was he supposed to be doing stuck out here in Colorado, between the invisible forces, half the time not knowing who hired him or who might be fixing to do him up. . . . 🔗

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Whatever it was. It sure ‘s hell looked like war, and that must be what was keeping him here, he calculated, that possibility. Something like wanting to find out which side he was on without all these doubts. . . . 🔗

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forfend 🔗

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twilit 🔗

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It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in. It wasn’t just the loudness, mind, it was the shape. 🔗

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Lew knew the carnival theory, which was to throw yourself into the middle of the blast the second it went off, so that the shock-wave would already be outside of and heading away from you, leaving you safe inside the vacuum at the center—maybe knocked out for a little, but all in one piece. But when it came right to doing it, with no choice left but to dive at the sparks of the too-short fuse, into that radiant throatway leading to who knew what, in the faith that there would be something there, and not just Zero and blackness . . . well if there’d been time to think about it, he might have hesitated, and that would’ve done him for certain. 🔗

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Then again, where else did he have to go to anymore, now that he’d crossed over what had just been revealed with such clarity as the terrible American divide, between hunter and prey? 🔗

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Querent 🔗

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“Like, ‘What in hell’s going on here,’ would that do it?”
“It might. Let’s inquire, shall we.” And sure enough, the last card to turn up in the layout, the one these birds kept saying really mattered, was that Hanged Man again. 🔗

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ineradicable 🔗

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Deuce had been one of these Sickly Youths who was more afraid of the fate all too obviously in store for weaklings in this country than of the physical exertion it would take to toughen up and avoid it. 🔗

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sepulchral 🔗

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decolletage 🔗

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Estrella Briggs, whom everybody called Stray 🔗

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plagal cadences 🔗

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penumbra 🔗

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unchaste 🔗

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In the electric light, they had a good long look at each other’s face, and though he couldn’t speak for her, Frank knew that in years to come, it likely could get him past many a hard mile to remember this couple-three seconds of soul-to-soul—baby or howsoever, the C chord in the day’s melody he could always return to would be this serious young woman sitting down at the end of the bed, and the look those eyes seemed for a minute there to be giving him. 🔗

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But one day it rang while Reef happened to be right next to it, and he knew it was for him, and that it was bad news. This was part of the strangeness of telephones in those early days, before the traffic became quite such a routine affair. As if overdesigned to include all sorts of extra features like precognitive alarms. 🔗

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And now there was nothing but his asshole between Reef and the force of gravity. 🔗

id804015771

They sat together on the outside steps, holding their hats and fooling with the brims. 🔗

id804019273

stereopticon 🔗

id804020575

You’ll notice there’s more churches here than saloons, making us unique in the Territory. Kind of professional challenge, get to their souls before the Governor gets to their necks.” 🔗

id804020760

“None, sir, bylaws, blue laws, or in-laws, anything and everything goes here, otherwise the game wouldn’t be honest. No deadlines in Jeshimon, pack anything anyplace you like, commit sins of your own choosing or even invention. 🔗

id804020912

preternaturally 🔗

id804020945

iniquity 🔗

id804021322

licentious 🔗

id804021653

“You know the principle in medicine where the cure grows right next to the cause. Swamp ague and willow bark, desert sunburn and aloe cactus, well, the same goes in Jeshimon for sin and redemption.” 🔗

id804023517

lariat 🔗

id804023836

gravid 🔗

id804023850

Each explosion was like the text of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder by some faceless but unrelenting desert prophesier who was coming more and more to ride herd on his thoughts. 🔗

id804023950

redolent 🔗

id804024312

As soon as he noticed the absence of light, of course, he could no longer see to read and, reluctantly, having marked his place, turned in for the night without considering any of this too odd. For the next couple of days he enjoyed a sort of dual existence, both in Socorro and at the Pole. 🔗

id804026314

“How long before she’ll see you or Frank again? You’re off into that old world o’ family vengeance, it has its claim on you now, you’re both out lost in country you don’t know how to get back in from. What do you think it’s like for her, that kind of ‘business’? Might just as well be dead already, the both of you. Damn fools.”
He didn’t know yet what was behind that passionate speech, nobody did, not quite yet. 🔗

id804026696

prodigal 🔗

id804040082

the further condition—‘ 🔗

id804040295

cadre 🔗

id804042423

neophyte 🔗

id804044275

Kabbalist Tree of Life, with the names of the Sephiroth spelled out in Hebrew 🔗

id804044947

rheostats 🔗

id804045081

syntonic 🔗

id804045706

eponym 🔗

id804046767

Madame Eskimoff’s favorite happened to be number twenty-four as listed by Iamblichus—never look into a mirror when there’s a lamp next to you. “Meaning one must rearrange one’s entire day, making sure one is finished dressing well before nightfall—not to mention hair and maquillage—all of which is sure to look different under gas or electric light anyway.” 🔗

id804388724

quotidian 🔗

id804388953

mews 🔗

id804390431

ingratiation 🔗

id804391964

Electrical arcs stabbed through the violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks, centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillation columns in both the Glynsky and Le Bel-Henninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods entered numbers into log-books, and pale gnomes, patient as lock-pickers, squinted through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee. 🔗

id804420070

lechery 🔗

id804420898

“But suppose I did stick it out. I’ve been curious for some time—as members here move closer to enlightenment, is there any sort of discount on the dues we pay?” 🔗

id804422266

“Werfner, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material—and flows of power as well, expressed, for example, in massive troop movements, now and in the futurity—he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkeit, or railworthiness, each and every accommodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation. . . .” 🔗

id804424202

torpid 🔗

id804428099

Whatever mutual suspicions might have flowered among the lads themselves—by the simplest computation, twentyfold at least—their true apprehensions converged on those invisible levels “above,” where orders, never signed or attributed, were written and cut. 🔗

id804428826

SANGUIS RUBER, MENS PURA, 🔗

id804429310

Their mission in Venice, best performed without demands on time and visibility like the present one, was to locate the fabled Sfinciuno Itinerary, a map or chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself. 🔗

id804429545

cicerone 🔗

id804430163

Because there are not only landmarks but also anti-landmarks—for every beacon, an episode of intentional blindness.” 🔗

id804430928

“Wait,” Chick frowning as if puzzled. “Do I feel this conversation turning, how shall I say, abstract? Will this Sfinciuno Itinerary turn out to be not a geographical map at all but an account of some spiritual journey? Nothing but allegory and hidden symbolism—” 🔗

id804432809

Now, as in Sfinciuno’s time, there are two distinct versions of ‘Asia’ out there, one an object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth—the other a timeless faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion. Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim is of course to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools. 🔗

id804434893

“So,” the Professor had gone on to explain, “if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude. . . .” 🔗

id804434975

fugues 🔗

id804435145

fricative 🔗

id804435175

scirocco 🔗

id804436843

Miles, beaming good-humoredly, continued. “It wanted us to know that we, too, are here on a Pilgrimage. That our interest in the itinerario sfinciunese and the chain of oases set down in it is less for the benefit of those who have engaged us than for our own. When all the masks have been removed, it is really an inquiry into our own duty, our fate. Which is not to penetrate Asia in hopes of profit. Which is not to perish in the deserts of the world without reaching our objective. Which is not to rise in the hierarchies of power. Not to discover fragments of any True Cross however imagined. As the Franciscans developed the Stations of the Cross to allow any parishioner to journey to Jerusalem without leaving his church-grounds, so have we been brought up and down the paths and aisles of what we take to be the all-but-boundless world, but which in reality are only a circuit of humble images reflecting a glory greater than we can imagine—to save us from the blinding terror of having to make the real journey, from one episode to the next of the last day of Christ on Earth, and at last to the real, unbearable Jerusalem.” 🔗

id804437712

This hasn’t been invented yet. I found it—it found me?—a fisherman in the fog, casting his lines again and again into the invisible river, the flow of Time, hoping to retrieve just such artifacts as this.”
“Affascinante, caro. Does that mean, if I live long enough, I might get to see this on the Rialto someday for sale by the dozens?”
“Not necessarily. Your own future may never include it. Nor mine. It’s not the way Time seems to work.” 🔗

id804438017

sfumato 🔗

id804438034

nacreous 🔗

id804438558

Irredentist 🔗

id804442066

baleful 🔗

id804442631

all at once there was a great stunning hoarse cry from the invisibility, nearly a material thing, a lethal impedance in the air, as if something malevolent were making every exertion to take form and be released upon the world in long, dry, cracking percussions, as if jarring the fabric of four-space itself. At each salvo the two skycraft slid away at angles almost impossible to read correctly, so distorted had become the medium up here through which light must pass. 🔗

id804442651

enigmata 🔗

id804444054

But between the history and the ground-level emotions driving it, the fear of being poor, let’s say, the blessedness of deliverance from pain, lay this strange interval forbidden to him to enter. 🔗

id804444265

“Bells are the most ancient objects. They call to us out of eternity.” 🔗

id804450540

indelible 🔗

id804450812

Meanwhile in the kitchen, “Better watch ‘at flirtin’ of yours, Lake, he’s dangerous goods, that little buckaroo.”
“Mamma, I hardly caught his name.”
“I saw what you were up to. Hundred men a day come through here, some of em regular celluloid-collar ads, too, and them, why you’re all business, but in strolls some shifty-eyed little hardcase with trouble wrote all over him, and you’re ready to—well I don’t know what.”
“I do.”
“Lake . . .”
“Teasing you, Ma?” 🔗

id804451080

Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn’t one didn’t secretly love a killer. 🔗

id804451316

“You are a mighty desirable length of calico, how come you’re not married already?” was how Deuce got around to popping the question.
“Thought I’d take my time, I guess.”
“Time is something you’re given,” he philosophized, “you don’t take it.”
It was not quite a reproof, and likewise short of a plea, but she must have caught something. “The way it is right now—nothin could make it better. But what about when we’re old?”
“Unless we could beat it. Never get old.”
She’d hadn’t seen his eyes like this. “Hope that ain’t Billy the Kid talk.”
“No. Crazier.” He was that close to just handing it all over to her. 🔗

id804451754

Sloat could not figure out what had happened to his partner. You’d’ve thought it was the first man he ever killed. Was it possible, even with those miners’ lives as cheap as jug whiskey and as easily disappeared down the gullet of days, that Deuce was being haunted by what he did, and that marrying Lake looked like some chance at putting that one ghost to rest, some way, God help him, of making it up to her? 🔗

id804458991

They took her down to the Four Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one elbow in Arizona and the other in New Mexico—with the point of insertion exactly above the mythical crosshairs itself. Then rotated her all four different ways. 🔗

id804460129

transmogrified 🔗

id804460681

malodorous 🔗

id804818190

The man might have had my father wiped away, carelessly as a wet ring on a bar top 🔗

id804818758

numinous 🔗

id804821663

Tonight in the Albany, Frank could see that Wren had arrived exactly here after unnumbered miles and Stations of the Cross—in the light off the great mirror her face was a queerly unshadowed celestial blue, that of a searcher, it seemed to Frank, who had come as far as she must to ask what he would be least willing to answer. He understood that there were such presences abroad in the world, and that although one may live an entire life without intersecting one, if it should happen, it became a solemn obligation to speak when spoken to. 🔗

id804826039

It was the wrong color for a fire, and daybreak was out of the question, though the end of the world remained a possibility. 🔗

id804833125

eponym 🔗

id804833146

declivity 🔗

id804833706

black cape billowing, hat down on her back, and the light of Heaven on her hair, flowered silk neckerchiefs Bob bought for her up in Montrose guttering like cold flames, in blizzards or spring-avalanche weather or the popcorn snows of August—she was riding out a homesickness too passionate for these realms of ordinary silver and gold to know much about, much less measure up to. 🔗

id804838276

irascible 🔗

id804839272

All at once, magnesium flash-lights were exploding everywhere, each producing a column of thick white smoke whose orderly cylindrical ascent was immediately disarranged by attempts of customers, in some panic, to seek exit, the unexpected combination of brightness and opacity thus quickly spreading to fill every part of the saloon. 🔗

id804839320

fulgurescence 🔗

id804840681

“Over here,” the visitor was saying, “the American West—it is a spiritual territory! in which we seek to study the secrets of your—national soul!”
“Ha! Ha!” Merle slapped his knee. “You fellows, I swear. What ‘national soul’? We don’t have any ‘national soul’! ‘F you think any different, why you’re just packing out pyrites, brother.”
“An edge of steel—mathematically without width, deadlier than any katana, sheathed in the precision of the American face—where mercy is unknown, against which Heaven has sealed its borders! Do not—feign ignorance of this! It is not a—valid use of my time!” Glaring, he joined his companions and stalked out. 🔗

id804842699

Dally’s voice was hard to pin down to any one American place, more of a trail voice with turns and drops to it, reminders of towns you thought you’d forgotten or should never’ve rode into, or even promises of ones you might’ve heard about and were fixing to get to someday. 🔗

id804843783

“Bob and Rudie, up by the shaft house, and the wrong one is smiling.”
“They’re after me? But last night that Bob, he seemed so friendly.”
“Here you go—” Merle rolling his desk out of the way and opening a trapdoor which up to that point had been invisible. “Our own alternate means of egress. Some tunnelin’ down there, ought to let you out by the ore station. If you get lucky, you can catch an empty bucket down to town.” 🔗

id804844500

coloratura 🔗

id804844548

imprecation 🔗

id804845201

tumescent 🔗

id804845497

THE “VACANCY” at the Silver Orchid turned out to be a space between two walls, way in the back, reached through a false fireplace. There was room for Frank and a cigarette, if he tore it in half. 🔗

id804845688

mirth 🔗

id804846547

“Not really. Unless you’re sayin that double refraction somehow is the cause of this—”
“Yes and how could something weak and weightless as light make solid metals transmute? does seem crazy, don’t it—down here anyway, down at our own humble ground level and below, where it’s all weight and opacity. But consider the higher regions, the light-carrying Æther, penetrating everyplace, as the medium where change like that is possible, where alchemy and modern electromagnetic science converge, consider double refraction, one ray for gold, one for silver, you could say.” 🔗

id804846679

Will gold turn out to be worth no more than silver plus the cost of this process, and what’ll there be then to crucify mankind on a cross of? Not to mention the Bank of England, and the British Empire, and Europe and all those empires, and everybody they lend money to—pretty soon it’s the whole world, you see?” 🔗

id804846812

“Because maybe what you think you’re looking for isn’t really what you’re looking for. Maybe it’s something else.” 🔗

id804847463

tommyknockers 🔗

id804849412

heretical 🔗

id804850275

melancholia 🔗

id804850307

“Unlike sound or light or one of them, news travels at queer velocities and not usually even in straight lines,” offered the Doc. 🔗

id804851576

itinerant 🔗

id804851904

“It’s like we specialized, Pa. Reef is runnin on nerve, Kit’s gonna figure it all out scientifically, I’m the one who just has to keep poundin at it day after day, like that fella back east trying to turn silver to gold.” 🔗

id804852203

wraith 🔗

id804861966

Gibbs, before working through a problem, had been fond of saying, “We shall pretend to know nothing about this solution from Nature.” 🔗

id804861995

ambuscade 🔗

id804862056

coyness 🔗

id804862291

provost’s 🔗

id804862322

conniving 🔗

id804864096

As his relations with Scarsdale Vibe had dwindled to yearly tycoonical head-insertions into Sloane Lab and eventually, blessedly, to none at all, Heino Vanderjuice began to think that once or twice he’d detected, out at the far edges of his visual field, a glimmering winged object among the rusticated stonework and the rippling elms, and there grew upon him the curious notion that this might actually be his soul, whose exact whereabouts since 1893 had been in some doubt. 🔗

id804864270

“P. G. Tait on Quaternions. Regards their chief merit as being ‘uniquely adapted to Euclidean space . . .’ because—‘lamp’ this—‘What have students of physics, as such, to do with more than three dimensions?’ I invite your attention to ‘as such.’”
“A physics student, as something else, would have need for more than three dimensions?” Kit puzzled.
“Well, Mr. Traverse, if you ever considered becoming that ‘something else,’ Germany would seem the logical place for you. Grassmann’s Ausdehnungslehre can be extended to any number of dimensions you like. Dr. Hilbert at Göttingen is developing his ‘Spectral Theory,’ which requires a vector space of infinite dimensions. His co-adjutor Minkowski thinks that dimensions will eventually all just fade away into a Kontinuum of space and time. 🔗

id804864378

You think there’s nothin-that, you don’t know,
You ain’t seen nothing un-til you go—so! 🔗

id804865433

circumlocution 🔗

id804896264

“Sometimes the real world, the substantial world of affairs, possessing greater inertia, takes a while to catch up,” Kit carefully pretended to instruct him. “The Maxwell Field Equations, for example—it was twenty years till Hertz discovered real electromagnetic waves, traveling at the speed of light, just as Maxwell had worked it out on paper.” 🔗

id804896464

Kit felt the way he had his first time on a bicycle, in a slow measured glide, knowing as long as he kept on moving just this way, he could not fall over. He might not even have to work too hard right now to conceal his thoughts, except for one pure and steady light he kept well within—the certainty that one day this would have to be put right—the moment his to choose, details such as how and where not as important as the equals sign going in in the right place. . . .
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Become the next Edison.” The man sat there smirking, secure in unquestioned might, unable to imagine how all he believed protecting him had just turned to glass—if not to be smashed to bits quite yet, then shaped for now into a lens that promised close and merciless scrutiny, or maybe someday, when held at the appropriate distance, death by focused light. And he should have said Tesla, not Edison. 🔗

id804896567

suppurating 🔗

id804896622

mollification 🔗

id804897099

These communards speak a garble of foreign tongues, their armies are the damnable labor syndicates, their artillery is dynamite, they assassinate our great men and bomb our cities, and their aim is to despoil us of our hard-won goods, to divide and sub-divide among their hordes our lands and our houses, to pull us down, our lives, all we love, until they become as demeaned and soiled as their own. O Christ, Who hast told us to love them, what test of the spirit is this, what darkness hath been cast over our understanding, that we can no longer recognize the hand of the Evil One? 🔗

id804897329

The gleam was gone, as if Scarsdale had accumulated all the money he cared to and was now moving on in his biography to other matters, to action in the great world he thought he understood but—even Foley could see—was failing, maybe fatally, even to ask the right questions about anymore. 🔗

id805396173

leavening 🔗

id805396467

courtesans 🔗

id805396667

penumbras 🔗

id805400583

lobbygow 🔗

id805400619

Occidental 🔗

id805400763

“Red hair! Freckles! Audition enough O.K.!”
Which is how Dally found her way into the white-slave simulation industry and the tunnels of Chinatown, began to learn some of the all-but-impenetrable signs and codes 🔗

id805401735

charabancs 🔗

id805402137

ineluctable 🔗

id805402374

highbinders 🔗

id805402880

miasma 🔗

id805402968

pith 🔗

id805403142

clangor 🔗

id805428278

hats—notably The Phenomenal Dr. Ictibus and His Safe-Deflector Hat. 🔗

id805428814

imputations 🔗

id805429053

sussurant 🔗

id805429783

It being her first time in a department store, Dally put herself through the usual small humiliations, taking mannequins once or twice for real women, finding herself unable to locate price tags on anything, gazing in alarm at an approaching pair of young women, arm in arm, who looked exactly like her and Katie, both regarding Dally with such queer familiarity, closer and closer till Katie all but had to grab and shake her, muttering “Only hayseeds walk into mirrors, kid.” By the time they got all the way upstairs, Dally had drifted into a kind of daze. 🔗

id805429857

vertiginously 🔗

id805431048

tenements 🔗

id805431470

A butler or two bowed them in the door, and they ascended into a ballroom dominated by a huge gas chandelier, blindingly bright, directly beneath which was placed a sort of circular couch in wine-colored plush skirted with gold tasseling and provided with satin cushions in matching shades, accommodating eight to sixteen non-dancers each facing radially outward, referred to not altogether in jocularity as an anti-wallflower device, for those willing to sit out dances here were obliged uncomfortably to occupy the great salon’s dead center while the spectacle wheeled around them on a floor whose smoothness had been finely calibrated by repeated applications of cornmeal and pumice 🔗

id805432796

demimondaines 🔗

id805432814

soubrettes 🔗

id805433029

Maybe it was just all the smoke in the place, but his features seemed to her, even this close up, untouched—maybe never to be—by what she thought she knew already of the harshness of the world. 🔗

id805434969

And sneaking in by way of Dally’s nose, something else, beyond time, before memory or her first baby words, the snoot-subverting fragrance of lilies of the valley. 🔗

id805436000

Luca Zombini liked to explain the business, at various times, to those of his children he deluded himself were eager to learn, even someday carry on, the act. “Those who sneer at us, and sneer at themselves for paying to let us fool them, what they never see is the yearning. If it was religious, a yearning after God—no one would dream of disrespecting that. But because this is a yearning only after miracle, only to contradict the given world, they hold it in contempt.
“Remember, God didn’t say, ‘I’m gonna make light now,’ he said, ‘Let there be light.’ His first act was to allow light in to what had been Nothing. Like God, you also have to always work with the light, make it do only what you want it to.” 🔗

id805436042

The perfect mirror must send back everything, same amount of light, same colors exactly—but perfect velvet must let nothing escape, must hold on to every last little drop of light that falls on it. Because if the smallest amount of light you can think of bounces off one single thread, the whole act—affondato, vero? It’s all about the light, you control the light, you control the effect, capisci?” 🔗

id805436206

Nicol prism 🔗

id805436491

“It was an optical problem, I thought it would be completely reversible. But according to Professor Vanderjuice up at Yale, I forgot the element of time, it didn’t happen all at once, so there was this short couple of seconds where time went on, irreversible processes of one kind and another, this sort of gap opened up a little, and that was enough to make it impossible to get back to exactly where we’d been.” 🔗

id805802561

bunco-steerer 🔗

id805803143

obliquity 🔗

id805804535

confabulating 🔗

id805806778

didn’t matter, with everything brand new and the soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you’d end it, cashing ’em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond . . . why clearly every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested into it—Karl Marx and them, well and good, but that’s what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here—not tools on credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. 🔗

id805822225

If Capital’s own books showed a balance in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so were those who took care of their problems for them, in no matter what ignorance of why 🔗

id805829743

“Oh, eyewash. The law. You’re just some li’l old saloon bum in their palace o’ wealth, Burge. You think if somebody shoots you right here ’n’ now, they’re going to care? Send even flowers to Laureen and them chavalitos? Piece of paper back there goes in a pneumatic tube’s all, next dumb animal comes blinkin out of the chute, pins on that star, and there ain’t even a form to put your name down in, let alone any notices in the newspaper. Call that law, law enforcement if you like, o’ course.” 🔗

id805830578

Streams of runoff frozen onto the vertical rock walls looked like leafless groves of white aspen or birch. Sunsets tended to be purple firestorms, with blinding orange streaks running through. 🔗

id805830931

bivouac 🔗

id805831171

Like mountains and creeks and other permanent features of the landscape, every slide in the San Juans had a name, no matter when it might have run last. Some liked to let go several times a day, some hardly ever, but they were all like reservoirs of pure potential energy, poised up there and waiting their moment. The one Reef was riding under just now had been named the Bridget McGonigal by a mine owner who’d since returned back east, after his wife, for her practice of likewise letting go at completely unpredictable moments. 🔗

id805837853

desultory 🔗

id805837917

glissandi 🔗

id805838067

Voodoo? Voodoo was the least of it, Voodoo was just everywhere. Invisible sentinels were sure to let you know, the thickest of necks being susceptible here to monitory pricklings of the Invisible. The Forbidden. And meantime the smells of the local cuisine, cheurice sausages, gumbo, crawfish étouffé, and shrimp boiled in sassafras, proceeding from noplace you could ever see, went on scrambling what was left of your good sense. 🔗

id805838139

cataplexy 🔗

id805838389

Benjamin Tucker 🔗

id805838436

Fenian 🔗

id805838910

“WE LOOK AT the world, at governments, across the spectrum, some with more freedom, some with less. And we observe that the more repressive the State is, the closer life under it resembles Death. If dying is deliverance into a condition of total non-freedom, then the State tends, in the limit, to Death. The only way to address the problem of the State is with counter-Death, also known as Chemistry,” said Flaco. 🔗

id805839138

“Fucking Spanish police,” Flaco said. “In Cataluña they are an occupying army. Any of the prisoners of ‘93 who weren’t Anarchists before going into Montjuich arrived rapidly at the heart of the matter. It was like finding an old religion again, one we’d almost forgotten. The State is evil, its divine right proceeds from Hell, Hell is where we all went. Some came out of Montjuich broken, dying, without working genitals, intimidated into silence. Whips and white-hot irons are certainly effective for that. But all of us, even those who had voted and paid our taxes like good bourgeoisie, came out hating the State. I include in that obscene word the Church, the latifundios, the banks and corporations, of course.” 🔗

id805839676

Czolgosz 🔗

id805840686

But as if, too, there might exist a place of refuge, up in the fresh air, out over the sea, someplace all the Anarchists could escape to, now with the danger so overwhelming, a place readily found even on cheap maps of the World, some group of green volcanic islands, each with its own dialect, too far from the sea-lanes to be of use as a coaling station, lacking nitrate sources, fuel deposits, desirable ores either precious or practical, and so left forever immune to the bad luck and worse judgment infesting the politics of the Continents—a place promised them, not by God, which’d be asking too much of the average Anarchist, but by certain hidden geometries of History, which must include, somewhere, at least at a single point, a safe conjugate to all the spill of accursed meridians, passing daily, desolate, one upon the next. 🔗

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Bakunin and Kropotkin 🔗

id805841238

THE NIGHT BEFORE Wolfe sailed, he, Reef, and Flaco stood down by the river, drinking local beer out of bottles and watching the fall of night, “weightless as a widow’s veil,” observed the young Irishman, “and isn’t it the curse of the drifter, this desolation of heart we feel each evening at sundown, with the slow loop of the river out there just for half a minute, catching the last light, pregnant with the city in all its density and wonder, the possibilities never to be counted, much less lived into, by the likes of us, don’t you see, for we’re only passing through, we’re already ghosts.” 🔗

id805863253

Gastón Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros. 🔗

id805863537

He met up with Ewball Oust one night in a saloon somewhere along the—one does not want to say accursed, exactly, but at least defectively blessed—circuit of engagements booked for Gastón Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros. For the Bandoleros the border somehow was asymptotic—they might approach as closely as they wished, but never cross. As if his father’s charro act had placed an interdiction on the bloodline, Gastón understood that to enter old Mexico would require of him something like a gift of grace for which he doubted his soul was eligible. 🔗

id805863845

asymptotic 🔗

id805864023

interdiction 🔗

id805865208

hoosegow 🔗

id805868100

heliograph 🔗

id805870489

“Oh, and you’ll want to meet El ñato.” An energetic presence had entered the carriage—officer’s jacket from the defunct army of some country not too nearby, smoked lenses, steel practicalities where you might have expected silver ornaments, and perched up on one epaulette a very large tropical parrot, so out of scale in fact that to converse with its owner it had to lean down to scream into his ear.
“And this is Joaquín,” El ñato smiling up at the bird. “Tell them something about yourself, m’hijo.”
“I like to fuck the gringo pussy,” confided the parrot. 🔗

id805870531

profligate 🔗

id805872728

Pendejo!” screamed the parrot. “Think! Double refraction! Your favorite optical property! Silver mines, full of espato double-refracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw, uh-uh! Cities, too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in that gringo smoke cloud, thinking there’s only one of everything, huevón, you don’t see those strange lights all around you. Ay, Chihuahua. In fact, Ay, Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Kid engineers! All alike. Closed minds. Always been your problem.” 🔗

id805872929

Tarahumares 🔗

id805873312

He had demonstrated at an early age a skill for locating water by examining a random spill of cactus thorns, and he soon became a working brujo, gazing into scatterings of thorns and telling people what would happen to them in the near future, the grammatical tense that mattered most these days back up in the Sierra. 🔗

id805873997

subduction 🔗

id805874081

In the depths of the calcite now, without waiting too long at all, he saw, or later would say he thought he saw, Sloat Fresno, and exactly where Sloat had to be. No comparable message about Deuce, however. A couple years later, when he ran into Ewball again and told him about this, Ewball would frown, in a slightly mischievous way. “Shouldn’t it’ve been a little, don’t know, more spiritual than that? Deep wisdom, ancient truth, light from beyond, all that comes of it is one more cantina shooting? Pretty durn bleak for some magical crystal, ain’t it?” 🔗

id805874165

“What the Indian said was, ‘s that his and the women’s lives got saved, no matter who it was did the savin—this case you, compinche—and that this wasn’t a real piece of spar so much as the idea of two twin halves, of balancing out lives and deaths.” 🔗

id805874253

“You have fallen into the habit of seeing dead things better than live ones. Shabótshi all do. You need practice in seeing.” 🔗

id805874909

Later, on the ground, in fact, strangely, under it, he found himself wandering a stone labyrinth from one cave to another, oppressed by a growing sense of danger—each time he chose a branch, thinking it would lead him out to open air, it only took him deeper, and soon he was at the edge of panic. “Do not,” said the girl, carefully, calming him somehow with an inexplicable clarity of touch, “do not be afraid. They want you to be afraid, but you do not have to give them what they want. You have the power not to be afraid. Find it, and when you do, try to remember where it is.” 🔗

id805875486

“Back before the beginning of all that, when they were designing the world—”
“‘They.’”
“‘They.’ The idea was that water should be everywhere, free to everybody. It was life. Then a few got greedy.” She went on to tell Frank how the desert was made, to serve as their penance. And so to balance it, somewhere, hidden in the uncounted miles of wasteland, would be this one cave, dense with water forever falling. If any wanted to search for it, why, of course they were welcome, though the odds were they’d wander forever without finding it. Tales you heard of haunted silver and gold mines half the time were really about this one hidden cave of rainwater, precious beyond price, but the old desert madfolk believed they had to tell it in a kind of code, that others would be listening, that saying anything out loud would cause the place to grow that much more remote, dangerous to approach. . . . 🔗

id805876407

What was there to do out here but run and pursue? What else made sense? Stand still, under this vast of a sky? Dry out, grow still as the brush, as a cactus, keep slowing down until entering some mineral condition. . . . 🔗

id805877773

the no-longer-elusive Sloat Fresno, quick as that, with his pistol already somehow in his hand, giving Frank time only to find his own and begin firing cold, no chance to rouse up any of those family emotions, none of that—old Sloat, who maybe never even recognized him, failing as it turned out even to get off his shot—blown over backward, one of the chair legs breaking under his already dead weight so he was sent into half a spin, throwing a dark slash of blood that trailed in the air and feathered in a crescent slap, unheard in the noise of the shots, across the ancient soiling of the pulquería floor. Fín. A prolonged and shallow-breathing stillness of burnt powder, smoke rising, ears humming, black Mexican eyeballs seemingly bent upon the newly inducted member of the dead 🔗

id805885307

syntonic 🔗

id805885837

obverse 🔗

id805885891

“So yiz paid double f’ sumt’in’s only good in Chicago ten yeeuhz ago. Swell. All I need’s d’ toime machine, I’m in business, ain’t I?” The urchin, flipping the coin dexterously from hand to hand, shrugged and prepared to take his leave. 🔗

id805885958

plenary 🔗

id805886558

The moment they stepped inside, they were hit by a strong polyaromatic gust, as if exhaled from the corrupted lungs of Depravity herself 🔗

id805886568

ejecta 🔗

id805886635

chanteuse 🔗

id805886681

paillettes 🔗

id805886707

louche 🔗

id805887389

stanchion 🔗

id805888547

acerbic 🔗

id805888627

panache 🔗

id805888635

coaming 🔗

id805889019

They seemed to be in the midst of some great storm in whose low illumination, presently, they could make out, in unremitting sweep across the field of vision, inclined at the same angle as the rain, if rain it was—some material descent, gray and wind-stressed—undoubted human identities, masses of souls, mounted, pillioned, on foot, ranging along together by the millions over the landscape accompanied by a comparably unmeasurable herd of horses. The multitude extended farther than they could see—a spectral cavalry, faces disquietingly wanting in detail, eyes little more than blurred sockets, the draping of garments constantly changing in an invisible flow which perhaps was only wind. Bright arrays of metallic points hung and drifted in three dimensions and perhaps more, like stars blown through by the shockwaves of the Creation. Were those voices out there crying in pain? sometimes it almost sounded like singing. Sometimes a word or two, in a language almost recognizable, came through. Thus, galloping in unceasing flow ever ahead, denied any further control over their fate, the disconsolate company were borne terribly over the edge of the visible world. . . . 🔗

id805889271

“If this is our host’s idea of the future—” Chick began, but he was abruptly checked by the emergence, from the ominous sweep of shadow surrounding them, of a long pole with a great metal hook on the end, of the sort commonly used to remove objectionable performers from the variety stage, which, being latched firmly about Chick’s neck, had in the next instant pulled him off into regions indecipherable. Before Darby had time to shout after, the Hook re-appeared to perform a similar extraction on him, and quick as that, both youngsters found themselves back in the laboratory of Dr. Zoot. The fiendish “time machine,” still in one piece, quivered in its accustomed place, as if with merriment. 🔗

id806349680

Imum Cœli 🔗

id806349838

equinoctial 🔗

id806350061

comestible 🔗

id806364729

imputations 🔗

id806364764

apoplexy 🔗

id806364889

Some Candlebrow conferees had claimed to see in this a parable for that otherworldly flow, insulated from secular ills, which we know as the River of Time. 🔗

id806365202

vivacity 🔗

id806365309

interlocutor 🔗

id806366384

homeopathist 🔗

id806366397

lycopodium 🔗

id806367410

purlieus 🔗

id806368153

quiescence 🔗

id806368175

phatic 🔗

id806368203

“We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present—your future—a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty—the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth aloud were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day, we were forced to migrate, with little choice but to set forth upon that dark fourth-dimensional Atlantic known as Time. 🔗

id806368317

“The nzzt Chums-of-Chance? You are not aware that each of your mission assignments is intended to prevent some attempt of our own to enter your time-regime?” 🔗

id806370340

they’ve run out of and want to seize from us, and take back with them?”
“Food,” said Miles.
“Women,” suggested Darby.
“Lower entropy,” speculated Chick. “As a simple function of Time, their entropy level would be higher. Like rich folks taking mineral waters at some likely ‘spa.’”
“It’s our innocence,” proclaimed Lindsay, in an unaccustomedly distraught voice. “They have descended on our shores to hunt us down, capture our innocence, and take it away with them into futurity.”
“I was thinking of something a little more tangible,” Randolph frowning in thought. “Negotiable.” 🔗

id806371567

On learning that they might be no more exempt than any of the human supernumeraries they had been so carelessly aviating above all these years, some Chums of Chance turned in panic to the corrupt embrace of the Trespassers, ready to deal with Hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys’-book innocence they were so willing now to turn right around and violate on behalf of their insidious benefactors. 🔗

id806371657

unabated 🔗

id806373168

eminence 🔗

id806374560

verdigris 🔗

id806375180

bodies had begun, actually, to fall, and screams delayed by distance to float at last up from the green fields and through the Commandant’s window to accompany his long recitation, punctuated with tuneful quotations on his personal gold-plated I.G. Mundharfwerke “Little Giant,” from behind a desktop chaotically littered with books, papers, and (embarrassingly) outright refuse, such as orange peels, peach pits, and cigar stubs, drifted in places to depths of two feet and more, somewhat repelling Meatman, who had after all only come here to “rat” on his classmates, who would soon, bearing their playing-field casualties, come marching back between the magnolia trees, to the sprightly Offenbach air “Halls of Montezoo-HOO-ma!” the tranquil Old Man with syrup-slow ease continuing his digression, fading through the afternoon, into obsessively detailed allegations of odd latrine behavior, evoking in short flashes white porcelain fittings voluptuous of form, not necessarily toilets, though in some way vehicles for the mysterious but as yet unspecified “peeculiar goings-on,” presently allowing the whole picture to be viewed, a rapid swoop down between the ranks of white fixtures, blurring moistly violet at the edges, into the Latrine itself, into dark proximities including—unavoidably—corruption and death, the rows of mirrors facing each other through a haze of secular use, the breath, atomized dentifrice and shaving preparations, ascents of tapwater vapor bearing traces of local minerals, each set of images chaining away for uncounted leagues, everything reflected, headed for the Point at Infinity along a great slow curve. . . . 🔗

id806375896

interstices 🔗

id806376777

What if they weren’t harmonica players? really? If it was all just some elaborate hoax they’d chosen to play on themselves, to keep distracted from a reality too frightening to receive the vast undiscriminating light of the Sky, perhaps the not-to-be-spoken-of betrayal now firmly installed at the heart of the . . . the Organization whose name curiously had begun to escape them . . . some secret deal, of an unspecified nature, with an ancient enemy . . . but they could find no entries in any of the daily Logs to help them remember. . . . 🔗

id806378363

parlance 🔗

id806379309

But that was the beginning of a certain release from longing, as if they had been living in a remote valley, far from any highways, and one day noticed that just beyond one of the ridgelines all this time there’d been a road, and down this road, as they watched, came a wagon, then a couple of riders, then a coach and another wagon, in daylight which slowly lost its stark isotropy and was flowed into by clouds and chimney smoke and even episodes of weather, until presently there was a steady stream of traffic, audible day and night, with folks beginning to venture over into their valley to visit, and offering rides to towns nearby the boys hadn’t even known existed, and next thing anybody knew, they were on the move again in a world scarcely different from the one they had left. And one day, at the edge of one of these towns, sky-ready, brightwork gleaming, newly painted and refitted and around the corner of a gigantic hangar, waiting for them, as if they had never been away, there was their ship the good old Inconvenience. And Pugnax with his paws up on the quarterdeck rail, tail going a mile a minute, barking with unrestrained joy. 🔗

id806379645

disabused 🔗

id806382285

“It was about flight,” Miles, temporarily lapsing into English, theorized, “flight into the next dimension. We were always at the mercy of Time, as much as any civilian ‘groundhog.’ We went from two dimensions, infant’s floor-space, out into town- and map-space, ever toddling our way into the third dimension, till as Chums recruits we could take the fateful leap skyward . . .and now, after these years of sky-roving, maybe some of us are ready to step ‘sidewise’ once more, into the next dimension—into Time—our fate, our lord, our destroyer.” 🔗

id806872848

lateral resurrection 🔗

id806873093

Incipient Gamomania, “That is, the abnormal desire to be married.” 🔗

id806873373

“LINDSAYLindsayLindsaylindsay . . .” 🔗

id806873465

mutatis mutandis 🔗

id806873537

sibilant 🔗

id806873951

pari passu 🔗

id806874229

histrionic 🔗

id806874424

homilies 🔗

id806874937

penitential 🔗

id806875232

engaging the proper controls on the viewing device could easily produce a long and fearful plunge straight down into the map, revealing the terrain at finer and finer scales, perhaps in some asymptotic way, as in dreams of falling, where the dreamer wakes just before impact. 🔗

id806876232

“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin—all these for the devout Manichæan are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.” 🔗

id806878014

minarets 🔗

id806878382

caravanserais 🔗

id806878613

phonology 🔗

id806878696

andante 🔗

id806879250

“This is distressing,” Randolph muttered. “Once again we are being used to further someone’s hidden plans.” 🔗

id806879379

waylaid 🔗

id806879401

vituperation 🔗

id806879445

byword 🔗

id806879476

equanimity 🔗

id806879549

peterman 🔗

id806880215

“Whatever is to happen,” he reported upon his return, “will begin out here, with an engagement of cavalry on a scale no one living has ever seen, and perhaps no one dead either, an inundation of horse, spanning these horizons, their flanks struck an unearthly green, stormlit, relentless, undwin-dling, arisen boiling from the very substance of desert and steppe. And all that incarnation and slaughter will transpire in silence, all across this great planetary killing-floor, absorbing wind, steel, hooves upon and against earth, massed clamor of horses, cries of men. Millions of souls will arrive and depart. Perhaps news of it will take years to reach anyone who might understand what it meant. . . .”
“I’m not so sure Darby and I haven’t seen something like it already,” mused Chick, recalling their brief though unpleasant experience in the “time-chamber” of Dr. Zoot. But its meaning, even as simple prophecy, was as obscure to them now as then. 🔗

id806880243

cataplexy 🔗

id806881203

beleaguered 🔗

id806882106

feints 🔗

id806893127

forlornness 🔗

id806896903

They gave each other the sour, resentful tightlip smiles of professionals who have learned the dimensions of the payback for whatever magic is keeping the tip out front in their happy stupor—in this case the sheer physical labor of cranking the projector and the demonic energies a man was obliged to stand way too close to. 🔗

id806901813

The conferees had gathered here from all around the world, Russian nihilists with peculiar notions about the laws of history and reversible processes, Indian swamis concerned with the effect of time travel on the laws of Karma, Sicilians with equal apprehensions for the principle of vendetta, American tinkers like Merle with specific electromechanical questions to clear up. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.
“Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon—the Earth’s own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything—” 🔗

id806902325

“We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no longer ‘passes,’ with a linear velocity, but ‘returns,’ with an angular one. All is ruled by the Automorphic Dispensation. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly.”
“Born again!” exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.
Above, the devastation had begun. 🔗

id806902372

propitiatory 🔗

id806903969

It never occurred to him to question how this preoccupation had come about, whether by way of photography and its convergence of silver, time, and light or just with Dally out of the house finding Time so heavy on his hands that he was obliged to bring it a little closer to his face, squint at it from different angles, maybe try to see if it could be taken apart to figure how it might actually work. 🔗

id806906746

poignantly 🔗

id806907402

“I want to know light,” Roswell was confessing, “I want to reach inside light and find its heart, touch its soul, take some in my hands whatever it turns out to be, and bring it back, like the Gold Rush only more at stake, maybe, ‘cause it’s easier to go crazy from, there’s danger in every direction, deadlier than snakes or fever or claim jumpers—” 🔗

id806907808

“There sure is projectionist work everyplace you look,” Merle said, “but the machinery itself, it’s dangerous, and somehow, I’m not sure why, but—more complicated than it needs to be.”
“Yes, it continues to puzzle me,” Roswell agreed, “this irrational worship of the Geneva movement, and the whole idea of a movie projector being built like a clock—as if there could be no other way. Watches and clocks are fine, don’t mistake my meaning, but they are a sort of acknowledgment of failure, they’re there to glorify and celebrate one particular sort of time, the tickwise passage of time in one direction only and no going back. Only kind of movies we’d ever get to see on a machine like that’d be clock movies, elapsing from the beginning of the reel to the end, one frame at a time.
“One problem the early watchmakers had was that the weight of the moving parts would affect the way the watch ran. Time was vulnerable to the force of gravity. So Breguet came up with the tourbillon, which isolated the balance wheel and escapement off on a little platform of their own, geared to the third wheel, rotating about once a minute, assuming in the course of the day most positions in 3-D space relative to the gravity of the Earth, so the errors would cancel out and make time impervious to gravity. But now suppose you wanted to turn that around.”
“Make gravity impervious to time? Why?”
Roswell shrugged. “It’s that one-way business again. They’re both forces that act in one direction only. Gravity pulls along the third dimension, up to down, time pulls along the fourth, birth to death.”
“Rotate something through space-time so it assumes all positions relative to the one-way vector ‘time.’”
“There you go.”
“Wonder what you’d get.” 🔗

id806909401

pince-nez 🔗

id807286588

He wondered if he could be his own ghost, and haunting these rooms and corridors, as if the nearly negligible fraction of his life spent here had remained here, somehow still proceeding, just past visibility—Stray, Cooper and Sage, Linnet, Reef as the careless young rounder he’d been, all were just “over there,” just like living in the world, changed from whoever they used to be, reluctantly allowing in more and more of the spirit-battering events of everyday, moved on, some of them, into colder places and harder times, bust, adrift, drawn west by those Pacific promises, victims of their own bad judgment . . .but Frank understood he was not to be any part of it. 🔗

id807287522

Frank stood at the flimsy kitchen door, with the papered-over glass, when the light came through, and listened, breathed, waited. He wondered if Stray, over on “her side,” alone during the deepening sadness of these daytime hours, might’ve begun to hear in other parts of the house routine sounds of his own presence—footsteps, water running or draining—as if from some phantom rooms amputated from the rest of the building and occupied, like it or not, by the dead? . . . 🔗

id807294406

Frank ran into the Reverend Moss Gatlin driving a strange-looking horseless trolley car, with a miniature steeple and working church bells on the back end, and over the front window, where the destination sign usually was, the lighted-up words ANARCHIST HEAVEN. Moss was busy picking up every vagrant, ankle-biter, opium fiend, down-and-outer, brakebeam stiff, in fact any citizen looking even a little helpless—and loading them on board his A.H. Express. Frank must have qualified, because the Rev caught sight of him right away and tipped his hat. 🔗

id807347916

palps 🔗

id807348178

In the train-station toilets, you could always find inscribed the last word in these matters—
Roses is red
Shit is brown
Nothing but assholes
Live in this town. 🔗

id807348391

Each meandering river presented a distinction between the two sides, prosperity or want, upright or immoral, safe as Heaven or doomed as Sodom, sheathed in certainty or exposed in all helplessness to the sky and a tragic destiny. 🔗

id807350178

laudanum 🔗

id807407546

drover 🔗

id807408335

BEING AFRAID OF GHOSTS, Deuce had been waiting for Webb to find him. In dreams no different from his cursed youth, he left her in the night, went calling into the unmeasured shadows deep inside haunted barns, daring what was there to come out into the open country, which itself had grown malevolent. He waited up into the clockless nights for mountains miles high that only came out at night, waiting to drive an ownerless wagon straight uphill into autumnal graveyard terrain and be found by the man he had killed. Mosquitoes big as farm animals, with eyes as reincarnate and expressive as a dog’s, and bodies warm and squeezable as a rabbit’s, bumped slowly against him. . . .
Deuce sometimes felt like he had put his head into a very small room, one no bigger, in fact, than human head size, unechoing, close and still. “Well . . . maybe,” he could hardly hear his own voice, “I could go out and kill a whole lot of other folks? and then I wouldn’t feel nearly as bad about just the one. . . .” 🔗

id807414368

Wish it could be Denver . . . be a saloon girl. . . . She crossed out the words, but went on daydreaming about it, whole dime novels full of lurid goings-on. Chandeliers and Champagne. Men whose faces were never too clear. Pain that felt just so good, imagined in detail. Girl intimates who lay around in fancy linen sharing laudanum on long slow winter nights. A loneliness nothing could touch. An embrace of distant, empty rooms, kept clean by the wind forever blowing through. A high-mountain sunlit spareness, a house framed in absolute rectilinear purity, dry, bleached, silent but for the wind. And her young face, remembered by a hundred no-goods all through the San Juans for its clean delicacy, unshielded before the days and what they were doing to it. 🔗

id807415388

depredations 🔗

id807415399

malfeasance 🔗

id807415745

galluses 🔗

id807416062

soliloquy 🔗

id807416180

disconsolate 🔗

id807416285

rhapsodizing 🔗

id807416613

aggrandizement 🔗

id807416821

ineluctability 🔗

id807417096

antinomy 🔗

id807417129

prosaic 🔗

id807420067

“You are the girls of High Albedo,” they were instructed, “the girls of silver darkness on the negative, golden brightness in the print. . . .” 🔗

id807421882

gossamer 🔗

id807427384

Riemann’s Zeta 🔗

id807431612

stultifying 🔗

id807431624

chromaticism 🔗

id807431913

Gauss 🔗

id807439584

“I suppose I only mean, be cautious. Though desperately carnal themselves, those two, yet their allegiance is not to the given world.”
“Of the flesh but not the world? How peculiar. How can that be? It sounds like maths, only more practical somehow.” 🔗

id807457244

gynecophobia 🔗

id807457357

truancy 🔗

id807458548

terra firma. 🔗

id807458616

liminality 🔗

id807458700

oneiric 🔗

id807458863

waited long after she had left Cambridge, in fact, but no such attack of sadness occurred, and presently he understood that some perverse variety of Fate, already familiar to him, which did not promise but rather withheld, was offering him the assurance that none of “this”—whatever it was supposed to be—was quite done with yet. 🔗

id807846306

“You can say ‘Pa.’” Still a-blush and her eyes all lit up. “Maybe all I am’s just some old Glamorous Assistant—you think?—always cursed to be drifting into the arms of one magician or another?” 🔗

id807848860

The Captain got up from his own table to go and sit with the family, whose patriarch genially reached behind his ear to produce a glass full of Champagne with the foam still on it, while the dinner orchestra struck up a species of tarantella. 🔗

id807849149

lobelias 🔗

id807849892

IT HAD BEGUN to seem as if she and Kit were on separate vessels, distinct versions of the Stupendica, pulling away slowly on separate courses, each bound to a different destiny. 🔗

id807850073

torpor 🔗

id807851925

paroxysm 🔗

id807852192

bituminous 🔗

id807852287

syntonic 🔗

id807853481

hitherto 🔗

id807853509

cacophony 🔗

id807856730

scuttlebutt 🔗

id807856853

hinterland 🔗

id807858335

lazarettes 🔗

id807872675

estaminet 🔗

id807872846

polyglot 🔗

id807873605

dossing 🔗

id807874071

khâgne 🔗

id807874114

“Like the Russian nihilists,” Denis explained, “we are metaphysicians at heart. There is a danger of becoming too logical. At the end of the day one can only consult one’s heart.” 🔗

id807889625

“Who can say what a ‘normal’ assassination rate is supposed to be?”
“Yes,” Policarpe put in, “maybe it’s not high enough yet. Considering how scientifically inevitable the act is.” 🔗

id807889641

Sipido 🔗

id807889982

stolidity 🔗

id807890248

chaste 🔗

id807890289

narcosis 🔗

id807892032

plaintively 🔗

id807892369

Kit threaded his way out into the Grand Salon, wallpapered in aniline teal and a bright though sour orange, to appearances floral in theme, though few would insist on it, lit by hundreds of modern-looking sconces, each quartershade of Congo ivory scraped thin as paper to let its electric bulb shine through, roisteringly a-seethe tonight with Quaternionnaires from around the globe, all persuasions not to mention apostates therefrom, quasi-Gibbsites and pseudo-Heavisiders and full-bore Grassmanniacs, milling about, more than in the mood for a clambake, eccentrically attired, negligently when not defectively groomed, all, with perhaps no more than the usual quota of barking and drooling, gossiping breathlessly about vacant appointments, compulsive marriages, cretinous colleagues, and real estate both overpriced and otherwise, scribbling on one another’s attire, performing with cigarettes and banknotes feats of vanishing and restoration right up in one another’s faces, drinking Monopole de la Maison, dancing on tabletops, exhausting the patience of wives, vomiting into the pockets of strangers, getting into long, intensely hoarse disputes in fluent Esperanto and Idiom Neutral, the technical discussions being in large part impenetrable, the phatic or sociable chitchat tending to the only slightly less problematic. 🔗

id807892446

“Does that mean we only imagine now that we exist?”
“Imaginary axes, imaginary existence.”
“Ghosts. Ghosts.” 🔗

id807892586

“Of course we lost. Anarchists always lose out, while the Gibbs-Heaviside Bolsheviks, their eyes ever upon the long-term, grimly pursued their aims, protected inside their belief that they are the inevitable future, the xyz people, the party of a single Established Coördinate System, present everywhere in the Universe, governing absolutely. We were only the ijk lot, drifters who set up their working tents for as long as the problem might demand, then struck camp again and moved on, always ad hoc and local, what do you expect?” 🔗

id807892774

“Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought they know of God’s intention—that space be simple, three-dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the real term, and a scalar as well—simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, to defend.” 🔗

id807893047

chanteuse 🔗

id807893230

“Thought you’d eloped with that redhead!” he greeted Kit.
“Got drafted into the navy,” Kit said. “I think. Nothing’s been rigorously what you’d call ‘real’ lately. Does seeing you in this condition mean that everything is normal again?” 🔗

id807893300

truculence 🔗

id807894171

Being used to more of a saloon type of atmosphere, Kit found the European manners here oppressive, not a heck of a lot of bluffing, slandering, cheating, or getting into fistfights, it seemed. Where was the fun? Except for a scream now and then whose polarity was hard to read, high emotion had to wait either for later or maybe for some other offstage room set aside for pain, lost souls, and canceled futures, for everything that must not go on out here, for this was a temple of money, wasn’t it, even if that did lead back to its own Unspoken, to figures like Fleetwood Vibe, to rubber and ivory and fever and black African misery whose awful depths were only beginning to appal public sentiment elsewhere in the civilized world. 🔗

id807895571

“This is the point where the Casino detectives come over and make me give it all back.”
“We’re safe,” Root assured her, “they’re looking for the latest thing, Nicol prisms and stroboscopic monocles and wireless telegraph rigs in people’s shoes. But our magic is more ancient, and the big advantage to being so outmoded is that nobody recognizes it when they see it.”
“So I have—what do you call them? Quaternions to thank.”
“That might present difficulty—but you can thank us, if you like.” 🔗

id807895583

piker 🔗

id807897390

If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world, change your length, enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to three different ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person. Or vector.” 🔗

id807897831

“Can you do it backwards and return to who you were?”
“I have still not learned how. Some master Yogis are said to know the technique, but for me it remains noncommutative—mostly, I just like to hop about. Each time I become somebody else. It is like reincarnation on a budget, without the element of karma to worry about.” 🔗

id807898502

bureaux 🔗

id807898644

contrivance 🔗

id807898731

envisaged 🔗

id807898737

surfeit 🔗

id807898763

fetid 🔗

id807898797

facile 🔗

id807898890

brotherhood of the willfully lost. 🔗

id807898939

“‘Only.’” Woevre was amused. “Someday you’ll explain to me how that’s possible. Seeing that, on the face of it, all mathematics leads, doesn’t it, sooner or later, to some kind of human suffering.” 🔗

id807899220

Why did this society insist on a woman entering a room face-first instead of ass-first? Another of the civilized complexities that made him miss intensely the forest life. 🔗

id807899296

Could it matter who spied for whom? The ruling families of Europe, related by blood and marriage, inhabited their single great incestuous pretense of power, bickering without end—the state bureaucracies, the armies, the Churches, the bourgeoisie, the workers, all were incarcerated within the game. . . . But if, like Woevre, one had seen into the fictitiousness of European power, there was no reason, in the terrible trans-horizontic light of what approached, not to work for as many masters, along as many axes, as one’s memory could accommodate without confusion. 🔗

id807899548

malediction 🔗

id807899686

monitory 🔗

id807899750

“We know each other,” said Policarpe. “It’s a peculiar game we all play. Against what looms in the twilight of the European future, it doesn’t make much sense, this pretending to carry on with the day, you know, just waiting. Everyone waiting.”
“In France,” said Denis, “they speak of He Who Must Come. He is not the Messiah. He is not Christ or Napoleon returned. He was not General Boulanger. He is unnameable. Nevertheless one would have to be uncommonly isolated, either mentally or physically, not to feel His approach. And to know what He is bringing. What death and what transfiguration.”
“We wait here, however, not, like the French, for some Napoleon, nothing that human, but kept hostage to the arrival of a certain military Hour, whenever the general staffs decide it has struck.” 🔗

id807900060

“Think of Belgium as a pawn. It is no accident that so many international chess tournaments are held here in Ostende. If chess is war in miniature . . . perhaps Belgium is understood to be the first sacrifice in a general conflict . . . though perhaps not, as in a gambit, to provide a counterattack, for a gambit may be declined, and who would decline to take Belgium?”
“So . . . this is like Colorado, with changes of sign—it’s negative altitude, this living below sea-level, something like that?”
Fatou stood close to him, looking up through her lashes. “It is the sorrow of anticipation, Kit.” 🔗

id807900671

attainder 🔗

id807910272

After sunset, however, this cheerfully rational example of twentieth-century engineering dissolved into more precarious shadows. “Anybody here?” Kit called, wandering the corridors and catwalks in a borrowed lounge suit and some nifty razor-toed congress shoes. Somewhere invisible in the dark, steam dynamos hissed, and enormous batteries of Italian hens squawked, clucked, and laid eggs which rolled ceaselessly, day and night apparently, in a subdued rumbling, by way of an intricate arrangement of chutes cushioned in gutta-percha, to the Egg Collection Area. 🔗

id807930511

dirigible 🔗

id807930538

Trying to clear his eyes of the stuff, slipping repeatedly, he half swam, half staggered toward where he remembered having seen a window, and launched a blind desperate kick, which of course sent him flat on his ass again, but not before he’d felt a hopeful splintering of glass and sashwork, and before he could think of a way to reach the invisible opening to climb through, the mayonnaise-pressure itself, like a conscious beast seeking escape from its captivity, had borne him through the broken window, launching him out in a great vomitous arc which dropped him into the canal below. 🔗

id807933356

revanchist 🔗

id807934028

prefiguration 🔗

id807935330

pallid 🔗

id807935352

copse 🔗

id807935727

We had quickly discovered our common love of the instrument,” Miles recalled, “and discussed the widespread contempt in which ukulele players are held—traceable, we concluded, to the uke’s all-but-exclusive employment as a producer of chords—single, timeless events apprehended all at once instead of serially. Notes of a linear melody, up and down a staff, being a record of pitch versus time, to play a melody is to introduce the element of time, and hence of mortality. Our perceived reluctance to leave the timelessness of the struck chord has earned ukulele players our reputation as feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up.” 🔗

id807936459

“You boys spend too much time up there. You lose sight of what is really going on in the world you think you understand. Do you know why we set up a permanent base at Candlebrow? Because all investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality. Because we have the answer for that. You think you drift above it all, immune to everything, immortal. Are you that foolish? Do you know where we are right now?” 🔗

id807936641

“We have had no choice,” fiercely, having abandoned the measured delivery Miles had come to associate with Trespassers. “No more than ghosts may choose what places they must haunt . . . you children drift in a dream, all is smooth, no interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of Time torn open, and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles who find you will do what you must, however shameful, to get from end to end of each corroded day.” 🔗

id807937751

Miles, taken by a desolate illumination, reached out his hand, and Thorn, seeing his intention, flinched and backed away, and in the instant Miles understood that there had been no miracle, no brilliant technical coup, in fact no “time travel” at all—that the presence in this world of Thorn and his people had been owing only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of Time, enabled somehow by whatever was to happen here, in this part of West Flanders where they stood, by whatever terrible singularity in the smooth flow of Time had opened to them.
“You are not here,” he whispered in a speculative ecstasy. “Not fully manifest.”
“I wish I were not here,” cried Ryder Thorn. “I wish I had never seen these Halls of Night, that I were not cursed to return, and return. You have been so easy to fool—most of you anyway—you are such simpletons at the fair, gawking at your Wonders of Science, expecting as your entitlement all the Blessings of Progress, it is your faith, your pathetic balloon-boy faith.” 🔗

id807938661

hysteresis 🔗

id808320118

“There is nothing immortal about them, Chick. They have lied to all of us, including those Chums of Chance in other units who may have been fool enough to work for them, in exchange for ‘eternal youth.’ They cannot provide that. They never could. 🔗

id808322729

Her parents had sailed out of Cobh like everybody else, but she’d been born later, and had never been to sea. If they had been sailing into the future, toward some unknowable form of the afterlife, what was this journey of Dally’s the other way? A kind of release from death and judgment back into childhood? She twirled her parasol in thought. A hack driver or two cast an appreciative eye her way. 🔗

id808323844

One glance at any government budget anywhere in the world tells the story—the money is always in place, already allocated, the motive everywhere is fear, the more immediate the fear, the higher the multiples.” 🔗

id808324905

“Time,” explained Dr. Rao, “is the Further Term, you see, transcending and conditioning i, j, and k—the dark visitor from the Exterior, the Destroyer, the fulfiller of the Trinity. It is the merciless clock-beat we all seek to escape, into the pulselessness of salvation. It is all this and more.”
“A weapon based on Time . . .” mused Viktor Mulciber. “Well, why not? The one force no one knows how to defeat, resist, or reverse. It kills all forms of life sooner or later. With a Time-weapon you could become the most feared person in history.”
“I’d rather be loved,” said Root.
Mulciber shrugged. “You’re young.” 🔗

id808325694

sonorously 🔗

id808326732

carillons 🔗

id808326774

opulently 🔗

id808327528

Perhaps we are meant to ignore the optics altogether, as if the rays were no longer doubly refracted, but doubly emitted, from whatever object we may observe through this . . . as if in the coconscious there were some counterpart to the Extraordinary Ray, and we were seeing with the eye of that unexplored realm. 🔗

id808345123

vaporetto 🔗

id808348903

profondes 🔗

id808351996

nickelodeon 🔗

id808355392

“Oh, then call them ‘traces of consciousness.’ Psychical Research is beginning to open these matters up a bit. Ghosts can be . . . well, actually, look at them all.” He waved an arm up and down the Zattere. “Every tourist you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep tonight in a strange bed, is potentially that kind of ghost. Transient beds for some reason are able to catch and hold these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul. Haven’t you noticed, in hotels, the way your dreams are often, alarmingly, not your own?” 🔗

id808355748

“A world of presences. Phantoms. History kept sweeping through, Napoleon, the Austrians, a hundred forms of bourgeois literalism, leading to its ultimate embodiment, the tourist—how beleaguered they must have felt. But stay in this town awhile, keep your senses open, reject nothing, and now and then you’ll see them.” 🔗

id808356332

nocturnes 🔗

id808356534

tenebrous 🔗

id808360264

sirocco 🔗

id808360268

bora 🔗

id808381906

Through God’s blind mercy, as he told it to Dally a few days later, on their way over to Tancredi’s studio in Cannareggio, after escapes from destruction and war in places he could no longer remember clearly, he had found asylum in Venice, only to happen one day upon these visions of Tancredi’s, and recognize the futuristic vehicle which had borne him to safety from the devastated City so long ago, and the subterranean counter-City it took him through, and the chill, comfortless faith in science and rationality that had kept all his fellow refugees then so steady in their flight, and his own desolate certainty of having failed in his remit, one of those mascottes who had brought only bad luck to those who trusted him, destined to end up in cheap rooms down at the ends of suburban streets, eventually indifferent to their own fates, legends of balefulness, banned from accompanying all but the most disreputable and suicidal of voyagers. But lately—was it Venice? was it Dahlia?—he was beginning to feel less comfortable as one of the lost.
So Dally thought she ought to have a look. 🔗

id808382655

But I would bring Hell in a small bounded space.”
“And . . . that would be . . .”
Tancredi laughed grimly. “You’re American, you think you have to know everything. Others would prefer not to know. Some define Hell as the absence of God, and that is the least we may expect of the infernal machine—that the bourgeoisie be deprived of what most sustains them, their personal problem-solver sitting at his celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below. . . . But the finite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this is not so much a painting as a dialectical argument.” 🔗

id808382865

“Of course it’s to do with Time,” Tancredi frowning and intense, aroused despite himself at the possibility that she might really have been thinking about the subject, “everything that we imagine is real, living and still, thought and hallucinated, is all on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future, the challenge to us is to show as much of the passage as we can, given the damnable stillness of paint. This is why—” Using his thumb against a brushful of orpiment yellow, he aimed a controlled spatter of paint at his canvas, followed by another brushful of scarlet vermilion and a third of Nürnberg violet—the target patch seemed to light up like a birthday cake, and before any of it could dry he was at it with an impossibly narrow brush, no more than a bristle or two, stabbing tiny dots among larger ones. “The energies of motion, the grammatical tyrannies of becoming, in divisionismo we discover how to break them apart into their component frequencies . . . we define a smallest picture element, a dot of color which becomes the basic unit of reality. . . .” 🔗

id808417093

puerility 🔗

id808420130

On the other side of it, she found herself out on the corner of Prinzenstraße and Weenderstraße, known to mathematicians here as the origin of the city of Göttingen’s coördinate system. “Return to zero,” she muttered to herself. “Begin again.” She didn’t find this sort of excursion especially out of the ordinary—it had happened before, and once she had learned that no harm was likely to come of it, she had been able to shrug and get on with her day. It was no more upsetting than waking from a lucid dream. 🔗

id808423305

The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathematics. Weierstrass functions, Cantor’s continuum, Russell’s equally inexhaustible capacity for mischief—once, among nations, as in chess, suicide was illegal. Once, among mathematicians, ‘the infinite’ was all but a conjuror’s convenience. The connections lie there, Kit—hidden and poisonous. Those of us who must creep among them do so at our peril.” 🔗

id808426908

“AS A CRIME,” Humfried pointed out, “often of the gravest sort, committed in a detective story, may often be only a pretext for the posing and solution of some narrative puzzle, so romance in this town is often pursued as little beyond a pretext for running in and out of doors, not to mention up and down stairs, while talking nonstop and, on auspicious days, screaming.” 🔗

id808428293

alacrity 🔗

id808429805

commutative 🔗

id808430284

Kit soon understood that the brambling of the golf-ball surface had been a way to keep the boundary layer from detaching and falling apart into turbulence which would tend to drag the ball down, denying it its destiny in the sky. 🔗

id808438161

pantechnicon 🔗

id808440160

“Waves in a timeless stream of Gas unceasing, illuminating-gas in particular, though including as well waves of sound, which might, as in that mainstay of Victorian science, the Sensitive Flame, modulate waves of light. To the cognizant nose in particular, the olfactory sector—or smell, as it is known, can be a medium for the most exquisite poetry.” 🔗

id810034870

Lenin himself is said to be writing a gigantic book now, attempting to refute the ‘fourth dimension,’ his position being, from what I can gather, that the Tsar can only be overthrown in three.” 🔗

id810034962

Madame Eskimoff—perhaps you’ll meet her—said that when spirits walk, beings living in four-dimensional space pass through our own three, and the strange presences that flicker then at the edges of awareness are those very moments of intersection. When we enter, even in ordinary daylight, upon a chain of events we are certain we have lived through before, in every detail, it is possible that we have stepped outside of Time as it commonly passes here, above this galley-slave repetition of days, and have had a glimpse of future, past, and present”—she made a compressive gesture—“all together.”
“Which would be to interpret the fourth dimension as Time,” said Kit.
“They call it ‘the already seen.’” 🔗

id810035726

eidolon 🔗

id810036031

“‘Well. Reckon yo tengo que get el fuck out of aquí.’” 🔗

id810036388

emetic 🔗

id810037623

Invisibilism, a school of modern architecture which believed that the more “rationally” a structure was designed, the less visible would it appear, in extreme examples converging to its so-called Penultimate Term—the step just before deliverance into the Invisible, or as some preferred to say, “into its own meta-structure,” minimally attached to the physical world. 🔗

id810038912

aniline 🔗

id810038957

Dirigible 🔗

id810039242

scherzo 🔗

id810040204

“Well. Puts them in a bind, doesn’t it. I mean, if I’m human, and they’re considering me for breakfast, that makes them cannibals—but if I really am a jelly doughnut, then, being cannibals, they all have to be jelly doughnuts as well, don’t you see?” He began to laugh merrily. 🔗

id810042631

Theosophist 🔗

id810042868

peripatetic 🔗

id810043525

And what’s it matter really, materialist or spiritualist, they’re all bloody bomb-chuckers aren’t they. 🔗

id810043612

Kashgar is the spiritual capital of Inner Asia, as ‘interior’ as one can get, and not only geographically. As for what lies beneath those sands, you’ve your choice—either Shambhala, as close to the Heavenly City as Earth has known, or Baku and Johannesburg all over again, unexplored reserves of gold, oil, Plutonian wealth, and the prospect of creating yet another subhuman class of workers to extract it. One vision, if you like, spiritual, and the other, capitalist. Incommensurable, of course.” 🔗

id810043847

orthogonal 🔗

id810048582

tropism 🔗

id810048700

penitential 🔗

id810048760

antipodal 🔗

id810049832

“Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.” 🔗

id810050940

tesseract 🔗

id810055543

Away to the west and the Sierra, in grand residences faintly visible through the mists that rose from the malarial lowlands, the gringo population cringed on top of their breezy river-bluffs, waiting for the native uprising they all believed imminent, as they lay supine in their bedrooms night after night, beset, in the few hours of sleep they did find, by nearly identical nightmares of desert flight, pitiless skies, faces in which not only the irises but the entire surfaces of eyes were black, glistening in the sockets, implacable, reflecting columns of flame as wells blazed and exploded, nothing ahead but exile, loss, disgrace, no future anyplace north of the Río Bravo, voices invisible out in the oil-reek, from out of the diseased canals, accusing, arraigning, promising retribution for offenses unremembered. . . . 🔗

id810056820

stevedores 🔗

id810058127

“Hell. Only way I’d miss her’s if my sights was off.” 🔗

id810058222

dyspepsia 🔗

id810058463

“these folks down here at least still have a chance—one that the norteamericanos lost long ago. For you-all, it’s way too late anymore. You’ve delivered yourselves into the hands of capitalists and Christers, and anybody wants to change any of that steps across ’at frontera, they’re drygulched on the spot 🔗

id810060944

contralto 🔗

id810061240

tempest 🔗

id810063883

Stray was here, and they were gone, and Reef was God knew where—Frank’s wishful family look-alike, Jesse’s father and Webb’s uncertain avenger and her own sad story, her dream, recurring, bad, broken, never come true. 🔗

id810074686

Reef usually found himself single-jacking or augering with a breastplate rig holding the butt end of the drill against his body.
Old-timers on the crew—Nikos, Fulvio, Gerhardt, the opera singer, the Albanian—when they first penetrated the mountain, prepared to fight frozen rock, had found instead a passionate heart, a teeming interiority, mineral water at about 120 to 130 degrees, and a struggle some days to simply get out alive by shift’s end, although some never did. . . 🔗

id810075739

Kanuni Lekë Dukagjinit, allowed any wronged family one consequence-free rifle shot, but if the offender was still alive after twenty-four hours, they couldn’t take any further revenge for as long as he stayed on his own property. 🔗

id810076404

Among the many superstitions inside this mountain was a belief that the tunnel was “neutral ground,” exempt not only from political jurisdictions but from Time itself. The Anarchists and Socialists on the shift had their own mixed feelings about history. They suffered from it, and it was also to be their liberator, if they could somehow survive to see the day. In the shower-baths at the end of the shift, the suffering could be read on each body, as a document written in insults to flesh and bone—scars, crookedness, missing parts. They knew each other as more comfortable men, in the steam-rooms of hydropathics, for instance, would not. Amateur bullet removals and bone settings, cauterizations and brandings, some souvenirs were public and could be compared, others were private and less likely to be talked about. 🔗

id810076482

Tatzelwurms 🔗

id810076858

“Once you have had the encounter,” Gerhardt agreed, “it is with you forever. This is why I believe they are sent to us, to some of us in particular, for a purpose.”
“What’s that?” Reef said.
“To tell us that we shouldn’t be doing this.”
“Tunneling?”
“Putting railroads.”
“But we’re not,” Reef pointed out. “The people who are paying us are. Do they ever see the Tatzelwurm?”
“It visits them in their dreams.”
“And it looks like us,” added Flaco. 🔗

id810076935

languorous 🔗

id810076978

adiabatic 🔗

id810077073

cognoscenti 🔗

id810078746

modish 🔗

id810079981

“Didn’t know I was invited along.”
She gave him a look and, possibly by way of formal invitation, reached for his penis. 🔗

id810082855

apse 🔗

id810083841

“In a cathedral what looks solid never is. Walls are hollow inside. Columns contain winding staircases. This apparently solid mountain is really a collection of hot springs, caves, fissures, passageways, one hiding-place within another—and the Tatzelwurms know it all intimately. They are the priesthood of their own dark religion 🔗

id810107298

IT WAS SAID that great tunnels like the Simplon or St.-Gotthard were haunted, that when the train entered and the light of the world, day or night, had to be abandoned for the time of passage however brief, and the mineral roar made conversation impossible, then certain spirits who once had chosen to surrender into the fierce intestinal darkness of the mountain would reappear among the paying passengers, take empty seats, drink negligibly from the engraved glassware in the dining cars, assume themselves into the rising shapes of tobacco smoke, whisper a propaganda of memory and redemption to salesmen, tourists, the resolutely idle, the uncleansably rich, and other practitioners of forgetfulness, who could not sense the visitors with anything like the clarity of fugitives, exiles, mourners, and spies—all those, that is, who had reached agreement, even occasions of intimacy, with Time. 🔗

id810107446

“What happened to you? You were a promising young dynamiter, your father’s son, sworn to alter the social terrain, and now you’re hardly much better than the people you used to want to blow up. Look at them. Too much money and idle time, too little fucking compassion, Reef.”
“I earned this. I put in my time.”
“But you’ll never earn these folks’s respect or even any credibility. It’s never going to get much better than contempt. Clear all the happy horseshit out of your mind, try to remember what Webb looked like, at least. Then turn your thoughts to the man who had him murdered. Scarsdale Vibe is in easy reach right now. Scarsdale how-about-you-all-go-live-in-shit-and-die-young-so’s-I-can-stay-in-big-hotels-and-spend-millions-on-fine-art Vibe. Look him up when you’re down there in Venice, Italy. Better yet, sight him in. You can still stop all this idle fuckfuck, turn around, and get back to yourself again.” 🔗

id812689777

tramontana 🔗

id812690334

lassitude 🔗

id812690355

Switzerland arrived just in time, rising before them like a lime sorbet after a steady diet of roasted ducks and assorted goose products. 🔗

id812690516

“In Russia, when I was a small child,” Yashmeen continued after a while, “I should not remember it now, but I do, wanderers, wild-looking men, came to our doors seeking shelter as if they were entitled to it. They were the stranniki—once, they had led everyday lives like other men, had their families and work, houses filled with furniture, children’s toys, pots and pans, clothes, all the tack of domestic life. Then one day they simply turned—walked out through the door and away from that, from all of it—whatever had held them there, history, love, betrayals forgiven or not, property, nothing mattered now, they were no longer responsible to the world, let alone the Tsar—only God could claim them, their only allegiance was to God. In my little town, and it was said all over Russia, families had dug secret rooms beneath their houses, where these men could rest on their journeys. The Government feared them more than it feared Social Democrats, more than bomb-throwers, ‘Very dangerous,’ Papa assured us—we knew he didn’t mean dangerous to us—we also understood it was our duty to help them in their passage. Their holy mission. Even with them down under the house, we slept as peacefully as we ever did. Perhaps more so. We told each other stories about them, ambassadors from some mysterious country very far away, unable to return to that homeland because the way back was hidden. They had to keep wandering the world whose deceptions and melodramas, blood and desire, we had begun to sense, perhaps not seeking anything with a name, perhaps only wandering. People called them podpol’niki, underground men. Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils over another world. It was not the day we knew that provided the stranniki their light.” 🔗

id812690764

“There are teachers. Teachers who have us for a while, allow us to see particular things, and then send us on, without regard to how we may have come to feel about them. We depart, wondering if now, perhaps, we will not be in a state of departure forever. We go off to dwell night by night beneath the floors of Europe, on another sort of journey into another sort of soul, in which we must discard everything, not only the objects we possess but everything we have taken to be ‘real,’ all we have learned, all the work we have put in, the theorems, the proofs, the questioning, the breath-taken trembling before the beauty of an intractable problem, all of which was perhaps illusion.” 🔗

id812692135

In the days that followed, Mouffette took every occasion to jump up in Reef’s lap and gaze into his eyes—sarcastically, it seemed to Reef—opening her mouth suggestively, sometimes even drooling. Each time Reef tried not to flinch. Each time Ruperta, exasperated, would cry, “Honestly, it isn’t as if she means to bite you.” 🔗

id812693253

reticule 🔗

id812694460

Seems every day somebody’s discovering another new piece of the spectrum, out there beyond visible light, or a new extension of the mind beyond conscious thought, and maybe someplace far away the two domains are even connected up.” 🔗

id812696052

eigenvalue 🔗

id812696553

metonymies 🔗

id812697055

As light began to seep in around the edges of the window blinds, Kit fell asleep again and dreamed of a bullet en route to the heart of an enemy, traveling for many years and many miles, hitting something now and then and ricocheting off at a different angle but continuing its journey as if conscious of where it must go, and he understood that this zigzagging around through four-dimensional space-time might be expressed as a vector in five dimensions. Whatever the number of n dimensions it inhabited, an observer would need one extra, n + 1, to see it and connect the end points to make a single resultant. 🔗

id812697327

“Yashmeen, the son of a bitch has destroyed my family. What am I—”
“Only envy. You are lucky to have any recourse. A name, someone who can be held to account. Too many of us have to sit foolishly by while something comes out of the dark, strikes, returns to wherever it came from, as if we are too fragile for a world of happy families, whose untroubled destinies require that the rest of us be sacrificed.” 🔗

id812698079

He took her hand and shook it formally but didn’t let it go right away. “Do you think—”
“We would ever have run away together in real life? no. I find it hard imagining anyone stupid enough to believe we would.” 🔗

id813055830

Could be all those Catholics he’d run into in this line of work, Irish and Polish in Chicago, Mexicans in Colorado and so forth, had it right all along, and there was nothing in the day’s echoing cycle but penance, even if you’d never committed a sin, to live in the world was to do penance—actually, as his teacher Drave had pointed out back during that winter in Chicago, another argument for reincarnation—“Being unable to remember sins from a previous life won’t excuse you from doing penance in this one. To believe in the reality of penance is almost to have proof of rebirth.” 🔗

id813059608

“Sorry boys, I don’t think I’m chasing Tarot cards anymore, no, from here on it’s anxious husbands and missing necklaces and exotic poisons for me, thanks.”
And if that wasn’t exactly who he was either—if, not having wanted much for a while, this wasn’t even exactly what he “wanted”—he was determined at least never to have to go back, never to end up again down some gopher-riddled trail through the scabland, howling at the unexplained and unresponsive moon. 🔗

id813075083

insouciance 🔗

id813106619

circumlocutions 🔗

id813107005

hæmatophages 🔗

id813108230

It was nostalgia for its own sake, really. The more he found himself addressed—even called out to—as “Dickwanst” and “Fettarsch,” the more his Prater-longings began to ebb, and he turned to quarters of the city he would not, as recently as months ago, even fleetingly have considered, such as Favoriten, where he went to move among the crowds of Bohemian workmen when the factory shifts changed, not so much seeking exotic flirtation as to be absorbed somehow into a mobility, a bath of language he did not speak, as he had once sought in carnal submission an escape route from what it seemed of the world he was being asked to bear. . . . 🔗

id813116137

“You are a full partner, Foley. You see the same set of books I do. The mixing of funds is a mystery deep as death 🔗

id813134598

apiarian 🔗

id813135750

“Then I saw that I was mistaking confusion for depth. Like a canvas that gives the illusion of an extra dimension, yet each layer taken by itself is almost transparently shallow. 🔗

id813137154

lambent 🔗

id813142671

“It’s not the price tag,” Tancredi cried, “it’s what comes after—investment, reselling, killing something born in the living delirium of paint meeting canvas, turning it into a dead object, to be traded, on and on, for whatever the market will bear. A market whose forces are always exerted against creation, in the direction of death.” 🔗

id813143337

tutelary 🔗

id813143984

viscid 🔗

id813145521

He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little rectangle of canvas at a time. 🔗

id813148068

Dally was supposed to be past the melancholy of departure, no longer held by its gravity, yet, as if she could see the entire darkened reach of what lay ahead, she wanted now to step close, embrace him, this boy, for as long as it took to establish some twofold self, renounce the somber fate he seemed so sure of. He was gazing at her as if having just glimpsed the simple longitude of what he was about to do, as if desiring to come into some shelter, though maybe not her idea of it . . . so, like terms on each side canceling, they only stood there, curtains of Venetian mist between them, among the steam-sirens and clamoring boatmen, and both young people understood a profound opening of distinction between those who would be here, exactly here day after tomorrow to witness the next gathering before passage, and those stepping off the night precipice of this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again. 🔗

id813570421

For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it, and the tragic hour into which it is passing? 🔗

id813571463

I can go on wandering, but I cannot remain at this stage of things—I must ascend, for down here I am so blind and vulnerable, and it torments my heart— 🔗

id813571920

They used to visit all the time, coming in swiftly out of the empty desert, lighted from within. I did not dream this, Father. Each time when they went away again, it was to return to “The Work of the World”—always that same phrase—a formula, a prayer. Theirs was the highest of callings. If there was any point to our living in that terrible wilderness, it was to persist in the hope of being brought in among them someday, to learn the Work, to transcend the World. 🔗

id813572279

Father, I have long known of a strange doubleness to my life—a child rescued from slavery yet continuing her journey along the same ancient road of abasement. Somewhere another version of me is at Shambhala with you. 🔗

id813617910

He kept some of the ticket stubs, so he knew in a general way that his route had taken him via Bucharest, to Constantza, where he boarded a small, bedraggled steamer, sailed along the Black Sea coast to Batumi, where you could smell the lemon groves before you saw them, got on a train there and crossed the Caucasus where Russians stood out in front of dukhans to watch them go by, raising their vodka glasses amiably. Fields of rhododendrons spilled down the mountainsides, and giant walnut logs came floating steeply downstream, destined for saloon bars like those in Colorado that Kit had once lounged against as a boy. Last stop on the line was Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he had the impression, though not the photographic evidence, of a very remote sandswept oil port, night in the daytime, skies of hell, boiling red and black, shades of black, no escape from the smell, streets that led nowhere, never more than a step from some drugged stupor or rugrider’s blade, with life not only cheap but sometimes of negative value—according to Western field reps more than happy to bend his ear on the topic, nobody to depend on, too much money to be made, too easy to lose it . . . the only relief from it being the parties held aboard corporate yachts moored among oil tankers down at the quays, portholes sealed against the sand and the smell of oil. The futures of these visitors, actuarially speaking, did not to Kit seem bright, and he left Baku regarding in some horror from the weather decks the port receding under black skies, among pillars of fire, wellsprings of natural gas burning since the days of the ancient fire-worshippers, scrawls of oil towers and loading piers against the blurred light off the water. 🔗

id813618739

So he crossed the Caspian Sea, among Bnito oil tankers and sturgeon fleets, boarding at Krasnovodsk the Trans-Caspian Railroad, which took him along the edge of the Qara Qum opening vastly, incomprehensibly to the left, while to the right, like a parable, irrigation ditches and cotton fields spread up toward the mountains, with folks selling melons at the water stops. What he found memorable as he proceeded was less the scenery than a sort of railroad-metaphysics, as he stood between carriages, out in the wind, facing first one side, then the other, two radically different pieces of country. Plains flowed by right to left, mountains left to right, two opposite flows, each borne by the unimaginable mass of the entire visible world, each flowing at the speed of the train, an ongoing collision in silence, the vectorial nature of whose currents was clear enough, though not the roles of time and his own observing consciousness with its left- and right-handedness. The effect of rotating ninety degrees from a moving timeline, as expected, was delivery into a space containing imaginary axes—the journey seemed to be unfolding in three dimensions, but there were the added elements. Time could not, somehow, be taken for granted. It sped up and slowed down, like a variable that was dependent on something else, something so far, at least, undetectable. 🔗

id813619181

for species here had gained a reputation for their ability to hold on even under the worst conditions—the predators tended to be skyborne, the prey to live beneath the surface, with the surface itself, defining them one to another, a region of blankness, a field within which the deadly transactions were to be performed. Oases, or distant smoky blurs of saksaul trees, appeared like moments of remission in lives of misfortune—rumored, hallucinated, prayed for, not always where they were supposed to be. 🔗

id813619706

chicanery 🔗

id813619951

profligacy 🔗

id813621651

lamaseries 🔗

id813621872

troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad showed up in English hunting tweeds and a deerstalker cap turned sidewise, with a sort of ultimatum in which one might just detect that difficulty with the prevocalic r typical of the British upper class. “Gweetings, gentlemen, on this Glowious Twelfth!” 🔗

id813628361

ineluctable 🔗

id813629586

iniquitous 🔗

id813646492

clepsydras 🔗

id813648173

“It isn’t only the difficult terrain, the vipers and sandstorms and raiding parties. The journey itself is a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you. It insists on the furthest degree of respect.” 🔗

id813648533

Tibetan Canon known as the Tengyur 🔗

id813648592

“I have also heard of a letter, in the form of a poem,” he said carefully, “from a Tibetan scholar-prince to his father, who has died and been reborn in Shambhala. . . .”
The bookseller nodded. “That is the Rigpa Dzinpai Phonya, or Knowledge-Bearing Messenger, by Rimpung Ngawang Jigdag, 1557. Directions for journeying to Shambhala are addressed by the author to a Yogi, who is a sort of fictional character, though at the same time real—a figure in a vision, and also Rinpungpa himself. I do know of a variant currently for sale, which contains lines that do not appear in other versions. Notably, ‘Even if you forget everything else,’ Rinpungpa instructs the Yogi, ‘remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once. I could put you in touch with the seller, if you were serious.” 🔗

id813648780

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late. 🔗

id813650276

obliquity 🔗

id813650442

The Chinese remind us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet they keep curiously silent about the step itself, which too often must be taken, as now, from inaccessible ground, if not indeed straight down into an unmeasured abyss. 🔗

id813650532

The moment he passed through the Gate, Kit was not so much deafened as blinded by a mighty release of sound—a great choral bellowing over the desert, bringing, like a brief interruption of darkness in the daytime, a distinct view now, in this dusk, of sunlit terrain, descending in a long gradient directly ahead to a city whose name, though at the moment denied him, was known the world over, vivid in these distances, bright yellow and orange, though soon enough it would be absorbed into the same gray confusion of exitless ravines and wind-shaped rock ascensions through which they had labored to get here and must again to regain the Silk Road. Then the vision had faded, embers of a trail-fire in the measureless twilight. 🔗

id813650889

The sunset is red, violent, complex, the sun itself the permanent core of an explosion as yet unimagined. 🔗

id813651049

Kit had begun to understand that this space the Gate had opened to them was less geographic than to be measured along axes of sorrow and loss. 🔗

id813653037

embouchure 🔗

id813654883

“I suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened.” 🔗

id813655133

“Quite natural to find Cæsar setting up these cozy arrangements with God whenever possible, as they’re both after the same thing, aren’t they.” 🔗

id813655385

the shelter of the trivial would prove a blessing and a step toward salvation. 🔗

id813656317

Okhrana 🔗

id813656744

looking down like icons of saints painted on the inside of a church dome. 🔗

id813657204

capacitance 🔗

id813657235

Time-travel isn’t free, it takes energy. This was an artifact of repeated visits from the future.” 🔗

id813657437

Kit understood for a moment that forms of life were a connected set—critters he was destined never to see existing so that those he did see would be just where they were, when he saw them. Somewhere on the other side of the world, an exotic beetle stood at a precise distance and compass bearing from an unclassified shrub so that here, in this clearing, these two black birds might appear to Kit, precisely as they were. 🔗

id813657696

“Our mortal curse to be out here in the way of whatever force decides to come in out of that unlimited darkness and wipe us from the Creation,” Prance delivered into religious mania. “As if something in the Transfinitum had chosen to reenter the finite world, to reaffirm allegiance to its limits, including mortality . . . to become recognizably numerical again . . . a presence come to Earth. . . .” 🔗

id813658146

FOR A WHILE after the Event, crazed Raskol’niki ran around in the woods, flagellating themselves and occasional onlookers who got too close, raving about Tchernobyl, the destroying star known as Wormwood in the book of Revelation. Reindeer discovered again their ancient powers of flight, which had lapsed over the centuries since humans began invading the North. Some were stimulated by the accompanying radiation into an epidermal luminescence at the red end of the spectrum, particularly around the nasal area. Mosquitoes lost their taste for blood, acquiring one instead for vodka, and were observed congregating in large swarms at local taverns. Clocks and watches ran backward. Although it was summer, there were brief snowfalls in the devastated taiga, and heat in general tended to flow unpredictably for a while. Siberian wolves walked into churches in the middle of services, quoted passages from the Scriptures in fluent Old Slavonic, and walked peaceably out again. They were reported to be especially fond of Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Aspects of the landscape of Tierra del Fuego, directly opposite the Stony Tunguska on the globe, began to show up in Siberia—sea ernes, gulls, terns, and petrels landing in the branches of fir trees, swooping to grab fish out of the streams, taking a bite, screaming with distaste, and throwing them back. Granite cliffs rose sheer and unexpected out of the forest. Oceangoing ships unmanned by visible crews, attempting to navigate the shallow rivers and creeks, ran aground. Entire villages came to the conclusion that they were not where they ought to be, and without much advance planning simply packed up what they had, left behind what they couldn’t carry, and headed off together into the brush, where presently they set up villages no one else could see. Or not very clearly. 🔗

id813658283

abated 🔗

id813658604

Since the visitation at the Stony Tunguska, he had noticed that the angle of his vision was wider and the narrow track of his life branching now and then into unsuspected side trails. 🔗

id813659023

borbanngadyr 🔗

id813659287

AFTER A BIT, Lieutenant Prance thought he’d begun to detect a presence overhead, which was neither eagle nor cloud, and which slowly drew closer until he could make out a vast airship, from which a crew of animated youngsters were regarding him with great curiosity. 🔗

id813659610

They came back to camp with sacks full of strange mottled red mushrooms that sent them off on internal journeys out to Siberias of the soul. There was apparently a two-part structure to the narrative, part one being pleasant, visually entertaining, spiritually enlightening, and part two filled with unspeakable horror. The fungomaniacs did not seem put out at any of this, regarding one as the price of the other. To enhance the effect, they drank one another’s urine, in which alchemized forms of the original hallucinatory agent were present. 🔗

id813660340

penance 🔗

id813660725

Kit looked around. The dark miles were empty of witnesses. He could kill this self-pitying loudmouth so easily. He said, “You know, you’re like every other so-called explorer out here, a remittance man with too much sense of privilege, no idea of what to do with it.” 🔗

id813661041

id814042135

firmament 🔗

id814042402

What it would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world, and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala, their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before the earthbound day. 🔗

id814044383

flotilla 🔗

id814045554

No one could dare to say which was worse—that it had never happened before, or that it had, and that all the agencies of history had conspired never to record it and then, displaying a sense of honor hitherto unnoted, to maintain their silence. 🔗

id814107528

‘High susceptibility to primordial variables.’” 🔗

id814110575

IT WENT ON for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day. 🔗

id814155125

LEAVING THE SÜDBAHN, she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of “free choices” that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be. 🔗

id814156423

ablative 🔗

id814156446

“If Limbo is a sort of suburbs of Hell, then it is perhaps exactly the place for me. Between fire and outer darkness, enjoying the equipoise. Until I receive another omen anyway.” 🔗

id814156551

impedimenta 🔗

id814156737

vestee 🔗

id814157402

lemma 🔗

id814157868

soporific 🔗

id814157958

philandering 🔗

id814157978

fervid 🔗

id814159897

hinterland 🔗

id814160150

They had climbed to the ruin of the ancient fortress. “The Venetians did this. They hanged Uskoks, sank our ships, destroyed our fortresses. Dispersed the rest of us, completing what the Turks had begun. Since then, four hundred years, we have been exiles in our own land. No reason to love Venice, and yet we continue to dream of her, as Germans are said to dream of Paris. Venice is the bride of the sea, whom we wish to abduct, to worship, to hope in vain someday to be loved by. But of course she will never love us. We are pirates, aren’t we, brutal and simple, too attached to the outsides of things, always amazed when blood flows from the wound of our enemy. We cannot conceive of any interior that might be its source, yet we obey its demands, arriving by surprise from some Beyond we cannot imagine, as if from one of the underground rivers of the Velebit, down in that labyrinth of streams, lakes, coves, and cataracts, each with its narrative, sometimes even older than the Argonauts’ expedition—before history, or even the possibility of connected chronology—before maps, for what is a map in that lightless underworld, what pilgrimage can it mark out the stations of?”
“A list of obstacles to be braved,” she said. “What other sort of journey is there?” 🔗

id816654893

If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibility, even for ship’s company who may’ve made this run hundreds of times. . . . 🔗

id816662576

divertissement 🔗

id816662886

sybaritic 🔗

id816662941

He also noted a defective sense of history, common among field operatives, given their need to be immersed in the moment. So it was history—Time’s pathology—that he must first address. 🔗

id816733803

depredations 🔗

id816739309

premonitory 🔗

id816739627

“Where are you?” he cried. He wished, terribly, for no answer. 🔗

id816740275

appetency 🔗

id816740475

It is in the nature of prey, Cyprian was later to reflect, that at times, instead of submitting to the demands of some predator, they will insist upon being difficult. Running for their lives. Putting on disguises. Disappearing into clouds of ink, miles of bush, holes in the earth. Even, strange to tell, fighting back. Social Darwinists of the day were forever on about the joys of bloody teeth and claws, but they were curiously uncelebratory of speed and deception, poison and surprise. 🔗

id816740608

tessitura 🔗

id816741549

venal 🔗

id816741897

ululated 🔗

id816741925

Cyprian had left so much emotion behind that it took him all of eight bars to understand that this was his own voice, his life, his slight victory over time, returned to fair limbs and spring sunrises and a heart beating too fiercely for reflection driving him toward what he knew he needed, could not live without. 🔗

id816742019

It was the absence of all hesitation here that impressed Cyprian, setting aside the ouzo and hasheesh whose molecular products, occupying by now every brain-cell, discouraged careful analysis. It was a world entirely possible to withdraw from angelwise and soar high enough to see more, consider exits from, but nobody here in the smoke and breaking waves of desire wanted exit, the little world would certainly do, perhaps in the way that for some, as one of Vesna’s songs suggested, children, though also small, though comparably doomed, are forever more than enough. 🔗

id816742500

fatalistic 🔗

id816742871

vernal 🔗

id816742875

equipoise 🔗

id816743104

flâneur 🔗

id816745269

coming back to it was likely to be no more useful than haunting is to a ghost. 🔗

id816748193

quiescent 🔗

id816748384

like a good Emotional Anarchist, in the Law of Deterministic Insufficiency.
“What’s that?” said Reef.
“Like a card comes up that you could never have predicted.”
“Oh but hell darlin, if you’ve been counting ’em careful enough—”
“That may be true for only fifty-two cards. But when the deck is orders of magnitude larger, perhaps approaching infinity, other possibilities begin to emerge. . . .” Her own way of saying, Vlado is immortal. Able to take care of himself, impossible to worry about. . . . 🔗

id817158035

Unless one has performed in his life penance equal to what he has exacted from others, there is an imbalance in Nature.” 🔗

id817158141

“Whom could one trust then to defend the interests of the Nation? The Royal Army? the Navy?”
“In theory. But an enemy with Imperial resources can buy anyone.”
“If there is no one who cannot be bought . . .”
“We must fall back on probabilities and ask who is likely to remain unbought.” 🔗

id817159940

Cyprian felt the sadness peculiar to the contemplation of recent time unrecapturable. Anything earlier, childhood, adolescence, they were done with, he could get by without any of that—what he wanted back was last week, the week before. 🔗

id817562508

“To save everyone trouble,” Vastroslav said, “there is nothing you can tell us. Nothing you can pay us. You have stepped into a long history of blood and penance, and the coin of these transactions is struck not from metal but from Time.” 🔗

id817562654

“Whenever you people torture, you try merely to cripple,” Vastroslav said. “To leave some mark of imbalance. We prefer a symmetry of insult—to confer a state of grace. To mark the soul.” 🔗

id817562992

And then one of those silences fell, and a curious thing had happened to time, for although they were the same people they had been when he had stepped on board the S.S. John of Asia last year, at the same time they were two entirely different people who had no business being in the same city together let alone the same room, and yet whatever it was between them was deeper now, the stakes were higher, the danger of how much there was to lose terribly, incontrovertibly clear. 🔗

id817563350

It was more than the usual history of flogging one expected from British schoolboys of all ages. It was almost an indifference to self, in which desire was directed at passing beyond the conditions of the self—at first she thought, as other women on the face of it might, well then it’s only self-hatred isn’t it, perhaps a class thing—but no, that wasn’t it. 🔗

id817563729

languorously 🔗

id817563802

He thought he knew being aflame. But this was sustained explosion, reaching now and then a quite unendurable brisance. Yet he endured it, not so much because it was her will as, unbelievably, what had become her need. How could he disappoint her need? It seemed too ridiculous, though the evidence lay everywhere. She was behaving like a love-smitten girl. 🔗

id817566136

“Before this is done with,” she informed him, “if it ever is, you will no longer imagine, you will believe.” 🔗

id817566161

He kept on trying to understand. One could look out over London, from the top of the Earl’s Court Wheel at twilight, one by one as the lights came on and the drapes were drawn. It was going on behind every other window one could see, common as stars in the sky, the reversals of power, wives over husbands, pupils over masters, troopers over generals, wogs over whites, the old expected order of things all on its head, a revolution in the terms of desire, and yet, at Yashmeen’s feet, that seemed only the outskirts—the obvious or sacramental form of the thing. . . . 🔗

id817566392

LATE AT NIGHT they would lie together watching lights, moving and still, reflected in the canals.
“What was there for you to doubt?” she whispered. “I have loved women, as you have loved men—”
“Perhaps not ‘loved’—”
“—and what of it? We can do whatever we can imagine. Are we not the world to come? Rules of proper conduct are for the dying, not for us.”
“Not for you, anyway. You’re much braver than I.”
“We will be as brave as we must.” 🔗

id817566425

pallid 🔗

id817566702

hieratic 🔗

id817566724

At Carnevale, masks had suggested a privileged indifference to the world of flesh, which one was after all bidding farewell to. But here at Carnesalve, as in espionage, or some revolutionary project, the Mask’s desire was to be invisible, unthreatening, transparent yet mercilessly deceptive, as beneath its dark authority danger ruled and all was transgressed. 🔗

id817567727

dalliance 🔗

id817605650

Disingenuous as always—for Cyprian had in fact begun to appreciate that out “in the field” it was precisely his strong desire to be taken that offered him a practical edge, released him from wasting time and energy over questions of rectal integrity, or who in a given encounter would be dominant—that whatever “honor” meant, it no longer had much to do with these outmoded sexual protocols. Let others, if they wished, keep floundering along in the old swamps—Cyprian worked better on firmer ground. 🔗

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“Small victories,” Webb greeted him. “Just to come away with one or two. To praise and to honor the small victories where and however they happen.” 🔗

id817607087

Then the three remained indoors, fucking, gambling, pretending to lose just enough to stay plausible, bickering, seldom venturing into questions of whatever should become of them. 🔗

id817608118

mediatrix 🔗

id817608503

But along with the mysteries of Desire, Cyprian was now feeling a shift in its terms, an apprehension that something was coming to an end. . . . The sources of Desire were as unknowable as those of the Styx. But no more accountable was absence of desire—why one might choose not to embrace what the world judges, it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one’s interest. 🔗

id817608598

“But I adore you,” Cyprian whispered, “that can never change.”
“Once I would have wondered how far you would go to prove it.”
“As far as you say, Yashmeen.”
“Once that would have been exactly your answer.” Though she was smiling, her pale brow was inflected with some premonition, some soon-to-be-desolate awakening. “Now I may no longer ask. I may no longer even wonder.” 🔗

id817621561

God’s grace?— Why should the Angel of Death, acting as agent for God, need to be screened from grace? What other, unsuspected dark energy, then? What anti-grace? 🔗

id817625624

diminuendo 🔗

id817625663

The time was rising like a river in a season of storm to rush in waves and whitecaps through the alleyways and plazas of his soul, and he did not know if he could climb high enough to escape it. 🔗

id817626064

ardor 🔗

id817628936

“Someone is clearly fascinated,” it seemed dismally to Hunter, “with Crouchmas’s simultaneous attachments to England and Germany. As if just having discovered a level of ‘reality’ at which nations, like money in the bank, are merged and indistinguishable—the obvious example here being the immense population of the dead, military and civilian, due to the Great War everyone expects imminently to sweep over us. One hears mathematicians of both countries speak of ‘changes of sign’ when wishing to distinguish England from Germany—but in the realm of pain and destruction, what can polarity matter?” 🔗

id817629274

The rest of the town looked up, and up, past a slate confusion of rooftops, and of course it was there, massively blocking the sky and whatever city features might lie behind it, a blackness nearly obsidian, hovering, all but breathing, descent built into its structure, not only the shedding of rain and snow but more meaningfully within, the downward transfer of an undiscussed product from the upper levels to hidden cargo docks below, by chute, by lift, by valves and conduits—though the commodity was not exactly a fluid, the equations governing its movement were said to be hydrodynamic in nature. 🔗

id817629420

cartouche 🔗

id817629434

dhows 🔗

id817629808

Frieze 🔗

id817629811

caryatid 🔗

id817629821

lunes 🔗

id817630115

bleared 🔗

id817638189

contretemps 🔗

id817638934

Folks out here talked about fate, but for Kit it was a matter of stillness. 🔗

id817639096

estaminet 🔗

id817639508

inveigled 🔗

id817639545

They were already too close not to turn and slide into an embrace smooth as the solution to a puzzle. There in the silence before the clamoring weeks of harvest would take over the fields, with the pepper pods stirring audibly in the hot lowland breezes, they found to no one’s surprise but their own how far ahead of them their bodies had been, how impatient with the minds that had been keeping them apart. 🔗

id817641177

soubrette 🔗

id817647117

“There’s plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure,” opined Ewball, “but they’ve got to be gone after in a professional way, anything else is being just like them, slaughterin the innocent, when what we need is more slaughterin of the guilty. Who gave the orders, who carried ’em out, exact names and whereabouts—and then go get ’em. That’d be just honest soldiering.”
“Don’t they call that nihilism?” Stray objected.
“’Cute, ain’t it? when all the real nihilists are working for the owners, ’cause it’s them that don’t believe in shit, our dead to them are nothin but dead, just one more Bloody Shirt to wave at us, keep us doin what they want, but our dead never stopped belongin to us, they haunt us every day, don’t you see, and we got to stay true, they wouldn’t forgive us if we wandered off of the trail.” 🔗

id817650935

confab 🔗

id817652519

Had he brought any along? Does the Easter Rabbit bring colored eggs? Before too long, Frank found himself in a strange yet familiar City, an outer arc of low warehouses up at the ridgeline 🔗

id817652650

He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land. 🔗

id817652809

supernally 🔗

id817653047

“I’ll say hello to the girls on Market Street,” she said, and though their kiss went on for what could have been hours, so little did it have to do with clock time, she was already miles away down those rails before their lips even touched. 🔗

id817653117

Frank knew that whenever the brujo spoke to a white person of “paths,” he was thinking not too kindly of the railway, which like most of his people he hated for its destruction of the land, and what had once grown and lived there. Frank respected this—who at some point hadn’t come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love. 🔗

id818025009

THE NEXT DAY Reef, Cyprian, and Ratty were out on the Anarchists’ golf course, during a round of Anarchists’ Golf, a craze currently sweeping the civilized world, in which there was no fixed sequence—in fact, no fixed number—of holes, with distances flexible as well, some holes being only putter-distance apart, others uncounted hundreds of yards and requiring a map and compass to locate. Many players had been known to come there at night and dig new ones. Parties were likely to ask, “Do you mind if we don’t play through?” then just go and whack balls at any time and in any direction they liked. Folks were constantly being beaned by approach shots barreling in from unexpected quarters. “This is kind of fun,” Reef said, as an ancient brambled guttie went whizzing by, centimeters from his ear. 🔗

id818027089

petard 🔗

id818027922

“Self-interest,” said Ratty. “Anarchists would be the biggest losers, wouldn’t they. Industrial corporations, armies, navies, governments, all would go on as before, if not more powerful. But in a general war among nations, every small victory Anarchism has struggled to win so far would simply turn to dust. Today even the dimmest of capitalists can see that the centralized nation-state, so promising an idea a generation ago, has lost all credibility with the population. Anarchism now is the idea that has seized hearts everywhere, some form of it will come to envelop every centrally governed society—unless government has already become irrelevant through, say, family arrangements like the Balkan zadruga. If a nation wants to preserve itself, what other steps can it take, but mobilize and go to war? Central governments were never designed for peace. Their structure is line and staff, the same as an army. The national idea depends on war. A general European war, with every striking worker a traitor, flags threatened, the sacred soils of homelands defiled, would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism off the political map. The national idea would be reborn. One trembles at the pestilent forms that would rise up afterward, from the swamp of the ruined Europe. 🔗

id818028579

swotted 🔗

id818028760

phrenology 🔗

id818030371

Yashmeen wondered if she hadn’t found some late reprieve, some hope of passing beyond political forms to “planetary oneness,” as Jenny liked to put it. “This is our own age of exploration,” she declared, “into that unmapped country waiting beyond the frontiers and seas of Time. We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel?” 🔗

id818031088

One nightfall the Professor was out working late, when from up the valley he heard someone singing in a young tenor voice, which at first he took for a typical Transylvanian swineherd’s kanástánc that had found its way here somehow seeping over ridgelines and fanning down watersheds. But presently another young voice in a higher range, a girl’s, answered, and for the duration of the twilight the two voices sang back and forth across the little valley, sometimes antiphonal, sometimes together in harmony. They were goatherds, and the words were in Shop dialect sung to a Phrygian melody he had never heard before, and knew he would never hear again, not this way, unmediated and immune to Time. Because what he could make out were words only the young had any right to sing, he was unavoidably reminded of the passing of his own youth, gone before he’d had a chance to take note of it, and thus was able to hear lying just beneath an intense awareness of loss, as if the division between the singers were more than the width of a valley, something to be crossed only through an undertaking at least as metaphysical as song, as if Orpheus might once have sung it to Eurydice in Hell, calling downward through intoxicant fumes, across helically thundering watercourses, echoing among limestone fantastically sculptured over unnumbered generations by Time personified as a demiurge and servant of Death— And the recording equipment, of course, and Enrico, were back at the inn. Not that any recording was necessary, really, for the two singers had repeated the song often enough, well into the onset of the night, for it to enter into the grooves of Professor Sleepcoat’s memory, right next to the ones dedicated to regrets and sorrows and so forth.
Later the Professor seemed to have Orpheus on the brain. “He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe in her desire to come back with him to live in the upper world again. He had to turn around and look, just to make sure she was coming.”
“Typical male insecurity,” Yashmeen sniffed.
“Typical female lust for wealth wins out in the end, is the way I always read that one,” commented Gruntling.
“Oh he’s the Lord of Death, for goodness’ sake, there’s no money over there.”
“Young woman, there is money everywhere.” 🔗

id818035483

“We’ll keep our ears tuned for Lydian material,” Yashmeen promised.
“Maybe there is none anymore. Maybe it’s gone forever. Maybe that gap in the musical continuum, that silence, is a first announcement of something terrible, of which this structural silence is only an inoffensive metaphor.” 🔗

id818037519

“Fear in lethal form,” said Cyprian. “And if all these units, all along this line, went off at once—”
“A great cascade of blindness and terror ripping straight across the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. Like nothing that has ever happened. Photometry is still too primitive for anyone to say how much light would be deployed, or how intense—somewhere far up in the millions of candles per square inch, but there are only guesses—expressions of military panic, really.” 🔗

id818037792

hebephrenic 🔗

id818039309

postulant 🔗

id818039821

narthex 🔗

id818039859

She had begun to feel him leaving as long ago as their tour of the French casinos, as if he had discovered a way back, not a reversion to any known type, more a reoccupying of a life he might have forgotten or never noticed there all the time waiting, and she had come slowly to understand she could not go with him wherever he was bound, watching helplessly as each day the distance opened a bit more. 🔗

id818039936

“It may be,” Cyprian said as gently as he thought he had to, “that God doesn’t always require us to wander about. It may be that sometimes there is a— would you say a ‘convergence’ to a kind of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well?” 🔗

id818040072

Gentle or not, Yashmeen took it personally anyway. The extent of her statelessness had unfolded for her like the progress of a sky from dawn into its shadowless day, a wandering in which she would count as home only the web of sympathetic spirits who had dug spaces beneath their own precarious dwellings to harbor her for a night or two at a time. Who might not always be there when she needed them to be. 🔗

id818040898

When it was Cyprian’s turn, he knelt and whispered, “What is it that is born of light?” 🔗

id818041000

koan 🔗

id818041055

“Now I must ask you in turn—when something is born of light, what does that light enable us to see?” 🔗

id818041105

Shekhinah 🔗

id818041495

Father Ponko. “When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as ‘taking away’ his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world.” 🔗

id818042333

metempsychosis 🔗

id818042526

“The mooned planet,” said the hegumen, “the planetary electron. If self-similarity proves to be a built-in property of the universe, then perhaps sleep is, after all, a form of death—repeated at a daily frequency instead of a generational one. And we go back and forth, as Pythagoreans suspected, in and out of death as we do dreams, but much more slowly. . . .” 🔗

id818044958

the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable. 🔗

id818046883

Now and then in the weeks that followed they would find themselves wondering—though they could never find the time to just sit and talk it through—if the permission they had felt when Cyprian was with them, the freedom to act extraordinarily, had come from residence in a world about to embrace its end—closer to the freedom of the suicide than that of the ungoverned spirit. 🔗

id818049900

demotic 🔗

id818067817

“For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.”
“And your world-line crossed that of Miss Tsurigane. And so.”
“And so.” 🔗

id818088778

It wasn’t exactly a religious experience, but somehow, a little at a time, she had found herself surrendering to her old need to take care of people. Not for compensation, certainly not for thanks. Her first rule became “Don’t thank me.” Her second was “Don’t take the credit for anything that turns out well.” One day she woke up understanding clear as the air that as long as a person was willing to forgo credit, there were very few limits on the good it became possible to do. 🔗

id818090155

Inversion symbolizes undoing. Here are three machines, false idols of the capitalist faith, literally overthrown—along with an indirect reference of course to the gunning down of Mark Hanna’s miserable stooge, that resolute enemy of human progress 🔗

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The explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew everywhere, superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways among the moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone pink with blood, rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded and coughing miserably. Some were shooting at nothing, others had forgotten where, or what, bolt-handles and triggers were. Later it was estimated that sixty federales had been killed instantly and the rest were at least demoralized. Even the vultures for days were too scared to approach. The Twentieth Battalion mutinied and shot two of their officers, retreat was sounded, and everybody hightailed it any way they could back to Torreón. General González, wounded and dishonored, committed suicide. 🔗

id818091488

So I haunt the train stations hoping to slip through a loophole in the laws of chance.” 🔗

id818093198

One of the fragments of light detached itself from the tree and flew down and landed on the girl’s wrist, like a falcon. When the tree went dark, so did Pancho. “Bueno,” she whispered to it, “pay no attention to the others. I want you to light up only when I tell you. Now.” The bug, obligingly, lit up. “Ahora, apágate,” and again Pancho complied.
Frank looked at Pancho. Pancho looked back at Frank, though what he was seeing was anybody’s guess. 🔗

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He couldn’t say when exactly, but at some point Frank came to understand that this bearer of light was his soul, and that all the fireflies in the tree were the souls of everyone who had ever passed through his life, even at a distance, even for a heartbeat and a half, that there existed such a tree for each person in Chiapas, and though this suggested that the same soul must live on a number of trees, they all went to make up a single soul, really, in the same way that light was indivisible. “In the same way,” amplified Günther, “that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind.” 🔗

id818093648

No matter how far any of them may wander, the single greater organism remains intact, coherent, connected.” 🔗

id818093665

cucuji 🔗

id818093888

“Darlin ordinarily I’d love nothin better on account of how Mexico once my other land mi otra tierra as we say down there has made me more than usually aware of San Antonio home of the Alamo cradle of Texas independence and so forth without getting into the details of who stole what from who I’m sure you can understand that sooner or later somebody in some saloon’ll bring the matter up maybe no more’n a slide of the eyeballs in the mirror back there yet a promise of business to be transacted in the near future that could range anywhere from the price of a beer to one of us’s life you see . . .” by which time in any case he was out the door again and halfway to San Angelo. 🔗

id818096820

“So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stem-winder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge. 🔗

id818097090

“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horse-thief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunchgrass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.” 🔗

id818098179

all they feel is that unbalance—that something’s wrong and needs to be made right again. And if distance means nothing, then they surface wherever there’s a fight with the same shape to it, same history of back-and-forth killing 🔗

id818105609

Before he left, he stole two .30-caliber machine-gun rounds, one for him and one for his Ma, believing that as long as these particular ones couldn’t be fired, he and Stray would be safe from harm. 🔗

id818106357

enfiladed 🔗

id818106823

Frank felt a hand at his shoulder and thought at first it was Stray’s. But when he looked, he could only just make her out, through the blowing needles of spring snow, sheltering Jesse with her body. No one else was near him. Just as likely to’ve been the hand of some dead striker, reaching back through the mortal curtain to try and find something of Earth to touch, anything, and that happened to be Frank. Maybe even Webb’s own hand. Webb and all that he had tried to make of his life, and all that had been taken, and all the paths his children had gone off on. . . . Frank woke after a few seconds, found he’d been drooling down his shirt. This would not do. 🔗

id818453615

they were gone, and he wasn’t even sure what it cost them not to look back. 🔗

id818472698

The corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different Minkowskian space-time track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of increasing entropy. 🔗

id818502644

The merchant gazed back at length, and may have gone on speaking, though he could no longer be heard clearly. Miles was aware in some dim way that this, as so much else, had to do with the terms of the long unspoken contract between the boys and their fate—as if, long ago, having learned to fly, in soaring free from enfoldment by the indicative world below, they had paid with a waiver of allegiance to it and all that would occur down on the Surface. 🔗

id818502741

“Are ghosts dreadful because they bring toward us from the future some component—in the vectorial sense—of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively, our own dead selves, thrust back, in recoil from the mirrorface at the end, to haunt us?” 🔗

id818502798

“Those poor innocents,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on the ground. “Back at the beginning of this . . . they must have been boys, so much like us. . . . They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand ‘Adventure.’ They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative—unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death.” 🔗

id818503587

ostinati 🔗

id818503766

osobaia obstanovka— “special situation,” 🔗

id818503984

armistice 🔗

id818504664

Sodality 🔗

id818505871

pluperfect 🔗

id818506688

hinterlands 🔗

id818507285

subjunctive 🔗

id818508182

reveille 🔗

id818508598

querulans 🔗

id818509968

One by one over the next half-hour Merle projected other transparencies onto the walls, which pretty soon were covered with scenes from American lives, unquestionably in motion. The combined effect was of a busy population the size of a small city. Inside each frame they were dancing, saloon-fighting, drinking, playing pool, working day jobs, loitering, fucking, strolling, eating in lunchwagons, getting on and off streetcars, dealing pinochle hands, some in black and white, some in color. 🔗

id818510163

In the years since they’d come up with the process, Merle confided, he had begun to understand that he was on a mission to set free the images not just in the photographs he was taking, but in all that came his way, like the prince who with his kiss releases that Sleeping Beauty into wakefulness. One by one, across the land, responsive to his desire, photos trembled, stirred, began to move, at first slowly then accelerating, pedestrians walked away out of the frame, carriages drove along, the horses pulling them shit in the street, by-standers who had their backs turned revealed their faces, streets darkened and gas lamps came on, nights lengthened, stars wheeled, passed, were dissolved in dawn, family gatherings at festive tables were scattered into drunkenness and debris, dignitaries posing for portraits blinked, belched, blew their noses, got up and left the photographer’s studio, eventually along with all the other subjects liberated from these photos resumed their lives, though clearly they had moved beyond the range of the lens, as if all the information needed to depict an indefinite future had been there in the initial “snap,” at some molecular or atomic fineness of scale whose limit, if any, hadn’t yet been reached— “Though you’d think because of the grain-size situation,” Roswell pointed out, “that sooner or later we’d’ve run out of resolution.”
“It might be something wrapped in the nature of Time itself,” Chick speculated. 🔗

id818510331

verdant 🔗

id818510370

sylphlike 🔗

id818511776

Not that Lew was doing that bad. There was a lot of money from someplace overseas, some said from gambling interests, others insisted it was gun-running, or some extortion racket—the story always came down to how the storyteller felt about Lew. 🔗

id818513304

Lew had never thought he’d see the day, but out here he found himself saying that every day. 🔗

id818515165

Technically she was smiling, but it had that Hollywood rigidity to it that Lew had learned to recognize as fear of somebody else’s power. 🔗

id818515626

scryers 🔗

id818515773

He showed up at the Royal Jacaranda on an old bicycle, trailed by a nimbus of reefer smoke. 🔗

id818515892

avuncularly 🔗

id818520224

“What in the hay-ull?” Deuce rolling off of his seat and under the table. It was Shalimar, and she had remembered to bring the tommy gun. 🔗

id818520269

quiescence 🔗

id818521042

penance 🔗

id818522094

“Sometimes,” Virgil was saying, “I like to lose myself in reveries of when the land was free, before it got hijacked by capitalist Christer Republicans for their long-term evil purposes. . . .” 🔗

id818522926

Though it was usually enough to stay in their past together, before she’d left, tonight he decided to bring it all the way up to the present day, on through a high-speed blur of all her time since Telluride and New York and Venice and the War, up to this very evening, except over there in Paris it was morning, and she was just leaving her rooms and going to the train station and riding out to a stop in some banlieue where hundreds of feet into the sky abruptly towered the antenna of a million-watt wireless transmitter, some already-forgotten artifact of the War, where he thought he recognized a Béthenod-Latour alternator and beneath the tower a little studio with geraniums at the windows where Dally drank coffee and ate a brioche and sat by a control board while an operator with one of those pointed French mustaches found the coördinates for Los Angeles, and somehow Merle now, tumbling, trembling in a rush of certitude, was on his feet and across the shop, fiddling with the radio receiver, its tubes blooming in an indigo haze, finding the band and frequency, and all at once the image of her silent lips on the wall smoothly glided into synchronization, and her picture was speaking. A distant grown woman’s voice propagating through the night Æther clear as if she was in the room. He gazed at her, shaking his head slowly, and she returned the gaze, smiling, speaking without hurry, as if somehow she could see him, too. 🔗

id818524644

This kitchen table was no place to be sitting in the middle of the day. She grabbed a few francs from under one of the green dishes and went out again, just as an airplane flew overhead, muttering serenely to itself. A few blocks to the boulevard and her local café, L’Hémisphère, where she’d discovered that if she only sat at a table outside, before long her life, selections from her life, would repeat themselves in slightly different form, featuring exactly the people she “needed” to see again—as if the notorious café were one of those favored spots that Eastern mystics talked about. Though it might be that the others “needed” to see her as well, sometimes they only passed like ghosts, and looked right at her, and didn’t recognize her. 🔗

id818525609

phlegmatic 🔗

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They were soon going so fast that something happened to time, and maybe they’d slipped for a short interval into the Future, the Future known to Italian Futurists, with events superimposed on one another, and geometry straining irrationally away in all directions including a couple of extra dimensions as they continued hellward, a Hell that could never contain Kit’s abducted young wife, to which he could never go to rescue her, which was actually Hell-of-the-future, taken on into its functional equations, stripped and fire-blasted of everything emotional or accidental. . . . 🔗

id818526522

Dive-bombin in-to the
Ci-ty!
Golly, what fun it
Can be!
Watchin em scat-ter,
Watchin em run,
Hearin em scream when
We fire that gun, my buddy,
We can pull out when
We want to—
We can go zoomin away,
With the ground just so close,
Rushin right up your nose,
We go dive-bombin in-to the day! 🔗

id818537425

factotum 🔗

id818537534

“Your brothers-in-arms. They’re not the ones need bombing, hell even I know that.”
“Then save me.”
“What?”
“If I’m such miserable case, help me get back to the right piece of trail at least. You tell me.”
She tried. 🔗

id818537708

contingent 🔗

id818538472

It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.
“That’s what they call the ‘topic sentence’?”
“That’s the whole thing.”
“Oh.”
It came back with a big A+ on it. 🔗

id818538864

“Illusion. When peace and plenty are once again taken for granted, at your most languorous moment of maximum surrender, the true state of affairs will be borne in upon you. Swiftly and without mercy.” 🔗

id818538938

Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun. 🔗

id818538950

docent 🔗

id818539003

“But staggering subsets, fellows—you see what this means don’t you? those Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.” 🔗

id818539662

attentat 🔗

id818539756

lambent 🔗

id818540768

loupe 🔗

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dreadnought 🔗

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As the sails of her destiny can be reefed against too much light, so they may also be spread to catch a favorable darkness. Her ascents are effortless now. It is no longer a matter of gravity—it is an acceptance of sky. 🔗

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Inconvenience, once a vehicle of sky-pilgrimage, has transformed into its own destination, where any wish that can be made is at least addressed, if not always granted. For every wish to come true would mean that in the known Creation, good unsought and uncompensated would have evolved somehow, to become at least more accessible to us. No one aboard Inconvenience has yet observed any sign of this. They know—Miles is certain—it is there, like an approaching rainstorm, but invisible. Soon they will see the pressure-gauge begin to fall. They will feel the turn in the wind. They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace. 🔗

Having journeyed eastward through 🔗