can sense what grieves him, but the very glittering reflection of its passage is enough to blind him. To him, it feels as if the natural world has made him sad, for he has wandered into a park and the sky far above through the branches seethes with the light of a restless moon. If the man could only see his way to the center of a single memory and hold it in his mind, he might understand what has happened to him. Instead, from the edge of his attention, the absence of mother, father, wife, daughter, leaves only outlines. It is too much to bear. It must be borne… In some cases, recognition may take the form of violent acts — one last convulsion against the inevitable. But not in the man’s case. In him, the sorrow only deepens, for he has begun to suspect the truth. The man wanders through gardens and courtyards, through tree-lined neighborhoods and along city-tamed streams, all touched equally by the blank expanse of night. He is without thought except to avoid thought, without purpose except to avoid purpose. He does not tire — nothing without will can ever tire — and as he walks, he begins to touch what he passes. He runs his hands through the scru fy tops of bushes. He rubs his face against the trunk of a tree. He follows the line of a sidewalk crack with his finger. As the night progresses, a tightness enters his face, a self-aware phosphorescence. When he leans down to float his hand through a fountain pool, his face wavers in the water like a green-tinged second moon. Passersby run away or cross the street at his approach. He has no opinion on this; it does not upset or amuse him. He is rapidly becoming Other: Otherwhere, Otherflesh. His trumpet? Long ago fallen from a distracted grasp…
Eventually, the trailing hand will find something of more than usual interest. For the man, this occurs when he sits down on a wooden bench and the touch of the grain on his palm brings a familiarity welling up through his fingertips. He runs his arms across the wood. He strokes the wood, trying to form a memory from before the sorrow. He lies down on the bench and presses his face against the grain… until he sees his apartment room and the blood pooling in the foreground of his vision and knows that he is dead.
Then the man sits up, his receding sorrow replaced by nothing. Tendrils of fungi rise from their hiding places inside his body. The man waits as they curl across his face, his torso, his arms, his legs. And he sees the night for possibly the first time ever. And he sees
But he does not flinch. He does not run. He no longer even tries to breathe. He no longer tries to be anything other than what he is. For this is the last phase of the third hour of death. After the third hour, you will never be unhappy again. You will never know pain. You will never have to endure the sting of an unkind word. Every muscle, every sinew, every bone, every blood vessel in your body will relax to let in the darkness. When they come for you, as they surely will, you will finally understand, under the cool weavings of the tendrils, what a good thing this can be. You will finally understand that there is no fourth hour after death. And you will marvel that the world could be so still, so silent, so
A Note from Dr. V to Dr. Simpkin
Dr. Simpkin:
You will find my (almost complete) decryption of X’s numbers below. I did not enjoy tackling this assignment. What began as a lark became an unnerving experience. At first, I fixated on two irritating thoughts: (l) that X had double-spaced his story just to waste paper; (2) that he had written it just to waste typewriter ribbon. As I decrypted the first few sentences, I could not help but feel that X, from some distant place, was peering over my shoulder and laughing at me. (Such laughter was depressingly common during his stay with us.)
My mood of irritation changed as I began to realize the discipline X had brought to his endeavors. The sheer persistence required to translate so many words into numbers impressed me. If the story was this difficult to decode-I began, for example, to experience blinding headaches-then how much more difficult had it been to encrypt in the first place? Had his escape involved the daily removal of a single fragment of brick from the wall of his cell, I don’t believe X could have demonstrated greater patience.
As I continued to work, fatigue transformed my banal task into grim revelation. The shadows grew long; the light left the window of my cramped office. X’s phantom laughter faded and the only sound was the dry scritch of my pen against paper. A belief at odds with the rationality of my profession colonized me: that I was creating the events uncovered with each excavated word. This sensation, so unexpected, made me shiver and suck in my breath. It brought my efforts to a shuddering halt. I literally felt that I was bringing into existence an entire future for Ambergris-a future so horrible I would not conjure it up for all the typewriter ribbons in the world. I threw down my pen; then picked it up and bent it until it broke, as if to guard against any possibility of continuing. That said, I could not bring myself to try to decrypt the final paragraph. I felt the ramifications would be too earth- shattering.
When I summoned the nerve to review my decryption effort (which I call “The Man Who Had No Eyes“), I discovered I had “mistranslated“ at least seven words. I got up to retrieve X’s book from the filing cabinet where I had quarantined it, intending to correct my errors, but immediately sat down again, terror paralyzing me. I could not move or speak for several minutes, frozen from the belief that the book itself had changed and was now writing me. During this negative epiphany, the shadows seemed to undulate like wings. The air was close and thick. When I emerged from my trance state, I knew that the results of correcting those seven words would be unthinkable. (Such an episode, had it originated with one of my patients, would have been the stuff of five or six therapy sessions.) As I type this note, I realize it is nonsense to believe words on a page can affect reality. It is just a story.
It is just X’s final goodbye. However, I cannot bring myself to send the book to you along with the other items. Yes, I do need it for my collection, but there are more important reasons to keep it here.
You should visit us. You could stay a few days, assist us in those areas where we lack personnel, maybe bring us some supplies. I do not think the text that next you read will much resemble what you may remember, but this place is the same, if in worse disrepair.
I wonder if there is already a name for my affliction.
Dr. V
P.S. Some of the words I have translated seem to make no sense-in my haste I have made errors-but the last paragraph has escaped my efforts completely, for reasons I will touch on later.
THE MAN WHO HAD NO EYES
There came a day when the gray caps changed the course of the River Moth and flooded the city ofAmbergris. Abandoning their PLOTTED lair, they came out into the light, put the rulers of the city to flight, and took over the islands that were now Cinsorium once again.
At first, people found that life did not change much under the new rulers. It certainly did not change for the most famous writer in Ambergris. Born in the city, he used the city as his palette, bending every word in the world to his will. He could create paragraphs so essential that to be without their smooth, wise forms was to be without a soul. If his mood was grim, he would create suicide paragraphs: words from the almost dead to the definitely dead. He could, I tell you, describe an object in such a way that forever after his description replaced the original.
Perhaps if he had been less talented, he would have been less APED. For praise rose all about him as naturally as the fog that came off the River Moth and he came to think of himself as unbound by any laws other than those of fiction.
Thus, he felt a growing need to break the labyrinthine rules of the gray caps. He laughed at daybreak in front of the watery ruins of Truffidian Cathedral. After dusk, he distributed his stories on public streets for free. He read his work from a boat above the flooded and now ANONYMITY statue of Voss Bender.
He wrote paragraphs in honor of the Lady in Blue (who, from the underground passages of the gray caps, confronted them with the evidence of their own cruelty).
After the fifth such offense, the gray caps cut out his tongue and threw it into the now BONFIRES River Moth, for the fish had grown fond of such flesh. They plucked out his eyes and used them on their barges. They cut
