off his hands and used them as candles at their administrative offices. They mutilated his torso with their symbol, in fungus green. Then they sent him to the one-room stilt house of his birth, by the water, so that he could, in GORGEOUS, contemplate his fate where once he had watched swallows fly, snatching insects.
For a long time, no one visited the writer out of fear. His own wife left him because she was not BLINDING enough. Every week, a Truffidian priest would come close enough to leave food and water on his doorstep.
The writer sat in a chair facing the wall as the stories built up inside of him until he was so full that he thought he would die from the SNARL of them in his lungs. But he had no tongue with which to speak.
He had no eyes with which to see the world. He had no hands with which to write down his stories. He lived inside a box inside a box. What now could he do?
For many weeks, he thought about killing himself and might have done so except that one day he bumped against the table on which he set the supplies and a pen rolled off the edge. It fell against his left foot. The touch was cold and sharp. The sensation spread up his leg and up into his torso until, inside the boxes inside his head, something awoke.
The writer spent the next three weeks feeling his way across every inch of his room much as you, dear reader, are feeling your way through this story. He picked up anything that lay against the walls until the table, the chair, the bed, and a few books all stood in the middle of the room. Then, holding the pen between his toes, he began to write on the wall.
It took many months to learn how to write with his feet. It was weeks before the visiting priest could read a single letter and much longer before anything more complex appeared on the walls. Words formed without form: “crashing am worry depends on the continuing earth exists can Zamilon.“ Each letter became an act of will-a playing out in his mind of what it should look like and then making his toes, his foot, his leg, apply the correct pressure to the wall so that the pen did not break and the shape took form correctly.
Over time, the writer covered the walls of his room with the visions that blossomed in the dark gardens of his mind. Words formed sentences, sentences paragraphs, paragraphs stories. With each word, a great burden lifted itself from the writer and he began to feel like himself again. Later, with sheets of paper and more pens begged from the priest, more words spilled out in a jumble, his pages a flood greater than that brought by the gray caps.
I saw one of the stories the writer wrote on the wall-in red ink, surrounded by thousands of other, disconnected words. It read:
There once was a cage in an empty room. A soft, soft sound like weeping came from the cage. After a time, a man entered the room. He was gray and sad. He held a small animal by the ears. It was battling to escape. The cage grew silent. The man approached the cage. He pulled the cage door open, threw in the animal, and slammed the door shut. As the man watched, the animal screamed, its paws sliding off the bars. A wound appeared in its left leg. A wound appeared in its left shoulder. Slowly, the animal was eaten alive until it was just a pile of bone and blood. The weeping became relentless. Everything the man placed within the cage died. Every time, the man felt a corresponding thrill of delight. But eventually the thrill died too. It became ordinary, something he had to do. Would it ever stop? He could not decide.
One day, he grew so bored that he opened the cage to let the nothing out. He expected it would kill him, but it did not. It let him live. It followed him everywhere. Over time, it killed everything he held dear, weeping the entire time. When nothing was left to care about, it abandoned the man. The man sat in his room with the empty cage and made the weeping sound the cage had once made.
Before the gray caps had mutilated him, the writer had published dreams and long, absurd stories. He had published fake histories and travel guides. I cannot say I care much for what he writes now, although he became famous for it. Within a short time, readers began to come from far away to buy a page from him. The writer would be able to continue to do what he had always done. He just had no tongue. He just had no eyes. He just had no hands. Was that really so bad?
At least, this is the story the man wrote for me when, as a traveler to Ambergris-fresh from an encounter with the giant squid that had scuttled my boat-I visited him in his room. Later, others told me that he had been born in his current state and that all of his ideas came from old books by obscure authors, read to him by a friend.
When I first saw him, he sat by a window, his head thrown back as if to receive the light. (I now know he was listening. Intently.) The writer was a wiry man whose face, with its wrinkles and mouth of perpetual grimace, hinted at tortures beyond imagining. His arms did indeed end in nothing. His legs, curled beneath him, were tight with muscle and ended in muscular feet. His toes seemed as supple as my fingers. When I came in, he smiled at me. He uncurled his feet, stood, and held his leg up in a ridiculous position. I thought he wanted to “shake hands,“ but no: he held a piece of paper between his toes.
He nudged it toward me. I took it. What did it say? I could not read it. It was just a series of numbers.
What do numbers mean to a man like me? Nothing.
LEARNING TO LEAVE THE FLESH
I
Browsing through the Borges Bookstore, on a mission for my girlfriend Emily, I am suddenly confronted by a dwarf woman. The light from the front window strikes me sideways with the heat of late afternoon and, when she upturns her palm, the light illuminates all the infinite worlds enclosed in the wrinkles: pale road lines, rivers that pass through valleys, hillocks of skin and flesh. A matrix of destinies and destinations.
Before I can react, the dwarf woman takes my hand in hers and stabs me with a thorn, sending it deep into my palm. I grunt in pain, as if a physician had just taken a blood sample. I look down into her large, dark eyes and I see such calm there that the pain winks out, only returning when she shuffles off, hunchback and all, out of the bookstore.
The walls rush away from me, the shelves so distant that I cannot even brace myself against them. I bring my hand up into the light. The thorn has worked itself beneath the surface and might even burrow deeper, if I let it. I examine the blood-blistery entrance hole. It throbs, and already a pinkish-red color spreads across my palm like a dry fire. The hole itself could be a city on a map, a citadel torn apart by the angry pulse of warfare that will soon spread into the countryside. A war within my flesh.
I leave the bookstore and walk back to my apartment. The boulevard, Albumuth, has a degree of security, but only two blocks down, on graffiti-choked overpasses, young teenage futureperfects carouse and cruise through the night-to-come, courting pleasures of the flesh, courting corruption of the soul.
Albumuth is my lifeline, the artery to the downtown section where I work, buy groceries, and acquire books. Without it, the city would be dangerous. Without it, I might be unanchored, cast adrift.
As it is, I drag my shoes on the sidewalk, taking every opportunity to run my fingers along white picket fences, hunch down to pet cocker spaniels, converse with smiling apple grannies, and stare into the deep eyes of children.
Even now, so soon after, the wound has begun to change. I manage to pry out the thorn. The hole looks less and less like a city in flames and more like part of my own hand. Rarely has a portion of my anatomy so intrigued me. No doubt Emily has traced the lines between my freckles, explored the gaps between my toes, run her hands through the sprawl of hair on my chest, but I have never examined my own body in such detail. My body has never seemed relevant to who I am, except that I must keep it fit so it will not betray my mind.
But I examine my palm quite critically now. The wrinkles do not share consistency of length or width and calluses gather like barnacles or melted-down toothpaste caps. Abrasions, pinknesses, and a few tiny scars mar my palm. I conclude that my palm is ugly beyond hope of cosmetic surgery.
I reach my apartment as the sun fades into the blocky shadows of the city’s rooftops and scattered chimneys. My apartment occupies the first floor of a two-story brownstone. The bricks are wrinkled with age and soft as wet clay in places. The anemic front lawn has been seeded with sand to keep the grass from growing.
