Every day the Secretary and I met at the Pasternak and sat at the same table for hours. Or so it seemed. There was hardly a soul around; the city was wrapped in a mystical emptiness reminiscent of the pandemic streets. As we sat and communed, whether in animated conversation or long clairvoyant teachings, the external world seemed to revolve for us alone.
She gave me tasks, brought me books that I had already read, such as Mount Analogue, Port of Saints and The Children’s Crusade and asked that I reread them. She was Maxwell Perkins editing my dreams, clarifying my paths, as I inched toward her goal that was soon to become our common goal: to locate Number 4 who had gone in search of the disappeared young scientist. At times it seemed we were somewhere else and when I’d abruptly notice I’d be thrown off balance. I had the sensation I might fall off a small mountain or be enveloped in thick inorganic clouds.
I wondered, if I walked straight through them into another era or just a few years forward, would I find the populace gathered in fields? Or if I ventured into the outskirts of other cities, crawling with broken prosperity, what then? Warehouses piled with coats of shaved mink with lynx collars or the disinherited daughters of sheiks dressed like Carmelite nuns and thousands of orphaned children all looking up with earnest anticipation for silver spheres to fall from the sky. Massive and flattened at one end, weighing in like small moons and washed in a gold we do not know. Another version of gold, alchemical, malleable, that could be pressed into other things. Bulls, bowls, winding snakes, wreaths and crowns of myrtle leaves that were not green, but shimmering dead leaves of gold. I could pluck up such a wreath and set it upon a mantle, carved from a single chunk of marble, but I really wasn’t anywhere, rooted at a singular spot. I suddenly wrenched myself free, not out of fear but defiance.
-You’re wake-walking, she said. Do not worry. It’s a subdivision of sleepwalking, not scientifically filed but duly noted in the Index.
-The Index?
-I will explain all in due time. Everything you see is real though not seen by others, unless of course they have the gift or affliction of moving through dimensional curves. These are flaps, as if opening an envelope and smoothing it out on tracing paper.
She was saying all this half aloud, as though by rote, and yet I couldn’t help feeling certain phrases were lost, or perhaps unuttered consciously so as not to give everything away, a bit like blindfolding a hostage. We maneuvered a steel Serra style labyrinth which opened up onto a bright green field and then yet another labyrinth composed of transparent partitions, curved and long enough to hang all the Waterlilies of Monet. I looked closely and saw they were hung with breathtaking paintings of intricate microcosms composed entirely of shards of ice.
-Careful, she whispered, they are quite delicate and some are still wet.
-How beautiful!
-Yes, and quite new. A suite of images illustrating the Kingdom of Ice that the young Clara stumbled upon in the Nutcracker. I noticed small dabs of pink and silver on my coat and a spots of oil staining my flats.I hadn’t worn ballet flats in at least a decade. They were a dusty rose color and I suddenly wondered which age I was and which self was making her way through the marshy wetlands of an impressionistic mind?
-All of your selves are aboard, she smiled.
-Where to now? I asked.
-You did well, she said, for a beginner. Now you must return to your hotel and rest.
And so I returned to my room with a question scrawled on my palm:
Pioneer or volunteer?
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