How easily I was able to pass from one dimension into another. I wrote the letter to Peter Kropotkin from an unknown woman in a handwriting not my own. At the end of her letter the narrarator spoke of a silver box containing a nearly illegible testament concerning the great activists birth. I visualized the box and removed the document. Though indistinct I recognized my own handwriting and noted that the text was marked with my own particular prose style. It contained certain truths that bled into a kind of fairy tale- the fabulous birth of young Prince Kropokin. I folded both documents and slipped them into my pocket. The rain was beating against the skylight so I grabbed my hooded jacket and headed out.
I walked along the railroad track but avoided the small cemetery as the sight of the bare ground where the statue once stood saddened me. The chain link fence felt foreboding and the ivy crawling over the stone walls was dying.
I had been summoned. Not with words but with music. A strangely familiar yet ungraspable melody lured me back to the Pasternak, our traditional meeting place. The Secretary and I arrived simultaneously and sat down. I had a sudden revelation that I felt compelled to write, a thought I could almost taste. When I fail to freeze such a thought I am left with the length of the thought, as if a reverberation of a plucked string. It was Pythagoras, who measured such vibrations, back when mathematics was a subtext of music. Back when the language of music was invented then expanded by Bach and Beethoven and made spiritual by Coltrane and given grammar by Ornette Coleman.
I was thinking about the isolation imposed on us at the onset of the pandemic. A fourteen day quarantine that stretched into months. How I had longed to reach and grasp a hand or rest mine upon another’s; how wrenching it was to take such a natural gesture from us. And now I am sitting across from the Secretary and see her as never before, a grieving human being.
She heartened when I handed her the manuscripts of the two pieces related to Peter Kropokin. I briefed her on the creation of the two and she chose to first read the imaginative piece on his birth. How fragile she seemed as she read, and I reached out and placed my hand over hers and there was nothing extraordinary about it, except the fact that we had never been so personal. For the first time it also occurred to me that we weren’t wearing masks and that I hadn’t worn one here at all. And no one had a mask on, and then I realized that there were very few people here, except those who, like the waitress, were definite components of our scenarios. Just the minimal amount of people, all playing their part with the same efficient wonder as the Secretary herself.
-Where am I? I was thinking.
-You are here, more alive than not, she said.
And I noticed the floral wallpaper was gently pulsing.
-Here there is no pandemic, she said, as if reading my thoughts.
-There is something far greater than anything a vaccine or mask can hold, she said. They are as useless as a finger in a dike.
And I could feel her thoughts with all of my being. There is a far greater pandemic we face, one that will do more than melt hearts, one that is transforming the great ice fields, now stretching on for miles as green rivers and rivers red as blood. Heralding a future where the guardians will be condemned to form a circle around a massive stone urn containing the ashes of a dead planet.
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