I HAD APPARENTLY BEEN
living in one of the towns that was now gone. According to reports, I held my
own against one of the younger organizations. I fought well and long. The
ending of the report is muddy, with many foreign words and phrases, and an
indecipherable series of pictures. There is no clear sense that I survived.
Photographs
of my body had circulated, flags had been stitched with secret instructions.
There
were instances of my name in the registry—the spelling varied, and my date of
birth was frequently listed as unknown. A scroll of hair, probably my own,
was taped to the paper. Mention was made of what must have been my house, a
vehicle I summoned to cross the water (skirmishes, courtship, evasions—the
report is unclear), and the amount of sacking I had contributed to the yearly
mountain effort. I ranked slightly above average.
People
wrote of seeing me in the morning by the water; several photographs featured
me wearing a beard, concealing something in my coat. A Nacht diagram rated me
favorably, prior to the revision. The Wixx index claimed I might have
perished. I read accounts of myself ostensibly accompanying a family to the
market on Saturdays. I may have been their assistant; I may have been their
captor. The wording is vague. Some sentences depicted me handling the bread
in an aggressive manner, as if searching for something inside it.
It is
possible I was collecting samples. I would not rule it out. It would explain
the long clear jars I found stored in my clothing that day when I woke. But
it would not explain why those jars were empty.
In the clearing beyond
where I’d slept there were men smashing spades against the sand, the sound of
children holding their breath. It was the first promising sign I had seen. I
knew to breathe in threes, to squint, to crouch while surveying, lest I be
deceived. Such were the ways I would keep myself alert.
Elsewhere in cities the men were reportedly listless, sleeping in long
troughs lining the town square, their exhalations steaming in unison over the
river. It would be the season of strategic fatigue. Many citizens carried
slender needles and used them to induce sluggishness. Exertion had been
mostly ruled out since February. Motion was under a quota.
I
practiced a paralysis style I’d learned as a child as I waited for the others
to stop moving. The footage, if examined, would depict a man awash in the
brush. That man would not come when called. That man would not even speak.
But inside him there would be life, of sorts. A kind of loud activity that
would constitute his secret.
As far as I knew, I had
not been breathing well that day. It was too early in the season to steal
much air from the region and I was favoring my lungs for the later peril.
This was called pacing. If you did not pace, you blew out. If you blew out,
you were left roadside, where picking occurred, where feeding occurred, where
a type of casual violence might visit.
But
after a full day of travel from the city, I crouched in the scattered pine
needles and allowed myself several full breaths, which filled my chest like
one of the early waters and brought on several uncomfortable memories. There
was no time to extract the paper cutouts from my knapsack, to stage a
scenario alleviation, so I exhaled shallowly, through a mouth shape that I
rarely used, one that reminded me of my younger self, until the memories grew
thin again and retreated outside my person.
I should start with those
moments I can relate firsthand, which will restrict me to events involving
the mountain and the town. It reminds me of the beginning to a famous old
story: “There was a town, above which loomed a mountain, beyond which
threatened a sky, from which came a certain person.” Is it simply a
coincidence that my story begins the same way?
I am
confident I can tell the truth about such matters, that my information is
worth imparting, though I recognize my confidence to be a decoy. There will
be areas of the report I will fail to relate, usually toward the bottom of
each exhalation, where I become emotional and inaccurate. I perform more
reliable thinking on the front end of an inhalation.
This
report will omit references to a so-called rescue. This report will omit
references to an apparent secret breathing technique called the Charlesfield,
a method of acquiring air ostensibly bestowed on certain of my partners in
the effort. This report will not assert assisted methods of remaining aloft.
This report will restrict itself to what is possible, surely a lamentable
limitation, but one that is unavoidable.
No
mention will be made of a man my mother once knew who breathed through paper.
There were great days of
greenery. I saw the sun firsthand. Its proximity made me feel shy—I was just
so many years old, I knew just so many things, I felt sensations I could not
describe. The shiny items on our path each day were touchable, but we were
smart to refrain from contact. Touching them had early on proved fruitless
and disappointing. A man should know better than to erase the distance
between himself and an object. He should not destroy distance. It would be
perilous to reduce my curiosity by knowing things.
Every
time I woke up a man lingered over me with calipers, breathing heavily, his
mouth as slack as a bag. He posted measurements outside our tents, recording
the day’s changes—American numbers—our bodies alternately bloating and shrinking
as we approached the summit.
Our
first task each morning was to assess altitude. This was done with our mouths
open, facing upwind. The number was then carved into a stationary rock and
dated, in case the altitude in that area would change.
Mr.
Hawthorne was small in the mouth cavity, as with many of his family, who
could not all open their mouths at once, since they shared dilation
privileges. He used his hands to dilate the opening, but he was frequently
knocked to the ground anyway. He used people as lean-tos. Those of us with
larger mouths stood strong in the valley bluster, letting the area breathe
for us.
I
spat something up that looked potentially revealing, so I dried it to a
shriveled husk on a south-facing rock, and then pocketed that husk for later
examination.
There
would be four of us this time to make the mountain effort. Some science had
gone into the devising of this number, but it was not for me to fathom. We
were brought in to face the townspeople at noon on the eve of our trip. I had
not met the other three efforteers, and tradition demanded we did not regard
each other, so I stood apart from them and kept my head down, practicing a
Spanish breathing style that promoted indifference.
Someone’s mother sat foremost in the auditorium. She looked to lord
herself over all of us. She had the arms of someone in charge. It was easy to
feel suspicious of her. She was the first to throw the forecast sticks at us.
I watched her pale arms folded in her lap. I do not know why looking at the
mother’s arms should trouble my focus the way it did, but I was certain for a
moment she was covered in canvas, which would have been poor foreboding. I
did not wish to see a cloth-covered lady, particularly before a journey. I
had read enough of the Bible to be afraid. During my introduction, which
featured a three-quarters time signature that flowed from the Description
Hole, I moved into the center of the room and crouched, wheeling in a circle
so all could see me. It was the standard promotional style.
A
small crush of applause emerged from the floor grille, clearly prerecorded. I
tried to blush. These people would all be dead soon, and I was embarrassed
for them.
If I had thoughts, they
occurred as hard noises in the foreground, a kind of thunder I walked into to
discover instructions. Even though motion was mainly restricted, it was the
primary way to discover what to do. The thoughts were mainly of myself. I
rehearsed what I would do in certain scenarios, should the scenarios arise,
though the scenarios were mostly unlikely or impossible.
One of the unlikely
scenarios was that we, the four hikers, would return alive. We nursed the
possibility regardless. I rehearsed a living posture. A probablist followed
us through the valley, chanting his numbers. He walked with short, hard steps
and surveyed the landscape, throwing his Estimate Sticks into the distance,
which made a sound like small bones snapping. We knew not to try to outrun
him, for we needed to save energy when the incline came, yet it was difficult
to hear him decrease our chances for survival as we progressed, his numbers
growing shorter and less exotic as we walked, his mouth cinching over time
into the smallest little button.
We
desired to walk toward the longer numbers, but those always seemed behind us,
and behind us was where the sun prohibited access. The probablist sang such a
song that we saw no animals for days.
There was a morning of
thin, false air when we kept to our tents. I could not say which morning it
was, but I could hear how fake the day was, how artificial its sounds and
smells.
A
good map will determine what cannot be breathed, since inhalation toward
behavior changing is based on a rough calculus of hills, valleys, and
water.
Our
maps were fair to good that day, though mine were colorless, and smelled of
children.
My
partners utilized ventilators ornamented with items from their homes, and
alternated surveying the site through their scenario flaps, which filtered
out color and the smaller organic life. I parceled my own breaths and
rebreathed what I could.
Each
breath that I saved in my shirt, that I rebreathed, produced in me a
standstill, a deep pause, that generated a slowness even in my partners, so
that if I chose to, I could cover all of us in the clear syrup until we
froze. It was my first sense that I could stifle their progress entirely
through breathing styles of my own invention. It would be another notion I
kept to myself, however much my mouth seemed to want to report it.
On the first day of
complete air, small sentences became available to our group, sentences such
that children might use if they were dying. It was undecided who should use
them. A coldness due to elevation prevented most of us from speaking, but
someone among us must have felt warm in the mouth, because there arose a
quiet language that filled the tent, inducing older feelings in me that I
would have preferred to avoid. I knew that an overdeveloped sensitivity would
ostracize me from my partners, so I practiced an inner translation of all
that I heard, until I was speaking again in a simple child’s voice that used
tones mostly of wonder and awe. This was a speech that my face found
strenuous and foreign, but I persisted.
Knowingness, I sensed, was a peril. Belief was a peril. Certainty was a
peril. I chose a low conflict mode and wore it deeply. I adopted a silent
accent.
A
notion arose that our bodies were being used as a repository for feelings
that were not our own. We were being employed as storage containers. Who
created this notion I do not know, but we were all at once nodding to each
other, affirming a belief that had yet to be fully articulated. In any case
there was the sense that we were acting together.
This
language in the tent was producing certain attitudes and ideas in us: We
should climb only at night. We should burn a shirt each morning. We had been
sent from the town in a purging action. We should escape the statistician,
who had lapsed into inaccuracy. The statistician was a withered old man from
Gregge. Our people at home were being killed. Our people at home had been
killed. Our people at home were no longer there—but then where would they
be?
The
suspicion I kept to myself: It was I who had accomplished this purging and
killing, through actions I no longer cared to remember. Why else would I have
felt so uncomfortable? I looked at the statistician, slumping against the
tent wall, his mouth embossed with a customized Gregge that shone in a
conventional way. We had all conspired to look so seductive. It seemed useful
to remain open to the possibility that I was this man, or a portion of him,
even though his shallow, wet breathing style seemed entirely foreign to me.
How appropriate, then, that this person of remote techniques was a facet of
myself I had been ignoring?
Silence was the tactic I favored.
The first real day I
remember was the day of needles, since all of us had courted a partial
paralysis as a mode of prayer. It followed the day of grain, which I only
read about later. In the day of grain a prediction was issued regarding
tomorrow, tentatively termed the day of blankets, since a smothering had been
predicted, which of course would prove untrue, and would be retracted. I
regarded this tentative prediction with suspicion, since the day of needles
had forced me from my tent on a long, steep ascent, free of partners, even
though climbing alone was deemed aggressive, violent, asking for retribution.
I used a one-person language on myself and purged most of my confusions. Once
my vocabulary had been exhausted I resorted to gesture, and when my limbs and
face were stricken w/ fatigue I fell back on thought, though that too was a
kind of secret motion, requiring a high-speed travel of blood through my
body, a greedy travel that I knew would soon put me in further danger.
Even as I climbed, I knew
that a prediction had been made that I would climb alone, struggling against
a loose stream of rocks. I carried the prediction within me, unsure of how
public it had been and why I again was suffered to know something incidental
and unimportant that had yet to occur.
If
confronted, I would claim the need to establish a lookout position, though my
real motivation would remain hidden, even from myself. I would simply not
know what I had been doing, and this would have to be acceptable. But from
then on—and this really happened—I would remain isolated from the others,
outside their language. I would satisfy their need to produce a treason, a
killing. Alone in my corner of the tent, uncomfortable with English sentences
and their mouth-breaking force, I would look like the perfect target for their
weapons. It was comforting then to discover that I might be of some use.
There were too many
tactics to trace. We had surpassed our strategy quota. I was tired of having
ideas. Luckily there were men among us, high-altitude persons, who were eager
to think for the group. Not only did they think, but they spoke of what they
thought, and if that wasn’t extreme enough, they believed what they spoke and
seemed ready to enforce their ideas with weaponry. I wished that just for a
moment I could feel, however fleetingly, that I was not controlling their
mouths.
There would be nothing
more comfortable to me than knowing I had failed to understand entirely
everything up to this point. I wish I could say I did not know the meaning of
the word “mountain.” A comfort, to not understand sentences. A comfort, to
fail to recognize people. A comfort, to find all languages foreign.
I
would feel so relaxed to know that I never understood my expedition, that
sentences of unbearable sound came from my head.
If
only I could know something as simple as that.
In truth, I had a fairly
clear sense of my name and my purpose. I understood my people to be dead. I
felt a kind of invisible harm circling me that I knew the others would only
call air.
When I looked down on the
town from the high ledge we had gained, I saw nothing.
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