Atwood Surfacing Quotes

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

They will not let you have peace, they don't want you to have anything they don't have themselves.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.

I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.

When you can't tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you're an addict.

it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.

He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.

...that's what Hiltler exemplified: not the triumph of evil but the failure of reason.

Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.

Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife… as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.

Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.

speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.

I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.

My hands are out of practice, my eyes disused. Most of what I do is drawing, because the preparation of the surface, the laborious underpainting and detailed concentration... are too much for me. I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now.

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn't help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.

She must have heard the door opening and closing in the middle of the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she's brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all, mirages raised by words.

Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters." It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.

He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he loved and he wanted someone to join him, anyone would do, I didn't matter so I didn't have to care.

The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a pattern of ridges like a washboard, was fading as rapidly as any other transient impression on a soft surface.

So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing, Nothing goes away.

The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.

Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance - we hear a capital W on Writer.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.

You all right?" he said again. I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was. "Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.

We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal-clear image enclosed by a blank wall.

When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or colored pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that’s how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then—they must have had something like that at their disposal.

Angels come in two kinds: the others, and those who fell. The angel of suicide is one of those who fell, down through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface. Or did she jump? With her you have to ask.

I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They'd had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there would be more room for the animals, they would be rescued.

He doesn’t say what he thinks of my paintings, but I know anyway. He thinks they are irrelevant. In his mind, what I paint is lumped in with the women who paint flowers. Lumped is the word. The present tense is moving forward, discarding concept after concept, and I am off to the side somewhere, fiddling with egg tempera and flat surfaces, as if the twentieth century has never happened. There is freedom in this: because it doesn’t matter what I do, I can do what I like

His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast; if he'd become hooked (on these rock paintings) he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man's delusion of usefulness.

But the truth is that I don’t know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained.

I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.

I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone.

The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure. The sun goes and the egg fades. I

He said Jesus was a historical figure and God was a superstition, and a superstition was a thing that didn't exist.

Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts invent a different pain.

The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface.

The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking and giving nothing.

They won easily: Joe didn’t know how, exactly, and I hadn’t played for years. I was never any good; the only part I liked was picking up the cards and arranging them.

It’s too late, I no longer have a name. I tried for all those years to be civilized but I’m not and I’m through pretending.

I can’t know yet, it’s too early. But I assume it: if I die it dies, if I starve it starves with me. It might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed.

If you don’t do it right we won’t play with you,” they said. Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

I didn’t last long at Sunday School. One girl told me she had prayed for a Barbara Ann Scott doll with figure skates and swansdown trim on the costume and she got it for her birthday; so I decided to pray too, not like the Lord’s Prayer or the fish prayer but for something real. I prayed to be made invisible, and when in the morning everyone could still see me I knew they had the wrong God.

Er liebte mich nicht, er liebte das Bild, das er von sich hatte, und er wollte, daß ihn jemand darin bestätigte, jede wäre ihm recht, ich war nicht wichtig, also brauchte ich mir um ihn auch keine Gedanken zu machen.

They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn’t tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their articial garden, greenhouse. They didn’t teach us about evil, they didn’t understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunowers; remote as Eskimoes or mastodons.

From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her. Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.

Most of the time, that is what it feels like here, far away from the war, in the still heart of the tornado. So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

The machine is gradual, it takes a little of you at a time, it leaves the shell. It was all right as long as they stuck to dead things, the dead can defend themselves, to be half dead is worse. They did it to each other also, without knowing.

I was the one they would forget on purpose to untie. I spent many afternoons looped to fences and gates and convenient trees, waiting for a benevolent adult to pass and free me; later I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at undoing knots.

Photo album, I’m in it somewhere, successive incarnations of me preserved and flattened like flowers pressed in dictionaries; that was the other book she kept, the leather album, a logbook like the diaries. I used to hate standing still, waiting for the click.

The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there is nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated

Each year it was a different school, in October or November when the first snow hit the lake, and I was the one who didn’t know the local customs, like a person from another culture: on me they could try out the tricks and minor tortures they’d already used up on each other.

I walk to the hill and scan the shoreline, finding the place, opening, where they disappeared: checking, reassuring. It’s true, I am by myself; this is what I wanted, to stay here alone. From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.

I wanted to run down to the dock and stop them, fighting was wrong, we weren’t allowed to, if we did both sides got punished as in a real war. So we battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

Ich höre die Stimmen der anderen und das Mischen und Aufklatschen von Karten durch die geschlossene Tür. Das Lachen aus der Konserve, sie führen es mit sich; winzige Tonbandspulen und eine Einschalttaste sind irgendwo in ihrem Brustkasten versteckt, sie sorgen für sofortige Wiedergabe.

Of course, thinks Stan. It’s the age of tolerance. Stupid fucking me. Anything goes, out there in the so-called real world; though not inside Consilience, where the surface ambience is wholesomely, relentlessly hetero. Have they been eliminating gays all this time, or just not letting them in?

Jamás creerían que esto es solo una mujer natural, un estado de la naturaleza, eso se lo parece un cuerpo moreno en la playa, con pelo ondeando como pañuelos al viento; no esto, cara con barro seco y manchada, piel sucia y costrosa, pelo como una alfombrilla deshilachada llena de hojas y ramas.

Under their feet was the ice, which was white also, and under that the river water, with its eddies and undertows, dark but unseen. This was how I pictured that time, the time before Laura and I were born – so blank, so innocent, so solid to all appearances, but thin ice all the same. Beneath the surfaces of things was the unsaid, boiling slowly.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face.

Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.

We made a point of a drink or two before dinner, or three; I was becoming a little too fond of gin, in this combination or that, but I wasn’t too close to the edge as long as I could feel my toes and hold my tongue. We were still skating on the surface of things – on the thin ice of good manners, which hides the dark tarn beneath: once it melts, you’re sunk.

I watch him, my love for him useless as a third eye or a possibility. If I go with him we will have to talk, wooden houses are obsolete, we can no longer live in spurious peace by avoiding each other, the way it was before, we will have to begin. For us it’s necessary, the intercession of words; and we will probably fail, sooner or later, more or less painfully.

They can’t be trusted. They’ll mistake me for a human being, a naked woman wrapped in a blanket: possibly that’s what they’ve come here for, if it’s running around loose, ownerless, why not take it. They won’t be able to tell what I really am. But if they guess my true form, identity, they will shoot me or bludgeon in my skull and hang me up by the feet from a tree.

This Is a Photograph of Me It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills. (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the centre of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough, eventually you will be able to see me.)

Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paperdoll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.

They will be plotting a strategy for recapture; or will they really go off and discard me, vanish into the catacombs of the city, giving me up for lost, stashing me away in their heads with all the obsolete costumes and phrases? For them I’ll soon be ancient as crew cuts and World War songs, a half-remembered face in a high-school year book, a captured enemy medal: memorabilia, or possibly not even that.

But when I reach the entrance to the cave, it is sealed over. It’s blocked in. Who can have done this? I vibrate my wings, sniffing blind as a dazzled moth over the hard surface. In a short time the sun will rise like a balloon on fire and I will be blasted with its glare, shrivelled to a few small bones. Whoever said that light was life and darkness nothing? For some of us, the mythologies are different.

At the Governor’s residence, Simon is directed to the parlour, which is almost large enough to be called a drawing room. All possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colours are those of the inside of the body—the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones. He imagines the sensation it would produce if he were to announce this aperçu out loud.

V určitém okamžiku se musel můj krk nějak uzavřít, jako když zamrzne rybník nebo se zacelí rána, a já jsem zůstala uvězněná ve své hlavě; od té chvíle se ode mě všechno odráželo, jako bych byla uvnitř nějaké skleněné vázy nebo procházela vesnicí, jejíž obyvatele sice vidím, ale neslyším, protože jim nerozumím. Stěny lahve zkreslují obraz i vnějšímu pozorovateli: žába ve sklenici vypadá široká; když se na mě dívali, musela jsem jim připadat směšná.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been. The word games, the winning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented, withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death.

This was where he drowned, he got saved only by accident; if there had been a wind she wouldn’t have heard him. She leaned over and reached down and grabbed him by the hair, hauled him up and poured the water out of him. His drowning never seemed to have affected him as much as I thought it should, he couldn’t even remember it. If it had happened to me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from the dead like that; I would have returned with secrets, I would have known things most people didn’t.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

Warum hatten sie ihn aufgehängt wie ein Lynchopfer, warum hatten sie ihn nicht einfach weggeworfen wie den Abfall? Um zu beweisen, daß sie es tun konnten, daß sie die Macht hatten, zu töten. Sonst hatte er keinen Wert: aus der Entfernung war er schön, aber man konnte ihn nicht zähmen oder kochen oder ihm Sprechen beibringen; das einzige Verhältnis, das sie zu so einem Tier haben konnten, war, es zu vernichten. Nahrung, Sklave oder Kadaver, das waren die einzigen Möglichkeiten; abgesägte Köpfe mit Hörnern oder Hauern an der Wand von Billardzimmern, präparierte Fische, Trophäen.

I try to think for the first time what it was like to be them: our father, islanding his life, protecting both us and himself, in the midst of war and in a poor country, the effort it must have taken to sustain his illusions of reason and benevolent order, and perhaps he didn’t. Our mother, collecting the seasons and the weather and her children’s faces, the meticulous records that allowed her to omit the other things, the pain and isolation and whatever it was she was fighting against, something in a vanished history, I can never know. They are out of reach now, they belong to themselves, more than ever.

Moje seznámení s náboženstvím proběhlo způsobem, jakým se většina dětí v té době seznamovala se sexem, ne na ulici, ale na betonovém školním dvoře se štěrkovými cestičkami, během zimních měsíců, kdy jsem chodila do školy. Děti tu postávaly ve skupinkách, držely se za ruce v palčácích a špitaly si. Strašily mě líčením, že na nebi je nějaký mrtvý stařec, který vidí všechno, co dělám, a já jsem se jim pomstila tím, že jsem jim řekla, jak se rodí miminka. Některé matky pak telefonovaly mojí matce a stěžovaly si na mě, ale já jsem přesvědčená, že mě jejich děti vyděsily víc než já je: ony mi nevěřily, zato já jim ano.

Soon, said the artists, ignoring him, there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed. People would creep along through this tubing, single file, stark naked, their only view the asshole of the one before them in the line, their urine and excrement flowing down through vents in the floor, until they were randomly selected by a digitalized mechanism, at which point they would be sucked into a side tunnel, ground up, and fed to the others through a series of nipple-shaped appendages on the inside of the tube. The system would be self-sustaining and perpetual, and would serve everybody right.

Mir war nicht schrecklich zumute; ich war mir klar darüber, daß mich nicht mehr viel berührte, schon seit langer Zeit nicht mehr. Vielleicht war ich schon mein ganzes Leben lang so gewesen, genau wie manche Kinder taub oder ohne Tastsinn geboren werden; aber wenn das der Fall gewesen wäre, hätte ich das Fehlen von Gefühlen nicht bemerkt. Irgendwann mußte sich mein Hals geschlossen haben wie ein zufrierender Teich oder eine vernarbende Wunde und hatte mich in meinem Kopf eingeschlossen. Seitdem war alles von mir abgeprallt, es war, als steckte ich in einer Vase. Es war wie früher im Dorf, wo ich sehen, aber nicht hören konnte, weil ich die Sprache nicht verstand. Flaschen verzerren auch: Frösche im Marmeladenglas sehen breitgedrückt aus, für die muß ich ein grotesker Anblick gewesen sein.

Ich blicke mich um, betrachte die Wände, das Fenster; alles ist wie früher, unverändert, aber die Umrisse sind verschwommen, als ob alles leicht verzerrt sei. Ich muss vorsichtiger mit meinen Erinnerungen umgehen, ich muss sicher sein, dass es meine eigenen und nicht die anderer Leute sind, Leute, die mir erzählen wollen, was ich empfand, wie ich mich verhielt, was ich sagte: Wenn die Ereignisse nicht stimmen, stimmen auch die Empfindungen nicht, die ich dabei hatte; ich werde anfangen, sie zu erfinden, und es gibt dann keine Möglichkeit mehr, das zu korrigieren, weil die, die mir helfen könnten, nicht mehr da sind, Ich überfliege schnell meine Version meines Lebens, überprüfe sie wie ein Alibi; es passt zusammen, es ist alles da bis zu der Zeit, als ich fortging. Danach ist mein Leben wie ein entgleister Zug, für einen Augenblick verliere ich es aus den Augen, es ist wie weggewischt; ich weiß nicht mal mein genaues Alter, ich schließe die Augen, was ist das? Die Vergangenheit zu besitzen, aber nicht die Gegenwart, das bedeutet, man fängt an senil zu werden. Ich kämpfe gegen die Panik, die in mir aufsteigt, ich öffne meine Augen gewaltsam, betrachte meine Hände, mein Leben ist darin eingeritzt. Ich öffne die Hand, und die Linien fließen auseinander. Ich konzentriere mich auf das Spinnennetz beim Fenster, in dem gefangene Fliegenkörper hängen, die das Sonnenlicht auffangen; die Zunge in meinem Mund bildet meinen Namen, wiederholt ihn wie ein Psalm... Dann klopft jemand an die Tür. "Gefangen, gefangen", sagt jemand, es ist David, ich erkenne ihn, Erleichterung, ich bin wieder da, wo ich hingehöre.

In the city I never hid in bathrooms; I didn’t like them, they were too hard and white. The only city place I can remember hiding is behind opened doors at birthday parties. I despised them, the pew-purple velvet dresses with antimacassar lace collars and the presents, voices going Oooo with envy when they were opened, and the pointless games, finding a thimble or memorizing clutter on a tray. There were only two things you could be, a winner or a loser; the mothers tried to rig it so everyone got a prize, but they couldn’t figure out what to do about me since I wouldn’t play. At first I ran away, but after that my mother said I had to go, I had to learn to be polite; “civilized,” she called it. So I watched from behind the door. When I finally joined in a game of Musical Chairs I was welcomed with triumph, like a religious convert or a political defector.

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once. It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn't understand what he meant, but maybe he didn't explain it very well. He was already moving away from the imprecision of words. But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

She’s about to add, “I have scars, inside me,” but she stops herself. What is a scar, Oh Toby? That would be the next question. Then she’d have to explain what a scar is. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What is writing, Oh Toby? Writing is when you make marks on a piece of paper, on a stone, on a flat surface, like the sand on the beach, and each of the marks means a sound, and the sounds joined together mean a word, and the words joined together mean… How do you make this writing, Oh Toby? You make it with a keyboard, or no… once you made it with a pen or a pencil, a pencil is a… Or you make it with a stick. Oh Toby, I do not understand. You make a mark with a stick on your skin, you cut your skin open and then it is a scar, and that scar turns into a voice? It speaks, it tells us things? Oh Toby, can we hear what the scar says? Show us how to make these scars that talk!

What he’s been working on is an idea, or the idea of an idea. It’s about a race of extraterrestrials who send a spaceship to explore Earth. They’re composed of crystals in a high state of organization, and they attempt to establish communications with those Earth beings they’ve assumed are like themselves: eyeglasses, windowpanes, Venetian paperweights, wine goblets, diamond rings. In this they fail. They send back a report to their homeland: This planet contains many interesting relics of a once-flourishing but now-defunct civilization, which must have been of a superior order. We cannot tell what catastrophe has caused all intelligent life to become extinct. The planet currently harbours only a variety of viscous green filigree and a large number of eccentrically shaped globules of semi-liquid mud, which are tumbled hither and thither by the erratic currents of the light, transparent fluid that covers the planet’s surface. The shrill squeaks and resonant groans produced by these must be ascribed to frictional vibration, and should not be mistaken for speech.

Eurydice He is here, come down to look for you. It is the song that calls you back, a song of joy and suffering equally: a promise: that things will be different up there than they were last time. You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface. You are used to these blanched dim corridors, you are used to the king who passes you without speaking. The other one is different and you almost remember him. He says he is singing to you because he loves you, not as you are now, so chilled and minimal: moving and still both, like a white curtain blowing in the draft from a half-opened window beside a chair on which nobody sits. He wants you to be what he calls real. He wants you to stop light. He wants to feel himself thickening like a treetrunk or a haunch and see blood on his eyelids when he closes them, and the sun beating. This love of his is not something he can do if you aren’t there, but what you knew suddenly as you left your body cooling and whitening on the lawn was that you love him anywhere, even in this land of no memory, even in this domain of hunger. You hold love in your hand, a red seed you had forgotten you were holding. He has come almost too far. He cannot believe without seeing, and it’s dark here. Go back, you whisper, but he wants to be fed again by you. O handful of gauze, little bandage, handful of cold air, it is not through him you will get your freedom.