City of Saints and Madmen

X'S NOTES

— A writer who is having difficulties with his masterwork-too old or just unmotivated? Read H’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, first.

— A writer in a prison. The prison is his own story. How can he make himself free?

— Ask the attendant for a better night lamp, not to mention another typewriter ribbon.

— Tonsure kept two journals, one that he wanted to be found. Why, really, would it be important for a fake account to be found?

— Always exercise when you first get up in the morning!

— Could easily write a biography of Voss Bender while in here. Start with childhood. Picture him this way: in the Truffidian Cathedral, surrounded by people yet utterly alone, sitting in the place of honor at the head of the altar, his left leg crossed over his right, an arm and fist supporting his head-a wild shock of black hair that goes to his shoulders, the olive skin, the darkness under the eyes, accentuating the darkness of the eyes themselves. These are eyes that see a lot without seeming to. The thick lips, the hint of a smile on those lips, while all around the congregation continues to chant. His foot is tapping.

But the tapping foot is not a sign of boredom. Inside his head, he is already, at l2, composing an opera.

Beside him-shriveled, white-haired grandfather, vacant sad-eyed mother, a father to whom everything in the world is cause for indifference. As the ceremony progresses and each of the relatives comes up to say something, most stress that he should “use his skills for good.“ He looks up at them from beneath the wall of black hair as if they were all made from scraps of paper. Throughout it all, his foot is still tapping.

And as he receives the benediction with his parents, their hands placed gently atop his head, he stands with his arms behind his back, his hands clasped together as if he has been shackled… and still the foot taps to the great swelling of symphonies in his head… He will always be this way-half in the real world, half in the next. (How, then, does he go from this idealism to despotism of old age?)

— Don’t forget that the director needs a letter to his superiors about funding.

— In the future, the gray caps will probably have taken over the city no matter what I write-how might the city change as a result? What will be the dangers of writing in such a milieu? Simple incarceration or something much worse? Is it worth the risk? Is it a good staging ground anyway?

— Ask for new books, even if theoretically you wrote them all.

— An encoded message from the future, itself with a message embedded in it?

— Is there more to theMartinLake story? Later years?

— Oxygenated squid blood is blue, not red.

— “His dreams will rise to the surface like bubbles of air, and when they pop open, he will finally remember the one thing he had hoped to forget.“ Bad B-movie material?

— Visions that I am not sure are mine. I’m not quite sure what to make of them. They suggest answers to some questions about the gray caps. It is always underground. And it is dark. There is a machine. The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks.

Images of jungles and swamps inhabited by strange birds, strange beasts. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen them or heard mention of their existence. Ever… After several days, your eyes stray and unfocus and blink slowly. You notice, at the very bottom of the mirror, the glass, a door. The door is as big as the machine.

The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so small that you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent-the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely-perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a non-existent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth.

The worms are singing to you through the rubble. You cannot think. You cannot breathe. You dare not breathe. Your head is full of blood.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

There is something behind the door.

The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You run you run you run you run from that place as fast as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while you drown in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hatdoesnwor atdoeswor tdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door…

Patient l9-9-l8-9-l4

Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute l3l4Albumuth Boulevard

Ambergris Il3-24