Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness

He held up a transcript.

— I'll read it aloud.

— And then we'll be done? asked Grieve.

— Then we're done, said James.

What was to come felt so vague and unreal that he did not feel any guilt yet at being a part of it. He remembered McHale's death. That had been real. These people had done that. He remembered the picture of Estrainger in the newspaper. How could he have been such a fool? He had been standing there outside the building talking to Estrainger himself, and hadn't known it. He could still see the scornful turn to Estrainger's lip. Where had all his scorn gone now?

Stark began:

— Eight February, nine P.M. Test of the effects of Gas E-thirty-eight. I was tied to a chair in the clean room. All precautions were taken to limit the sound to that room alone. The duration was one hour. As soon as the gas was released a visible cloud formed near the ceiling of the room. I heard nothing at first, but after a while had a feeling of dizziness. This feeling grew. If I had not been strapped to the chair, I would have lost my balance and fallen to the ground. A noise began, a quiet tone, like a single harp string. It grew in volume, but then faded. Colors swam in my sight. The dizziness was overwhelming. I began to vomit and a shuddering pain came in back of my eyes. The colors in my sight blended together and I began to hear a sort of music. It sounded like voices singing, voices underwater. I realized what it was, abstractly, but was drawn away from my own thought, and took up the sound again. The music was the memory of past sound filling the sudden void made by my loss of hearing. As the hour passed, the music faded and was gone, and I was left in a silence more profound than any I had known. I have lived with that silence nine days, and know now I shall never hear again.

At the Small Ferris Wheel Abandoned in the Woods

James blinked in the harsh light. Where was Ansilon? He felt along his shoulder with a free hand. Yes, the owl was there.

Ansilon strained slightly against his hand in greeting. Both were deathly quiet, for had they not come at last to the Small-Ferris-Wheel-Abandoned-In-The-Woods of which they had so often heard?

There it was on the far side of the clearing, all rusted and bent. The clearing was in a deep, deep depression of land, and the trees around were all very old, so although the Ferris Wheel was in fact of an incredible height, it did not rise above the highest height of trees, but stood among the treetops, veiled from any distant sight.

— Up we must go, said Ansilon.

and also,

— My friend, I have brought a gift for you, a final gift of my friendship.

For indeed, James had not seen Ansilon for many a year, he having been presumed dead and most certainly gone away.

— What is it? asked James. I have got something for you, too.

Ansilon laid on the ground a little piece of hay woven into a ribbon.

— Tie this in among your locks of hair and you will know the sound of lying when you hear it; you will know the sound of truth.

James took it and tied it in his hair.

— What then for me? asked Ansilon.

And James sang quietly a little rhyme for owls that have gone away. This Ansilon took gladly into his heart, and he perched happily on James's shoulder, sometimes moving this way and sometimes that.

Then up they climbed on the Ferris Wheel, sometimes out onto a tree limb and up and back onto the wheel, so complicated proved the ascent, yet after some minutes of climbing, they found themselves far above the ground seated in a lovely iron car.

— Here we are, said Ansilon, and here we'll stay.

— What ever do you mean? asked James. I must go back after a little while.

Must you? asked Ansilon. Must you?

And James knew then that all children at some time mistake themselves and choose to leave childhood. Yet once it is done, it cannot be undone, for it is a very small door that shuts in a long, long wall.

— Good-bye, said James.

— Good-bye, said Ansilon.

And then it was pouring rain, and James was standing in the street with his grandparents, wearing a rain slicker, many years later, and he felt clearly that he had lost all that was best.

But who has the means to preserve such as that? he thought. And the world continued.

James and Grieve were standing in the hall. They had left Stark still seated at his desk, just a single lamp lit in the long room.

— What happened to Andrew Morris? James asked.

Grieve turned away from him; her face stiffened.

— He was a sort of uncle to us. It was partly his idea, the whole thing. He's the one, he's. .

— What? said James, turning her by the shoulder back towards him.

— He's the one, James. Right now, he's waiting in a hotel room in Washington. Tomorrow is his day. He has the final message.

A Burgeoning Sense of

grayness was the gift of the greatest draftsmen. In a way they saw color as a series of progressing grays, gray moving to black, to white, gray in blue, gray in yellow, gray in purple and green. The direction of lines provoked the imagining of color, the sweep of shading. James was no good at drawing, but he loved master drawings, and went often to the museums as a young man.

He didn't care for painting. It was too easy, too mannered. In drawing, there is the pencil and the paper. Two things, distinct. There is the black of the lead, and the white of the page, and together, anything can be created, can be called to mind. Painting was like a flourish, an unnecessary flourish thrown back in the world's teeth. There isn't time, thought James, for everything to be drawn, but only once all things in the world had been drawn, that would be the time for painting to begin.

James stood outside Grieve's door. She had asked that they sleep there, and he had wanted to. She had asked that he stay outside the door a moment, for what reason he did not know.

The halls were quiet, the stairwell long. He went to the landing and looked down and up. Mirrors were on the ceiling at the top, and on the floor at the bottom, so that the stair appeared to progress forever farther into itself.

A place for ridding people of chronic lying, thought James. It was scarcely that. He had never met such a bunch of liars in his life.

The man had said, a kingdom of foxes . In a kingdom of foxes, you must believe only what you are not told.

Grieve opened the door to her room. She was standing there in a long nightgown, with the straps loose on her arms. Her shoulders were bare, and her mouth was parted slightly.

He stepped forward.

— I'm sorry, but—

He caught her chin in the palm of his hand and turned her head to one side. With his other hand he lifted her ear. There was indeed behind her ear the lily-violet.

— Am I proven? she asked.

He shut the door with his foot.

— There are fifteen lies, and you can tell them all, he said. I will listen carefully.

Then they sat together by the window where she had lain as a child, and she told him many of the things she had thought and done. For in the gathering of hours towards this seventh day, it was clear that whoever they would be together, they would not be the same, and could never say to each other the things they might say now. For things go out of the world and things come into it, and one cannot account for, suppose, or presuppose these vanishings and their whereabouts. One can only speak slowly all the things one has thought while out drowsing in a world broken up not as we think, into places, separated by space, but broken up solely by time, which moves fast then slow then fast again, while all else holds still.