All rights reserved.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2014 …falling through space, planetary or interplanetary, it didn’t matter.<\/p>\n \u2014I know, you told me. “Where are you going? Stay, don’t leave me.” All that.<\/p>\n \u2014No, I mean something different, something I take as a reward for my gullibility.<\/p>\n \u2014This voice?<\/p>\n \u2014The same. In this dream I am walking down a white corridor that branches off into other white corridors.<\/p>\n \u2014Motif of whiteness, I get it. And then you dissolve into white atoms, like Poe’s Pym?<\/p>\n \u2014Not how he went.<\/p>\n \u2014I know how he went.<\/p>\n \u2014So do I.<\/p>\n \u2014Then keep on. Narcissus and Echo<\/p>\n \u2014All day yesterday from Hegel to Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein back to Hegel, all day, first Hegel, then Wittgenstein and then back again to Hegel, until I flung down the books and went for a walk in the park. It was dark, the lagoon reflected no stars. Joggers, their earphones leaking insect chatter, passed by as I walked on the path beside the road. For a moment I stood at the edge of the lagoon and listened to the herons settling in on their island, rumpling the branches of the cypress. A wind tainted with the Gulf kicked in, foretelling storm. I thought, The only error is the fear of erring itself. I thought, Duck rabbit, rabbit duck, again unable to pinpoint the dawning. First Hegel, then Wittgenstein, over and over. “Damn,” I shouted and rammed my cane into the soft muck at my feet.<\/p>\n \u2014And then?<\/p>\n \u2014Then you flew down from the trees in the guise of a gray heron and began to speak.<\/p>\n \u2014Fairy tales, friend. Sheer fairy tales. After you left, a string of monikers and lovers, cages, stones.<\/p>\n \u2014And what of me? What of me?<\/p>\n \u2014You mean your mirror in hell?<\/p>\n \u2014Yes!<\/p>\n \u2014Those also serve who stay at home.<\/p>\n \u2014I’ve heard that before.<\/p>\n \u2014As have I. We were walking down the Kaiserallee in Baden-Baden watching the ducks bobbing along the Oosbach when I heard a voice behind me and it was myself speaking to myself speaking to myself speaking.<\/p>\n \u2014Ah, that’s what you mean.<\/p>\n \u2014Yes.<\/p>\n \u2014Well.<\/p>\n \u2014I could talk about Albertine.<\/p>\n \u2014Awful Albertine? Don’t get me started.<\/p>\n \u2014O.K. Today we are complacent, tomorrow we will be happy, yesterday we were dead. Better?<\/p>\n \u2014Much.<\/p>\n \u2014Huge yellow machines making their way across the horizon…<\/p>\n \u2014I see them.<\/p>\n \u2014 …churning up the earth like construction paper.<\/p>\n \u2014I get the message, if there is one.<\/p>\n \u2014”Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about good form?”<\/p>\n \u2014I get the message.<\/p>\n \u2014Most won’t.<\/p>\n \u2014Saw a man in half and what do you have, one man sawed in half or two half men? By the way, should I stay over? How many nights in a row will this have been? A thousand? More than a thousand?<\/p>\n \u2014Better not to have looked down at all.<\/p>\n \u2014Well, beauty is its own attractant, you know, and remember the offers I had, I mean, gads, oodles of them.<\/p>\n \u2014I remember.<\/p>\n \u2014Therefore…<\/p>\n \u2014 …nothing. Or were you about to drag in the flower, the fifty foot one you’ve been welding in the factory at night when you thought I wouldn’t notice your absence?<\/p>\n \u2014Some other long-eared fellow you must have in mind. I can’t have been the first or the last.<\/p>\n \u2014Three dead yesterday, four the day before, eighteen tomorrow.<\/p>\n \u2014Is that a record?<\/p>\n \u2014Not yet.<\/p>\n \u2014Having been obliged to marry a native princess, I spent my days and nights in the forest, a savage amongst savages, and in this way delayed the terrible fate I had planned for myself.<\/p>\n \u2014Why hide this old advertisement?<\/p>\n \u2014Because it doesn’t belong to me.<\/p>\n \u2014A likely excuse.<\/p>\n \u2014I can think of no better.<\/p>\n \u2014Captains Courageous, The Princess of Cleves, Kuprin’s The Duel…<\/p>\n \u2014”Finally, after nine years, without having waited for the dissolution of his first marriage, he married her.”<\/p>\n \u2014My favorite part.<\/p>\n \u2014For me it’s what came after.<\/p>\n \u2014The beheading?<\/p>\n \u2014Of course. Oh god, I didn’t know it was me I loved!<\/p>\n \u2014Caught in reflexivity’s web how could you not?<\/p>\n \u2014It’s not as hard as it looks.<\/p>\n \u2014I’m grateful for that. I hope the reader is, too.<\/p>\n \u2014”O, then conclude, \/ Minds swayed by eyes are full of turpitude.”<\/p>\n \u2014I see what you mean.<\/p>\n \u2014And yet even here hawks stalk the sky.<\/p>\n \u2014By here you mean hell?<\/p>\n \u2014Or Boise or Lake Balbeck or wherever the hell hell is today. Hello today, gone tomorrow. And so on.<\/p>\n \u2014I went to your father’s house, then back to the store, then back to your father’s house, then back to the store, never imagining you would be at the lake. In one story this is where you drown the twins, in others it’s after dinner in the bathtub after you had what your mother said must have been a brainstorm or something. I vote for keeping the twins alive at least a little longer, longer, that is, than six weeks. What’s the point otherwise of having introduced them at all?<\/p>\n \u2014I think I see what you mean. We must delay disillusionment as long as possible, within reason.<\/p>\n \u2014Something like that.<\/p>\n \u2014Are we ourselves also slaves to such restrictions?<\/p>\n \u2014Pas du tout! Pas du tout!<\/p>\n \u2014Thank goodness for that.<\/p>\n \u2014Our restrictions are far worse.<\/p>\n \u2014Ah.<\/p>\n \u2014Can’t be helped.<\/p>\n \u2014I suppose not.<\/p>\n \u2014Who was it tore up my bed, slaughtered my donkey, set fire to my garderobe?<\/p>\n \u2014Me?<\/p>\n \u2014Or a damn good facsimile.<\/p>\n \u2014He who has climbed up the rungs of logic…<\/p>\n \u2014 …must throw away the ladder if he is to see the world aright. I remember. But who among the logical-positivists did? I mean, not even Wittgenstein…<\/p>\n \u2014There were others.<\/p>\n \u2014There always are.<\/p>\n \u2014”If he never comes to know himself. If he never comes to know himself.” O Cephisus, O Mother already deceived by water, why couldn’t you interpret these simple words for your son? I mean I was what, only nineteen, if that. I mean, like, you know, the deck was stacked, the fix in, the night already tricking itself for me to encounter the trick who looked just like me. I’ve read the same story hundreds of times, seen it in the movies, and still I lean over and am amazed again by the reflection in the water, the hair, the smile, the lips, the cheek. Whoever it is, I think, it can’t be me. But before that I came upon you in the forest and it was your language tricks that entrapped me.<\/p>\n \u2014They might have saved you.<\/p>\n \u2014Not in the version I remember.<\/p>\n \u2014I said might like hypothetical, you know, like possible if you hadn’t screwed up and fallen into your echo instead of mine.<\/p>\n \u2014And so with men.<\/p>\n \u2014As the saying goes.<\/p>\n \u2014”Ah, so you, too, crave pear bread from the Glarner region?”<\/p>\n \u2014I hear them, as well, the voices, I just can’t keep up with them as fast as you. Never could, even when we were kids. Couldn’t understand it either, I mean I was a girl and all, but still. We raced to the store and you beat me hands down every time. One day when we were younger than the law in some countries allows, you took me behind the barn. We’d spent most of that winter afternoon killing flies for a penny a fly. Can’t remember who groped whom first either, like that duck-rabbit pictogram to which you alluded earlier.<\/p>\n \u2014Was that you? I thought that was Abelard?<\/p>\n \u2014Abelard? That juicehead? How could you not know the difference? I mean one of us is from one sex and the other is from the other. I mean, get out of here. I mean, like, really?<\/p>\n \u2014Not a clue, or clew.<\/p>\n \u2014Time was passing. The morning was wearing away. That kind of clue?<\/p>\n \u2014No.<\/p>\n \u2014Whose honor is most at stake here?<\/p>\n \u2014We’re both thieves, so what does it matter?<\/p>\n \u2014After what you did you can say that? I mean it wasn’t I who walked down the hallways with the girls and boys in awe of my beauty. It wasn’t me born into such wealth. Nor did I ever shoot a deer, much less drive them into nets and stick spears in their throats, never felt I needed to.<\/p>\n \u2014If I remember rightly Pym’s demise resists explanation.<\/p>\n \u2014Go ahead, change the subject. Why not? I’d do the same if I didn’t suffer from echolalia.<\/p>\n \u2014Torches poured red light over the bushes announcing dinner. What an inopportune interruption, the king observed, then strolled back across the lawn like Nerval with his pet lobster.<\/p>\n \u2014Nerval? You have the nerve to bring up Nerval after it was you who introduced me to his “Pandora”? Does your ego know no bounds?<\/p>\n \u2014Apparently not.<\/p>\n \u2014”‘Here you are again, enchantress,’ I cried. ‘And the fatal box \u2014what have you done with it?'” Anthony Bonner’s translation.<\/p>\n \u2014I was standing in front of Tiepolo’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart when a child of no more than ten spat on my pants. I’ve yet to forget the sensation of wanting to throttle the brat. Of course I didn’t, but still…<\/p>\n \u2014Yes, you’d see that as your reward, but why am I not the one who stole the heavenly fire?<\/p>\n \u2014But you are. Why else would we still be here?<\/p>\n \u2014On this dais?<\/p>\n \u2014In these streets.<\/p>\n \u2014If not for etc.?<\/p>\n \u2014You can say that.<\/p>\n \u2014So I delayed Juno a few times so Jove could finish off some nymph in the mountain. I mean was that any reason to…<\/p>\n \u2014No use complaining. Things are what they are.<\/p>\n \u2014The Stygian waters. The white flower.<\/p>\n \u2014Am I staying over?<\/p>\n \u2014And I, your last chance, like an ass able only to bray back what she hears.<\/p>\n By\u00a0Tom Whalen All rights reserved. \u2014 …falling through space, planetary or interplanetary, it didn’t matter. \u2014I know, you told me. “Where are you going? Stay, don’t leave me.” All that. \u2014No, I mean something different, something I take as a reward for my gullibility. \u2014This voice? \u2014The same. In this dream I am walking down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":382,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-527","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/527\/revisions\/535"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Tom Whalen’s\u00a0<\/em>The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan\u00a0is forthcoming from Dalkey in 2011.<\/em><\/h4>\n
This story is included in issue\u00a0#43: Walls. Copyright \u00a9 2010 by\u00a0<\/em>Fiction International. Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in\u00a0<\/em>Fiction International. Please contact the\u00a0editor<\/a>\u00a0for reprinting information.<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"