walking on a certain day, intent on winning the heart of a certain girl, you might invite her to walk with you along the river road. She might consent, and climbing out her tiny window, she would leap down into your arms, and together you would go. But never would you imagine that there by the river, a cast of actors is awaiting the rise of an enormous curtain which no one can see, and that they are waiting for none other than the two last actors, who straggle, many hours away, along some country road. By chance, they resemble you and your love exactly. By chance, you arrive just as the curtain rises.
The Palace
A palace so large that the kingdom itself is but a small part of it. Servants sent to some far corridor are given burials, for we know well that they will not return. Communication is a matter of whispers, which travel like cursed fact. And our hearts are maintained through windows, where courtesans’ soft skin and long lashes are arguments that uphold this life. Everyone has their orders, which must be carried out. These are kept in tiny cylinders hung like pendants from our servile necks. Since we cannot read, we must ask others to read these instructions for us. And often these interpretations change. All in all it is a good way to be, or so I have heard, as beyond the walls of this enthronement there are great doubts like standing trees, and each outlives a man, and each is named for some task we will never be allowed.
A Bird’s Judgment
You have been betrayed. Yes, it’s true. It’s early September in the city where you live and someone has spoken to the authorities. Even now, the chief of police is sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk in the vast ministry, waiting for you to be brought in. All across the city, squads of officers are preparing themselves. Likenesses of your face are being handed out.
It’s true you meant no harm. Also true: there’s no way anyone could know. And yet the real truth remains: someone has given you up. Soon there will be boot-steps on the stairs, a loud knocking at the door. Soon you will be spoken to repeatedly in a loud voice, tied and carried under a policeman’s arm like a parcel to a waiting car.
If only you could make it into the next apartment and beg your life of the widow who lives there, she would hide you, and then how happily and well you would live. But even to stir from your chair is impossible. For the book of your acquaintance has closed on this hundred-hundredth day, and limp clouds are straggling like children across the windowpane. There is no hope. You have been betrayed and the wild exodus of fate from the fated is never-begun and alwaysfinished. The sounds from the street are maddeningly normal. Also, it’s hotter than you like, and you are wearing far too many clothes. As if a bird told a bird a bird’s judgment, the day itself has announced its coming in yellow colors and vague shapes just beyond the edge of sight.
A Visitor
A green sea, huge and fugitive, sits at anchor beneath the roof of your small home. Word of this is general in the village, and neighbors pass by again and again hoping for a glimpse. But your bemusement is like a wellworn knife and you caress it slowly, back turned, as a tiny smile plays against the broom closet, pretending it is a broom, though in truth you know, it is no such weighty thing.
Banditry
In among the foregone on the narrow road that circles and recircles the city of your tongue, the highwayman has gone walking with his next victim. He is handsome and dashing; she is young and petulant. They stop beneath a tree and her long hair falls to the ground. She says, “I am in love with a man, but I fear he is a bandit.” To this the man says nothing, but stands, quietly stroking her hair. A cold breeze rises and he holds her close. Soon in the distance he will see evening riding and know that it is time.
A Lark
By the harbor, a great work has begun. We of this town already think of ourselves differently. Travelers have started to arrive. They say they left their homeland years ago at the news, and have been on the roads for generations. When it is finished this statue will be a portrait-signature upon an uncertain earth, a letter we few shall leave for the crowded centuries that wait inside the hills. And to think, I know the headman, who used to be the town’s mason. I spoke to him, saw him pass in the street just days ago. He was head-to-toe in flat working gray, and could be missed but for the fiendish cast of his eyes. And who but a mad man could make such a statue? A statue of the town in which we live, exact and equal to an inch, yet formed from the hardest stone and rising up out of the water. Already it looms above the town on great marble stilts. I saw myself walking there, or standing as it were, as I once walked, beside a pond with lilies. He saw me, he must have seen me walking there, where I often walked, by that pond where my daughter was drowned. And yes, in the waters of the marble pond, I see he has etched some impression of a face looking up from the depths. He has peopled the houses with scenes from our lives. He has stretched the avenues, and laid them with old parades and angry, roused evenings. In the center square, on which work has just begun, a man is being lynched. But best of all, at the harbor mouth of the statue town, which will come last, he tells me will be built a marble sea in which we all shall be buried, one by one, as years and hours take our hands.
The Bank of Perth
It is rumored to exist in every city, in every human settlement. One has heard, or one knows of someone who has heard, in the crowded street, in the drawingrooms of wealth, in the merchants’ salons and the workmen’s meeting houses, the timbre of an agent of the Bank, facilitating advance, supplying the necessary collateral, acceding to wishes, and accounting, irrefutably, for all the gaps in our human exchanges. Where do such agents come from? How may they be known? They seem never to be seen, but would be recognized at once. Often they can be made out, barely, across a room, in closeted discussion with some luminary. One presses closer, and the bank agent is gone. Furthermore, no one saw him go.
Not to the natural world, nor to celestial orders are such intentions bound. The Bank of Perth cannot be countermanded, is greater than the sum of all countries, for though every country has fallen and will fall, the Bank cannot fall, nor fail. Its location need not be secret, and yet it cannot be known. All currency is dispensed in its favor, and greed is the tool of its want.
Several times in our long history, a mystic or true philosopher has unearthed the deepest secrets of the Bank of Perth. But even to do this is to go beyond use, for those who have seen such sights may never speak of them, may never tell of them, may never treat of them. Save, of course, in parable.
The Suitors
A man was out taking the summer air when along the lane he saw a crowd approaching. Perhaps not a crowd. They were arrayed in a line, and each suitor was grander in dress and manner than the one who came before. The line stretched endlessly, over hill and dale. On the farthest hilltop, the man could see the crowns of kings and the scepters of emperors glinting in the sunlight. Where are they going? he inquired of the first, but his question went unanswered. Where are you going? he asked again. The man did not join the line, but went humbly beneath his roof and began to prepare for himself the smallest of meals, which he would eat without haste by the window, which he would eat with a tiny wooden spoon, making no noise that one might hear, were one to pass that way.
The Seamstress of Bao Suk
There was once in Bao Suk, at the end of a certain unmentionable dynasty, a seamstress living and working in a shop near the gates of the city. Her daughters were lovely and useless, but would serve to wear the clothing that she made, that it might be seen and sold to any who passed by. Her fame had grown over the course of a difficult life, difficult not by any curse of fortune, for indeed, her star had always risen, but difficult because her wishes were not