The Remedy for Time

The Reading

The boy read much. By the time he was fifteen he had read enough to understand that he would never read enough. He read in the morning before the house was warm, with a blanket around his shoulders and a book against his knees. He read through dinner, silent at the table while the others spoke. He read past midnight under a small lamp with a shade yellowed from decades of such reading, not his reading but his grandfather's, who had left the lamp and the books and the habit and not much else.

The lamp was the first inheritance. The books were the second. His grandfather had died on a Thursday in autumn with a finger still holding his place in a volume of Tacitus, and the boy, who had been eight, had come into the study after the body was taken and had sat for an hour in the chair and had turned the page the old man had been turning when the page stopped. He understood, without being told, that the reading was now his. That the books were waiting. That a book an old man had been reading when he died was the kind of book that chose its next reader the way a coat, hung by a door through a long winter, chooses the next set of shoulders.

He began with Tacitus because Tacitus had been left on the table. He moved to Herodotus because Tacitus had mentioned him. He moved to Thucydides because Herodotus had been answered by him. And by the time he was twelve he had understood something about his situation that his grandfather, had he lived another year, might have tried to warn him about. Each book pointed to ten other books. Each thinker referenced three he had never heard of. Each philosophy was a response to a prior philosophy he would have to read first to understand what was being answered. The map of knowledge, which he had imagined as a country he could walk across in a long life, revealed itself to be an ocean. And one lifetime was a wooden rowboat.

His sister, who was seven, used to come into the room and sit on the rug and watch him read. She did not ask him to play. She had tried that when he was younger and she was younger, and it had worked, and she had learned that it no longer worked, and she had adapted the way younger sisters adapt, by lowering her expectations to the exact level he was able to meet. So she would sit on the rug with a book of her own, one she could not yet read, and she would turn its pages in rhythm with his, as if she were reading alongside him, as if the act of turning were itself the reading. Sometimes she would look up and say his name. He would not answer. She would go back to her book. She never seemed hurt by this. He came to understand, much later, that it was not because she was not hurt. It was because she had decided, a long time before he noticed, that being in the room with him was more important than being spoken to by him, and she was not going to trade the room for the speech, because she knew she could not have both.

He sought out the wise sages in his life, such as he had. The retired teacher on his block kept Plato on the back of the toilet. The priest at the church his family did not attend had once meant to be a philosopher and had compromised. A cousin who had taught himself calculus at thirteen had written nothing since, and worked now at a warehouse counting boxes, and read only on Sundays, and only the New Testament, and only the gospels, and only Luke. Each of them tried, in his own way, to save the boy.

The teacher told him to read the Greeks and only the Greeks. Everything since was a footnote to Plato, the teacher said, and if the boy understood Plato he would understand how every argument after Plato was an attempt to escape him, which meant the Greeks were not one option among many but the only door with a country behind it. Spend ten years there, said the teacher, and the rest will be easier than you think.

The priest disagreed. He said the boy had to start with Augustine and stay in Augustine until Augustine was finished with him, because Augustine was the first man in the West to write about what it was actually like to have an inner life, and everything since was a commentary on that interior, and without Augustine the boy would be reading about houses without understanding what rooms were for.

The cousin said the boy should forget all of it. Mathematics, he said. Only mathematics. Everyone else lies and can be caught lying, but mathematics, when it is true, is true, and when it is false, is false, and there is no third option. He said this in the warehouse on a break, with a stub of a pencil and a napkin, and he showed the boy a proof he had worked out on his own. The proof was elegant. The boy did not fully follow it. The cousin handed him the napkin and told him to keep it, and he did, for a long time, folded inside a book whose title he would later forget.

The boy listened. He thanked each of them. And then, because he did not want to choose — because choosing felt like a small death, a quiet confession that one part of the world mattered more than another — he read everything. He read the Greeks and Augustine and the moderns and the mathematicians. He read theology and biology and poetry and letters. He read in the morning and through lunch and past midnight. He read until his eyes hurt and then he closed his eyes and thought about what he had read and then opened them and read more.

For a while this felt like progress. Then it began to feel like something else. The more he learned, the more he knew he didn't know. Each new book did not fill the space it was supposed to fill. It enlarged the space. Reading was not an accumulation. It was an excavation that kept revealing how deep the pit went. By eighteen he could not sleep for thinking of it. By twenty he was thin from forgetting to eat, and his hands trembled when he turned the pages, not from hunger but from panic, the steady low panic of a man running from something that was also his home.

So he sought a remedy for the problem of time.

His sister was fifteen now. She came into the room one night in late autumn. The lamp was yellow. The book he had been reading was on the floor, and he was sitting with his back against the radiator staring at nothing, which was what had replaced reading in the weeks before he left.

She sat on the rug. She did not bring a book this time. She sat with her arms around her knees and looked at him.

"You're going to go," she said.

He did not answer.

"I know," she said. "You don't have to."

He had told no one. He had been making lists for weeks in the backs of his notebooks: the regions, the stories, the plants each story named, the languages he would need, the provisions. He had thought he had kept it hidden. He looked at his sister's face and understood that he had kept it hidden the way a man keeps his hunger hidden by not eating, which is to say, not at all.

"I won't be gone long," he said.

She did not react. It was a lie and they both knew it. What he had told himself was that he would be gone a year, two years, maybe three. What he had not let himself say even in the privacy of his own mind was that he did not know how long, and that the not-knowing was the point.

"I'm asking you not to go," she said.

He did not answer. He wanted to say that she did not understand. He wanted to say that what he was going to find was worth the leaving. He wanted to say that he was going for her, too, that when he came back he would be the kind of brother she had always deserved. He wanted to say many things, all of which were different versions of the same small betrayal, and he could not bring himself to say any of them, because he knew, standing in the doorway of his own departure, that he was not going for her. He was going because the going was what he had decided, and she was one of the things the going would cost, and he had already accepted the cost without having counted it.

She sat there for a long time. Then she got up and left the room. She did not slam the door. She did not say anything more. She closed the door quietly behind her, the way a person closes the door on a room they are never going to enter again.

He left three days later, before dawn, with the lamp packed at the top of his bag. He did not wake her to say goodbye. He told himself it was kinder. He would have a very long time, later, to learn it was not.

He recalled the stories of old, which told of a plant deep beneath the surface of the earth that granted life everlasting. The stories varied. In some, the plant was a flower that bloomed once in a hundred years at the bottom of a sea. In some, it was a fig tree whose roots reached the underworld. In one, a serpent guarded it, and was killed, and the plant was eaten, and the eater lived for a thousand years and still died in the end, which the boy read as a flaw in that version of the story rather than as its meaning.

He set himself to the quest of finding it.

He traveled through plains where the grass reached his shoulders and moved in wind he could not feel. Through tundras where his breath froze in his beard and snapped off in flakes. Through deserts where he drank his own sweat from a rag. Through mountains where the air thinned until he slept and woke and could not tell which was which. Through forests where he heard animals he never saw, and jungles where the trees pressed together so closely that noon and midnight were separated only by a shade of green.

In the third year he met an old man at a crossroads in a country whose name he had already forgotten. The old man was sitting on a stone with a cloth across his knees. He had no belongings and no destination. He asked the boy where he was going. The boy told him. The old man listened, and when the boy had finished, the old man said nothing for a very long time. Then he said: "I went looking for it once."

The boy waited.

"Did you find it?"

The old man smiled in a way that was not a smile. "I did not. And the not-finding is the only reason I am sitting here now." The boy did not understand. The old man saw that he did not understand, and did not try to make him. He said only: "If you find what you are looking for, you will wish you had been sitting on a stone instead. I tell you this because no one told me, and I would have gone anyway, and you will too. But at least you will remember, somewhere under the going, that you were told."

The boy thanked him. He walked on. He thought about what the old man had said for a day, and then for an hour, and then not at all.

He was young when he began. He was no longer young when he ended. Somewhere along the way he lost track of how long he had been walking, and then he lost track of where he had started, and then he lost track of which direction home had been, and by that time home was an idea rather than a place, and the idea was receding.

After years of searching he fell through a tunnel.

He did not see it coming. One moment the earth held him. The next it did not. He rolled down the tunnel for what seemed to be forever, and the rolling scarred every surface of his skin, and broke many of his bones, and at some point during the falling he understood that the falling was the answer to his prayer, that he had not found the plant by searching but by ceasing to search, and this understanding arrived without comfort. He thought, for the first time in many years, of his sister's face. He thought of the door closing. Then he thought of nothing, because the rolling would not let him.

At last he reached the bottom, nearly dead.

There he found a plant with fruit that called to him. It was not a grand plant. It was small, and grey, and its single fruit hung close to the stem like a drop of water that had not yet decided to fall. He could smell it. The smell was not sweet. It was the smell of a thing that had waited a very long time to be eaten. With his last ounce of energy he ripped the fruit from its place in the ground and gulped it down. He felt a pang run through the entirety of his body, through every fiber and every cell, and the pang was not pleasure and it was not pain, it was the particular sensation of something rearranging itself without his permission, and before he could understand what had happened to him he fell unconscious.

The Hollow

When the boy awoke he could hardly realize it, for there was no light. It was complete and utter darkness. He could almost see more with his eyelids closed. He couldn't quite remember how he had come to be where he was. He remembered falling. He remembered the rolling. He remembered the fruit. But the pain was no longer in him, and the absence of the pain made the memory feel like something that had happened to a different person.

Walking around, he measured out the space with his hands. It was about fifty square feet. The floor was smooth. The walls curved upward and met somewhere over his head. It was a hollow in the rock, a bubble inside the earth the size of a small room, and whatever had made it had made it long before there were hands to touch it.

He tried climbing to reach the top, to find the opening through which he had fallen, but the walls were too steep, and offered no bearing for his feet or his hands. He climbed, and slid, and climbed, and slid, and eventually he sat at the bottom of the hollow and breathed, and the breathing was the only sound.

He spent what must have been the first year trying to escape. He scraped at the walls with his fingernails. He pounded with his fists. He jumped and clawed and tried to brace himself across the curve of the hollow to lift himself up the way a child lifts himself up a doorframe. He called out. No one answered. He listened. There was nothing to hear. He invented a language of knocks, in case there was someone on the other side of the wall with a patience equal to his own. There was no one. The walls did not respond. The darkness did not respond. The only response was the water, which came every few days from the top of the hollow, and fell on his face when he sat directly beneath it, and stopped falling before he had drunk enough.

He was hungry, but there was no food. He was thirsty, but there was no water except the small fall. He waited. The hunger did not become pain, which surprised him until he understood why. He was immortal now. Hunger was information only. It was a clock his body was keeping for no one.

Slowly the days passed, though he didn't notice. As he grew weak and weary he could not scrape or pound or climb, and so he lay with his back against the wall, and made marks with his nails for every day he thought had passed. He made them neatly at first, in rows of five with a diagonal through each, then rows of rows, then rows of rows of rows, until there was no system left that could hold the count.

He decided, on a day he no longer tried to track, that he would die. He had heard, in the literature of his reading, of men who had died by refusing. He lay on his back and willed himself to stop. He thought of the sister, because he thought her memory might help. He thought of his grandfather in the chair with his finger in the page. He thought of every ending he had ever read, and tried to walk into one of them and close the door behind him. Nothing happened. His body continued its slow empty work. His heart continued its mechanical count.

He tried to bash his head against the wall. The wall was not hard enough to break what he was trying to break.

He tried to hold his breath. He held it past what a lung is supposed to hold. He passed out. He woke. He was still in the hollow. His breath had started again on its own, without his permission, the way everything in him now started on its own, without his permission, because the fruit had rewritten the contract.

He understood, slowly, that he had been given the thing he asked for, and that the gift was the cage.

The days turned to months, and the months to years. He realized that he was now immortal. He had known it before in a theoretical way. Now he knew it the way a man knows his own hands. But it made no difference to him in the hollow. He wanted to escape, and could not. He marked so many days on the walls that he couldn't tell them apart from one another. His nails wore down. And then, slowly, over years he could not count, his fingers.

He wept when the first finger went. He had been pressing it against the wall to make the mark, and the finger had not marked, and he had looked at it in the dark he could not see in, and had understood with his touch what his eyes could not show him: that the finger ended somewhere before it should have. He did not feel pain. The fruit had taken pain too. What he felt was a small specific grief that did not belong in the catalog of griefs he had brought with him from the world. He wept without sound, because the weeping was a habit he had brought with him from a world with listeners, and there were no listeners here, and the silent weeping lasted longer than any grief he had ever known. He wept for the finger, and for the grandfather, and for the sister, and for every book he had not finished, and for the old man at the crossroads who had warned him. He wept without tears, because his body no longer made them; the fruit had taken that too, along with the hunger and the bleeding and the capacity to die. He wept dry. He wept for what must have been a decade. And then the weeping stopped, because he had used it up, and nothing new came to replace it.

His thoughts kept him company.

This was the first gift of his immortality, though he would not have called it a gift for a very long time. In his lonely existence he remembered, eventually, why he had sought immortality in the first place: to give himself the time to learn all there was. The memory arrived on a day he could not have identified, while he was lying on his back with nothing to do and nothing to expect, and the old hunger returned to him with the clarity of something he had forgotten he owned.

He had no books. He had no teachers. He had no paper and no ink and no walls that had not already been marked past legibility. But he had the mind. He had everything he had ever read, and everything he had ever thought, and everything that had ever been said to him. And he had the time — the terrible time, the limitless time — to arrange and rearrange these things into new shapes. So he decided that he would discover everything for himself, starting from what he already knew.

He began with geometry, because geometry needed nothing but attention. He reconstructed the proofs he remembered and derived the ones he did not. He proved, in the dark, over what might have been a hundred years, the propositions of the Greeks, and then the theorems of the moderns, and then theorems no one had proved yet, because he had the time for it, and there was nothing else to do.

He named his first original theorem after his sister. He did this without thinking about it, the way a man names a child after a parent because the name is what was available. The theorem concerned the behavior of a particular curve under a particular transformation, and it was, as far as he could tell across his first century of verification, true. Naming it gave him a small warmth he had not expected. He began naming every theorem after someone. His grandfather. The teacher with Plato on the back of the toilet. The priest. The cousin. The old man at the crossroads. He named theorems after people whose names he was not sure he was remembering correctly. He named one after a girl from his school whose face he could still see but whose name would not come, and the theorem took her face as its name, and he proved it and was pleased.

He moved to philosophy. He wrote, in his head, a dialogue on the nature of knowledge, with interlocutors he invented and grew to love. He wrote a treatise on justice, and a second treatise refuting the first, and a third synthesizing them. The second treatise, he decided after much consideration, was the one closest to true. He tried to hold onto this. He forgot it within a century and had to re-derive it. He derived it. It was still closest to true. He forgot it again.

He wrote novels. He wrote them sentence by sentence, revising each sentence for as long as a sentence seemed to want, and some sentences took him a decade. His proudest was a novel set in a house by the sea, about a brother and a sister who lived there together into old age, and never married, and wrote to no one, and died within a week of each other. The novel was seventy chapters long. He knew it by heart. He revised it, in full, once every hundred years. Each revision was better than the last. By the time he had revised it fifty times it was, he believed, the finest novel ever written in any language, and he was the only person who would ever read it, and this fact, which should have destroyed it, did not. The novel was good on its own terms. The novel did not care who read it. He did not know what to do with this. He did not know whether the novel was a triumph or a curse.

He held the keys to the universe but could not escape the confines of the hollow.

This is the sentence he would have written, had there been anything to write it on, in the centuries during which the knowledge was his and the uses of the knowledge were not. He understood, eventually, that a theorem proved alone is not fully a theorem. That a novel written in a dark room for no reader is not fully a novel. That the mind, which he had always treated as a sufficient country, was in fact an instrument built to resonate with other minds, and that an instrument played alone, for no listener, in an empty room, is only partially an instrument. He understood this. The understanding did not release him. It did not reach the walls. The walls continued their patient work of being walls.

On a night that was not a night, he heard a voice.

He had been lying on his back, thinking through the proof of a theorem he had proved a thousand times before, as a way of not thinking through anything else. The voice came from above him. It was small, and clear, and said his name.

His name, which he had forgotten, returned to him at the sound of it. He lay very still, in case stillness was the condition of the voice continuing.

"You can stop," the voice said.

He did not answer. He had not used his mouth in so long that he was not certain the mouth still worked.

"You have proved enough things. You have written enough novels. No one will read them. You can stop."

He tried to speak. Something in his throat worked. A sound came out that was not a word.

"It was not a punishment," the voice said. "The plant did what you asked it to do. You asked for time. You were given time. The rest is yours."

"Who are you?" he managed. It took him many attempts.

The voice did not answer for a long time. Then it said: "I am the one who asked you not to go."

He wept. The weeping was dry, as it had been for centuries, but it was weeping. He wept for a span he could not count. He wept because he had believed, for as long as the belief could stand, that he had imagined her. That she had been a figure in one of the novels he had written and revised. That the brother and sister in the house by the sea were the originals, and the sister in the world above had been a draft of them. It had been easier to believe. To believe the opposite was to remember that he had closed a door on a real face.

"I am sorry," he said.

"I know," she said.

"Tell me you are real."

"I cannot tell you that. I am a voice in a dark room. You have been alone for a very long time. You have the strongest reasons in the world to invent me."

"Then I have invented you."

"Maybe. Does it matter?"

He thought about this. It took him, he thought, a very long time, though by this point his measurements of time were the measurements of a man who had stopped believing in minutes. When he had thought about it enough, he said: "No. It does not matter."

"Good," she said.

"Are you going to stay?"

"I cannot stay. I am not the kind of thing that stays."

"What are you, then?"

"I am what visits you. Once. I am what gets through, for a moment, because you have forgotten something important and the forgetting has thinned the wall."

"What have I forgotten?"

The voice was silent for a long time. Then she said, so quietly he almost missed it: "You have forgotten that you are allowed to stop."

He thought about this for a long time too. He was still thinking about it when he realized she was no longer there. He called her name. He had forgotten it again. He called her old name, the one from the house with the radiator and the lamp, and she did not answer, and he understood that she had been gone for a while, and that he had not noticed.

He decided he would stop. He decided this firmly. He lay down and did not think. He did not prove. He did not write. He did not revise. He lay in the dark and tried to be a man who had stopped.

He lasted, by his own reckoning, what might have been a year.

Then he began again. He could not help it. The theorems came up on their own. The novels demanded their next revisions. The mind, which had been built for this, did this. He could no more stop the work than he could stop the breath that had refused to be held.

He understood, in the beginning of his second attempt to be a man, that the voice had been right about the mattering. It did not matter whether she was real. It mattered that she was gone. It mattered that she had come at all. He kept working. He worked for centuries. He worked until he had forgotten that she had visited. He worked until he had forgotten that he had once decided to stop.

And slowly, over centuries he did not keep track of because there was nothing left to track, he began to forget.

He forgot the names of the sages who had advised him. The teacher with Plato on the back of the toilet. The priest who had compromised. The cousin with the napkin and the elegant proof. He forgot them in that order, teacher first because the teacher's face was the first to dim, and cousin last because the cousin's proof was something he had continued to use, and the use had preserved the cousin a little longer. Then the use wore out, and the cousin went.

He forgot the face of his grandfather, whose lamp had waited for his reading. He could remember, for a while, the finger in the page. Then the finger went too.

He forgot the color of the grass in the plains, and the smell of the jungle at night, and the taste of the fruit, and the weight of his bag on his shoulders in the first days of the quest. He forgot the old man at the crossroads who had warned him. He forgot the warning. He forgot the regret he had felt when he remembered the warning. He forgot his own name, which had been a small thing anyway, a collection of sounds someone had chosen for him a long time ago.

He remembered the theorems. He remembered the novels. He remembered, without remembering why, that he had to escape.

The last thing he forgot was his sister's voice saying his name from the rug in the room with the radiator. He did not know, when it went, that it had been the last. He only knew that something had been with him in the hollow, something like a shape at the edge of his thinking, and that at some point he looked for it and it was not there, and he tried to remember what it had been, and he could not. He felt, briefly, a grief he could not locate. Then the grief went too, because there was nothing it could fasten to.

The hollow continued. The theorems continued. The novels revised themselves on a schedule he no longer set consciously. The water fell from above and he drank it when it fell. This was the condition of his being.

The changes in the hollow happened so gradually that he did not notice.

Decades after he first fell, a thin coating of water formed on the bottom. It was not enough to wet his ankles when he sat. It was barely a film. He did not notice it beginning. Centuries later there were a few inches of water, and this he noticed, and he decided it was the ordinary consequence of the rain, and he made no more of it. But to him, who had now been in the hollow so long that his own beginning was a rumor, the water had always been there. He could not remember a time when there had been no water. The water, like the darkness, and like the silence, and like the mind at work, was simply one of the things the hollow contained.

The water rose so slowly that it rose without argument. A millimeter in a year. A centimeter in a decade. An inch in a century. It was the patient work of the sky, year upon year, dripping through the one fissure it had found, laying down its small tax on the floor. His attention had long since moved from the floor to the interior of his own head, where whole libraries were being built and torn down and rebuilt, and he did not notice the floor disappearing, because the floor had never been the point.

The water rose so high that he was swimming in it. He swam without remembering when he had begun to swim. The swimming became, for a time that was long even by the standards of his imprisonment, the condition of his being. Then the water reached the top of the hollow, and began to carry him up the tunnel through which he had originally fallen. He did not fight it. He did not swim with it. He was a thing the water was moving now, in the slow and indifferent way that water moves things.

It occurred to him, somewhere in the long ascent, that he had spent many thousands of years discovering the structure of the universe, and the discovery that was actually carrying him out was a discovery he had not made. The water was not his theorem. The water was what had happened while he was busy with theorems. This thought disturbed him, and then passed, the way most thoughts had come to pass in him over the centuries, like weather.

The Empty World

One fine morning he reached the top.

He did not know it was morning, but he saw light for the first time in a span of time that had no name, and his eyes, which had not seen light in all that span and which should not have worked at all, worked. He was lifted onto rock, and the water drained away around him and down into holes he could not see, as if the world had been waiting for him and was now withdrawing its welcome.

He lay on the rock for a long time before he understood that he had arrived.

The sun was on his face. It was warm. He had forgotten warm. He lay with his eyes closed and felt the warmth, and it was unbearable the way food is unbearable to a man who has not eaten in a month, not because the food is too much but because the body has forgotten what to do with it. He wept without tears. He laughed without sound. The laughter and the weeping were the same movement, and they lasted for what must have been a day or a week or a year.

When he opened his eyes he looked around, but was too weak to move.

He expected to see nothing familiar. He was old enough that he no longer expected anything, and when he expected nothing, the world obliged. Just rocks, the sunlight, clouds and the wind. No trees. No nature. Certainly no humans. No birds. No insects. No grass. No flowers. No roads. No ruins. No broken walls that might once have been buildings. No shards of pottery. No cairns. No graves. There was rock, and there was sunlight, and there was the wind moving over the rock, and there was sky, and the sky was empty.

He understood, slowly, what this meant.

It meant that he had outlived every civilization whose knowledge he had reconstructed. It meant that the theorems he had proved had no one left to present them to. It meant that the novels he had written in his head had no readers — not because the readers had refused them, but because the readers had died, every single one of them, and the readers' children had died, and their children, and their species, and the species that might have come after, and there was no one left on the surface of the earth to hand anything to.

He had escaped the hollow only to be placed into another.

Then, with all the force and fury of a thousand lifetimes, he hurled verbal boulders through the cannons of his mouth at the confines of reality. He cursed the plant. He cursed the sages. He cursed the hunger. He cursed the fall and the hollow and the water that had taken its patient millennia to carry him up to this empty rock. He cursed every book he had ever opened and every question he had ever asked and every minute he had spent learning instead of living. He cursed his own cleverness and his own hunger and the vow he had made at twenty that he would not die ignorant. He cursed the old man at the crossroads, and then he unshaped the curse, because the old man had warned him, and the curse was for the wrong thing. He cursed himself. He cursed himself for centuries. He cursed until the cursing wore the shape of his curses smooth, the way water wears stone smooth.

His voice, which had not been used in longer than he could remember, was the only sound in the world, and the world did not answer him.

When he was done cursing he was still there.

He had believed, during the curse, that the curse would end him. That reality, properly accused, would break, and he would break with it, and there would be some release. There was no release. The rock continued. The wind continued. The empty sky continued.

So he began to speak.

He spoke the first theorem he had ever proved in the hollow. He said it aloud, in the order of its steps, with the reasons at each step. It took him a day. The wind carried the words away. There was no one to receive them.

He spoke the second theorem. It took him three days.

He spoke, over the course of what might have been a year, every theorem he had ever proved. Then he spoke the philosophy. The dialogue on the nature of knowledge, with its invented interlocutors. The treatise on justice and its refutation and its synthesis. He performed the whole dialogue, playing each voice, pausing where the text demanded, and nothing listened.

He spoke the novels. He told the novel about the brother and sister in the house by the sea. He told it in full, seventy chapters, sentence by sentence as he had revised them, and when he reached the last chapter — the one where the sister dies in the night and the brother finds her in the morning — he stopped, because he had never been able to stop crying at that chapter, and he still could not, and the crying took him out for a long time.

When he came back he continued. He told every novel he had written in the dark. He told the dialogues. He told the epics. He composed the music aloud, humming what he had composed in the silence, and the humming was the sound of a man whose throat had forgotten tone but was trying. The sound was terrible. He hummed anyway. He hummed for centuries.

He came to understand, slowly, that the speaking was not for the wind. The wind was not a listener and he had stopped pretending it was. The speaking was not for him either. He had already held all of this inside his head for as long as he could remember; speaking added nothing. He did not know what the speaking was for. He only knew that he could not stop.

After a very long time he came to believe that the speaking was the work itself. That the theorem, to be fully a theorem, needed to be spoken, even to nothing. That the novel needed to be told, even to nothing. That the knowledge he had gathered, alone, in the dark, was a half-thing, and that the speaking was the second half, and that the second half was now being paid, very late, to a room that had emptied while he was paying the first.

He did not know whether this belief was true or whether he had invented it because he needed a reason to keep speaking. By the time he had entertained the question for a thousand years he had stopped caring which it was.

He spoke until there was nothing left to speak.

When there was nothing left to speak, he stopped.

He was still there. The sun rose and set. The wind moved. The rock held him. He lay on his back and looked at the sky, which had never had a cloud in it since he had emerged, or perhaps had always had clouds, or perhaps both, since the two were indistinguishable now.

He began to forget again.

He forgot the novels he had just told. They left him in the order he had told them. First the brother and sister in the house by the sea, because it was the first one he had spoken, and the speaking had worn it down. Then the next. Then the next. The theorems left him in reverse order of their speaking. He forgot the dialogues. He forgot the philosophy. He forgot the music.

He forgot the hollow. He forgot the voice that had visited him in the hollow. He forgot the fall. He forgot the crossroads. He forgot his bag and the lamp at the top of his bag. He forgot the grandfather with his finger in the page. He forgot his sister. He had forgotten her before, in the hollow, and remembered her briefly when the voice came, and forgotten her again after. Now he forgot her in a different way. Not as a fact he had stopped being able to access, but as a place his mind stopped going, until eventually the place itself did not exist and there was no absence to feel.

He forgot that he was a person.

He lay on the rock and did not think. He was not unthinking the way a man who has stopped thinking is unthinking. He was unthinking the way a rock is unthinking, because there was nothing in him that thought, and the absence was so complete that it did not know itself as an absence.

Centuries passed. Millennia. The rock weathered. He did not weather. He was the only thing that did not weather. He lay among rocks that eroded around him, and he remained. The rocks became sand. The sand blew away. New rocks rose from the earth beneath. He remained. He became, effectively, a feature of the landscape that no one was observing. A thing the earth could not process. The one remainder from a vanished world.

The Second Fruit

On a morning that did not belong to any season, because there were no seasons left, he opened his eyes.

He had not known his eyes had been closed. He did not know why they had opened. He lay where he had been lying for longer than he could have begun to count, and he looked, for the first time in an age, at the world next to him.

Something had grown beside him.

It was a plant. It was small, and grey, and a single fruit hung from its stem, close to the stem, like a drop of water that had not yet decided to fall. It had the smell of a thing that had waited a very long time to be eaten.

He looked at it. He did not know what it was. He did not remember the first plant. He did not remember any plant. But he looked at it, and something in him, older than his mind and older than the forgetting, recognized it. Not as itself. As a kind. As the kind of thing that is offered.

He understood, without language for the understanding, that the plant was a question.

He did not know which answer was which. If he ate it, it might end him. The first plant had made him immortal; perhaps the second made an immortal die. Perhaps it was the reverse of the first. Perhaps it was the cure for what the first had done. Or, if he ate it, it might begin him again. A new quest. A new fall. A new hollow, with new water, patient and slow, rising through centuries he would not notice. A new surface, emptier than this one. An infinite regress of hollows. Or, if he ate it, nothing at all would happen, and he would simply have eaten a fruit on a dead world and been still lying there afterward, only slightly less hungry.

He looked at the plant for a very long time.

He did not reach for it.

The sun moved across the sky. The fruit hung close to the stem. The wind moved, and the plant did not move with it, because the plant was small and low and held itself against the rock.

And then, without warning, without source, without memory behind it to explain it, a small hand came to rest on a rug beside him in the dark.

He did not know whose hand.

A voice said his name, a name he no longer had.

He did not know whose voice.

A door closed quietly somewhere he could not see, and the closing moved through his chest the way the slow water had moved through the hollow for ten thousand years before he noticed.

He did not know which door. He did not know which name. He did not know who had gone and who had stayed and who had waited on the other side of the wood for him to come back.

He only knew that something in him was still there that could be reached.

When his hand, which had no fingers, moved toward the fruit, it moved without his deciding.

And the weeping was not dry.