I’ve seen so many universes wiped to star dust by religious wars. It always starts in the same way. The gods sitting at their heavy table, humming, drumming, fanning, fiddling, and in the quiet breaks, carefully pitting element against element in a teetering house of cards. The weak force balanced by the strong force, the dark running away from light as slow as it could, tying with a knot the turbid minds of stars to the icy toenails of runaway asteroids. All glued together by some variant of gravity, the warm fuzzy feeling which some people call love, others call cheese. At the end of the procedure, the universe was never naked. The gods made sure to wrap it up in shiny paper before they leave the room.
And every day, I would find it laying in the middle of the table, in between the hourglass and the metal ruler. I would always pretend it was a surprise: I would open it up, carefully untying the red knot, meticulously removing the wrapping paper, and there it was: light! So much light! Too much light! In the pyramid of cards, the queen or the king or the ace stood at the top, while the rest of the cards took turns, like emperor penguins, to warm up at the bottom.
Leftovers from the four gods’ music were criss-crossing the room walls, which, like mirrors, could never let go of echoes. A dissonant disagreement was enough for the well-crafted house of cards to fall in disarray. A bout of over-enthusiasm could end the small universe in bloody revolution. A fine balance it was, but it never lasted more than a few hours.
The light at the beginning of the universe was so strong that I couldn’t see anything. But then the light would grow dimmer, and I could take my glasses off, and see all the faces. It was not hard to fall in love with them. Imagine how hard it was to say good bye each day to a new universe.
I would come back to the gods’ room at the end of the day, wipe the table of dust, stack the fallen game cards and put them carefully in the middle, in between the ruler and the hourglass – two crystal balls with sand falling down in whirlpools. Back then it was not decided whether time flowed down or in a circle: nothing lasted more than a day, so all the days of the week were Wednesdays, and years didn’t make sense because the sun disappeared and reappeared at will.
The gods quartet has met for the first time in music school. The improvisation teacher picked them up from the crowd of students – perhaps, in Nimbralia, he was drawn by her ethereal dress, the exquisitely colored fabric was dancing intricate worlds in the movement of her hand; perhaps in Ythros he noticed the straight tie, so still that the point that holds the entire universe could easily have been at its tip; perhaps in Valythera he saw the sharp edges of makeup, mirroring the beautiful, unrelenting chin; perhaps in Xanruun he remembered long-lost dreams.
We’ll never know what was in his mind when he picked them. The teacher’s mood was changing as much as his mind, and his mind ran erratically like a particle of gas gasping for air. Not so were the four – stubborn, passionate, they were soon dead set to create what none of them could understand: a music that would never end. They rehearsed in the back room, the one with the mirror walls, the heavy table, and the long wooden chairs. Humming, drumming, fanning, fiddling, pitting element against element, laying card over card, and then wrapping it all in shiny paper. Back in the class, the teacher would listen to the first 5, 10 sometimes 20 measures, and then scream: NOT LIKE THIS! It was a game of trial and error, where no one knew what was the lesson. Except for maybe, the janitor.
They wrote the music of rocks growing old, the rhythm of still water, the harmonies of salt and pepper, the hymn of dry skin on dry skin. And I would come and wipe the dust of the heavy table. They wrote the feeling of paper, the what is like to be a bat?, the underside of the orange peel. And I would unwrap the universe out of its shiny paper. They wrote the first song and the last song. And the cards would start falling. And I would leave the broken universe in the middle of the table.
I have been for so long at this work that I knew what was possible and what was impossible. I knew names for all the things, including the ones I had to make up myself because they weren’t yet in the dictionary. And from that pain, I left a note on the table at the end of every day of work.
They were artists, and for aeons, they must have thought it was part of the table. it was Xanruun who first read it: “write a song that is never the same, running erratically like a particle of gas gasping for air”. It was silence, the walls of the room were ready and listening. Already with the first measure, the hourglass started stuttering, some sand columns were reaching down (wherever down was), others were evaporating in inverted waterfalls. At the heavy table, sitting on long wooden chairs, the 4 androgynous faces were squelching, belching, floating atop disconnected limbs, contorted like in a Picasso dream. Time was flipping, unsure whether seconds were stretching to reach Plank’s constant, or shrinking to fit in an eternity. And so our universe was born, the first one to last for more than a few hours. There are 4 gods, they say, and every other day, only one of them is true.
Halfspoken 