In the attic of this house-which is not of course a house-there is a box, and on it is written: Jimmy, and in it is everything (first person singular) from the first moment at which he could have said yes, up to the moment when he did, and he was gone.
And the new tenant stepped in through the door, then, and paused for a moment to marvel at how empty, and how tiny, and how beautiful it was, the world.
And then from behind the child spoke to me, but another voice spoke louder, and I turned toward it instead.
In the box in the attic there is a moment, in which he is given a gift by this child, and he says, "it's beautiful, and I love it," and that is the absolute truth (first person singular).
According to the label, which was written by her mother, it's a picture of their house. Without the label it would be difficult to tell.
The child does not have this moment in her box (which is a meadow). She was still too young. Not to remember. But she was too young to use. So.
The advent of reason must be a terrible thing.
Jimmy is eight, and has had a bad dream. He can't remember it.
This is the moment that lies at the very bottom of that box, entirely unspectacular, a child's room in darkness in a sleeping house in shadow and all around it now wrapped tight this new, miserable awareness: that I am and always will be this, and never any other thing.
And: this will, at some point, cease to be.
But beautiful fields lie just before me.
Well. Not precisely just. They certainly do lie.
And in fact they are as close to an infinite frictionless perfectly reflective plane as they are to the chaos of lilies and barley that grew in the huge bright place behind the child's eyes, when she said yes then, when it was needed, and the tenant entered, and, being distracted by events beyond this narrative, was not this time so taken with the small strange wonder of it all.
After he came to understand, sufficiently, and thereby possibly to be of future use, Jimmy's box is fairly full of little neatly packed prayers.
Oh. Here's a moment she is old enough to share, and in this one he hasn't gone-hasn't gone, and they are all happy, and he takes the child's hand and they close their eyes and they bow their heads and they pray.
Please can I see him please. Just see.
And in this moment I-do not quite-hate these beautiful fields, and all the beautiful blood upon them, and so I come to the child, as though called, and I stand on pink wall to wall carpeting, scuffed thinner and greyer where most feet most often fall.
The child is quite noticeably older now, and only momentarily terrified, and then she breathes again.
"You look exactly the same," she says.
"Yes. Why wouldn't I?"
Of course she was so very young when she said yes. But she remembers. Or it wouldn't have been right.
A white music box sits on a white bedside table, open, and the dancer has wound down.
"Right," she says. "Stupid." She stares. She looks away.
Inside her head was a cloudless blue dome of sky, unmeasurably and unreachably high, and beneath it lay that gentle meadow of green moments. And I was distracted, and I would very much have preferred to stay there. But Jimmy begged, and bled, and cried, and it hurt.
"I'm sorry," I say to the child. "It's reasonable that you would be taken aback."
"Is-does-" The child looks away and back. "Can he see me? I mean-I know-can you let him?"
"No."
"I just wish he could see that I'm still all right."
She's not, of course. There are clouds in that sky now, I imagine, and she knows (for I have told her) that even when she dies, she will never, ever fly beyond it: never hold his hand again, except in these perfect memories of prayer.
And something tall and thin and terrible is growing in the middle of her meadow, that she tries not to see.
And she wants comfort.
"You're beautiful, and I love you," I say, and it's the absolute truth.
She starts to cry. She grabs my hand. It's almost as awful as Heaven. She needs comfort.
"He will see you when it's over," I tell her. "I promise you, he will remember this."
And, comforted by that, she lets me go.
Back.
There.
And this experience, all of it-the child, so changed, her hands, her eyes, her hair; the carefully worded truth (the lie)-is put in a box in the basement, upon which is also written: Jimmy, and which is by now only one of a thousand thousand boxes, in a thousand boundless basements, in a metaphor grown entirely untenable:
-here are a really quite remarkable number of variations on the theme of "disintegrated bodily, but better now";
-here is a whorehouse;
-here is what the sun really looks like;
-here is a kiss which was stolen from a stolen corpse, or, no, not a corpse: some this which was not the demon still screamed behind its bright eyes as I kissed it; here is the texture of its hair. Stored away, waiting;
-here is war.
Some of these things will no doubt displease him, in that instant when he comes to know them, but see, here is the child, hair and hands, safe and well, of course, of course, and here is the huge truth behind that little secret of the sun, and here is the complicated moon, and all this blood all so red and an ocean of broken glass, so blue, as the walls of this house-which is not of course a house-fall down, and cruel reason is burnt away forever, by the (as so many things are, intolerable) brightness of that for which I fight.