Begaters Can't Be Choosers

M. As a child he had been told that beginnings are the false structures that we invent in the formless, unyielding expanse of the past. And he had said: "what does that even mean"—though of course he said it however a child might. And they had told him: "You were never really born. You are only some reconfigured motion, some reconfigured particulates". So he had resolved, from that young age, to discard his life as it happened—not to forget, of course (though he very much would want to), but rather to reattribute. To treat his memory as someone else.

Every morning, he woke at 6. Every morning he looked at the clock on his wall (a detail that made one unable to think of his room as anything but a schoolroom). He looked at the straight line of the hands, that hour like the back of a beetle.

When he met people, he began conversations as though they had already started. When he read his books he would start them in the middle. He would place the book flat on a table and find the first page where the book was balanced: the weight of pages on both sides holding it open. He measured everything. It is what people who hate beginnings and endings do.

The middle is the illusion that there is width—but there is only depth. There is only something getting further and further away from us. A bird lodged deep in the darkening sky.

....

X. One could say that her fingers touch life while the others simply operate the machinery at its ends. One could say she is "of the world" and therefore more beautiful, more relevant, more important than her sentinel sisters (if we are (as we are, as we claim) arbiters of meaning). After all, the string she has touched is all the time that has been lived. Her hands have passed over the exact totality of time experienced, which is thorough, which is beautiful. Though this assumes she is responsible for the strings of dogs and of frogs and, yes, even of ants. Which begs the questions of their material and shape—whether there is something ant-like to the string of ants, or whether, simply, each string has its own color, which begs the question of phylogenetic consistency and whether, say, a wolf and a dog have similar colored threads—tawny hues, I would suppose—, and if so what determines the mapping from genes onto bands of light, whether there is an elegance to the formula or simply convenience? But surely, you must be asking, with perhaps mounting anxiety, what of microbes, brief and shockingly frequent—to which I say let us ignore microbes, because things are already pretty inconceivable without considering Lachesis hunched with telescopic lenses over trillions of invisibly thin threads. Because we are already in over our heads imagining even ants and insects, the lives of smaller, briefer things, which must be so much more intricate and difficult to measure, requiring, ironically, more time. Which begs the question of whether there are more things dying right now thaen there were when there were fewer people, whether the job is getting harder. Which begs the question of whether they have interns, women in white who practice on the easier animals, or, if there is indeed more life and more death, whether there is a factory where the threads are teased apart and attended to by giant machines.

....

II. can go no further. For why should a litany not stop as it reaches its undeniable peak, cresting majestic, the last wingstroke of a bird driven by electromagnetic impulse crow-flight towards the sun. The unsurpassable peak of Booz of Rachab.

Booz, raised like rœmu(lu)s by the gentle ministrations of a wild animal mother—a fish-mother, to be precise. An adventive Tigris salmon who nudged his river basket to the river banks, away from the torrents, the deep water into which he had been destined to descend (not downriver but straight-down river, drown river). A mother who fed him the caviar of would-be step brothers and loved him like her own. Brothers who didn't die, but slipped between his infant teeth and hatched and swam inside him. Would advise him, for the rest of his life, their fish-wisdom.