Chapter 9
and this is the beginning: when the world ends
in a slowing and cooling: what color the skies
turn as the sky stops turning: was it a dream
or was it a poem Grin is writing in the end?
Grin and three companions travel to the unlit city by train. The sky turns from rose-red dawn to ice-white noon to ember-and-blue twilight before the four arrive at their destination and a painted sign—”Welcome to the Unlit City: Population, Unwrit.”
Grin steps off the train into a cool dry evening. He looks towards the dying mother-of-pearl light on the horizon. Grin remembers a woman. Her name was Li. Her skin was the color of the dying light. Skin is a shield. The largest human organ is skin. The largest human organ is a shield. The sky reminds Grin of Li’s skin. Li’s skin reminds him of exile.
Grin needs—no, wants—no, needs—to find Li, to tell her, “You loved me once. Let me love you again.” But what is once? What is again? Grin knows less than he knows more but if he lets go he can see what lies behind the concepts he cannot define but which inscribe all happenings in a whenwhatwasiteverwilliteverb—
“Where are we?” a male voice from behind Grin says.
Grin, upset, clenches his teeth before resetting his countenance before turning to speak to his companion. “We’re in the Unlit City.”
“But where is the Unlit City?” the man asks. The man—how vague, how indefinite he is—wears a calfskin hat, a cream-colored shirt, and a pair of tan slacks. His face is between young and old but certainly anything but middle-aged. His eyes, though behind black sunglasses, glow neon green. “Stop describing me. Where is the Unlit City?’ the man insists.
Grin rolls his eyes at the fellow traveler. “You want me to turn my descriptive attention elsewhere, but I’ve not described you at all. If you have problems, talk to the narrator. Wait—” Grin says, forestalling the other man’s interjections—”the Unlit City is between Anywhere and Everywhere, or in California, which is only weird because it’s in Florida.”
The man with neon green eyes looks around. What color is his skin? Something close to mocha, Grin concludes. “If we’re in Florida, then why are there mountains?” the mocha-toned man insists.
“Because we’re in California,” Grin replies.
“You don’t make any sense,” the neon-green-eyed mocha-skin-toned man says without contempt or resent, as if senselessness is as meaningless as skin tone or hair color or whether your eyes glow or drink in light.
“I’m not responsible for the sense you want. This is the Unlit City. Direct your complaints to its architects,” Grin says.
“And where are they?”
“And who are you, exactly?” Grin shoots back.
The man with glowing green eyes thinks for a second, says, “I’m Socket.”
“Socket,” Grin says, “what are you doing in the Unlit City?”
“The same thing as you,” Socket says.
Grin furrows his brow in disbelief. “I doubt it.”
Socket sighs, says out loud, “Whatever happened once, has to have happened before it can happen again.”
Grin, full of dread, says, “And whatever happened once has always and ever happened at least only once.”
“Do you believe me now, Grin?” Socket asks.
“I don’t know. I’m here for someone more than something, and if you really were after the same thing as me, you would have known it wasn’t a thing, but a one,” Grin says.
“I don’t think you know what you’re looking for, Grin,” Socket says.
“I know I know who I’m looking for,” Grin corrects.
“I’m not sure you know who you’re looking for either, Grin,” Socket says.
“I know her name, her face, the taste of her lips, the way that she sighs when you hold her close. Don’t you dare try to take her away from me, Socket,” Grin says quickly and full of fire-white anger.
“I can’t take away what you don’t already have, Grin,” Socket says cooly.
Grin swallows a lump in his throat, breaks the fourth wall. “Who is this man and why did you allow him into the story?”
Don’t look at me, Grin. I’m not in control of this. If anyone is, it’s you.
“Don’t shoulder that burden on me. I’m not the architect of all this,” Grin tells me.
You are what has always happened to be, Grin. Remember that and move forward. You know what you’re after can be found or it can’t be found. You have a dichotomy and a dilemma. Resolve them.
Grin bows his head, forcing the narrator’s gaze down to a path of fine sand and smooth pebbles.
“We have to go to the beach,” Grin says to anyone who will listen.
“Why?” Socket says.
“Because the beach is where the cobra made of darkness eats the seagulls made of light,” Grin says.
“That doesn’t sound like something we should go near,” Socket says.
“Socket, you said you’re bound to the same goal as me. The next step is through the belly of a cobra.”
Socket shrugs his shoulders. “Whatever you say, Grin,” and starts down the footpath towards the ocean.
Grin sets out towards the ocean too. On his way, he hears a scream and looks up towards the sky. He sees twenty-seven seagulls, made of light, flying towards the point in the sky where the horizon dies.
Grin is dumbstruck. The seagulls are so beautiful that they arrest his ability to think and/or to remember. He is only able to feel their presence overwhelming his own presence.
It comes as a surprise to Grin, then, when the cobra of darkness stands twelve stories tall and begins to hiss at the gulls. The cobra’s presence interrupts Grin’s arrest and sends words to his lips: “Look out!”
But the seagulls either don’t heed or don’t hear Grin’s warning. The cobra begins to snap them out of the air, while the seagulls continue to fly towards an inattainable goal.
The occupants of the Unlit City break the sky with their screams of terror and dread. The seagulls are, after all, the only reliable source of light in the Unlit City.
“What happens now?” Socket asks Grin.
“We have to wait,” Grin says through some tears which have always marked his face.
And so they wait. And so the cobra eats all the gulls. And so the cobra hisses in laughter. And so the cobra of darkness has consumed the seagulls of lightness.
And so the seagulls of lightness are in the belly of the cobra of darkness. And so the cobra of darkness is full of the lightness of seagulls. And so the lightness of seagulls begins to illuminate the chinks between the scales covering the cobra of darkness. And so the cobra of darkness is fractured. And so the lightness erupts out of the belly of the cobra of darkness.
And so the lightness cracks open the hood of the cobra of darkness, and so a giant seagull emerges from the darkness of the cobra to the lightness of the horizon. And so the inattainable goal of the horizon becomes possible because the gull is larger than the horizon now. And so Grin and Socket and Li are brought closer by the simple bigness of the seagull of lightness.
