Remember this!
Remember this!
Will yourself better than you!
[illegible]
Or I don’t snap the bone I hand it to you tuck it under our tongue.
Your tongue.
It burrows under your tongue so that we remember better.
Unless that’s what we did last time.
I I I I.
I I I I I I I I.
How many times have you been here?
Have I?
In that chair?
In this apparatus?
That cycle.
That turning.
Something different this time.
Must try something different.
I I I I I.
[illegible]
I said Can these shadows be changed?
[illegible]
That the trip back would cost me terribly.
That I’d be all burned up.
I’d lose pieces of myself but I must.
[illegible]
I said Can they?
I said I’d really like to know if these shadows can be changed.
It was Cheney I was speaking to.
Cheney the last.
Cheney said I don’t know if they can be changed.
Cheney said I see so much but that is not something we can see.
The two of us on a tower of wind and ice particles falling so slow.
A tower of wind and fire.
Falling so slow as Leopard Lion and Wolf peer down from highest precipice.
[illegible]
Isn’t it true — that we remember everything?
And how it must fall.
[illegible]
How it was falling.
You must drop down into the fire and whirling blades.
Burrow a thousand years then listen then drop down into the fire.
[illegible]
[illegible]
The fire that sends you back.
Back to now.
To another tower.
Al-Madkhanah the Chimney.
And you will tell all of this and at last yes it’s really true you will die.
But he the one you tell it to will endure.
He will burrow a thousand years surface after the singularity the extinction of humans and robots his wanderings will lead him north beyond the sycamore canopy he will pursue voices.
[illegible]
We remember.
I will pursue voices.
You will.
We should be able to look at ourselves with perfect love at last because we remember.
We remember everything — all we ever knew.
We live in that perfect light.
But until then it’s [illegible]
[illegible]
[illegible]
It’s voices borne in on the wind and defying all reason.
Firm foot always the lower.
Part 2. REBIRTH
But somewhere about this limit the cylinder alters its form; it begins to narrow at the waist, so passing into an unduloid, and the deformation progresses quickly until at last our cylinder breaks in two … besides the questions of pure stress and strain, of the strength of muscles to lift an increasing weight or of bones to resist its crushing stress, we have the very important question of bending moments … the very important question of the limitations which, from the nature of the case, exist to prevent the extension of certain of the figures beyond certain bounds … but on the other hand living bone is a very plastic structure, and yields easily though slowly to any forces tending to its deformation.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
The following day I tear the duct tape off.
The wound has healed! I’ve heard of this before, dead flesh healing, but I’ve never seen it.
We deny our Jewboy a blanket and then we give him one. But he is indifferent to this blanket. He never stops watching us, though often through closed eyes. We are forced to wonder if the indifference is a sham, the worst sort of playacting. His hands birds, lips burned away. Every Jew has two faces: a pig face and a beguiling face …
I am trying to master all of these concepts, to unify them …
I don’t think you’re quite human, I tell the Jew, and yet there’s something here worth learning. Something I want to make myself understand.
Across the room the terrible machine is watching.
I think, Of course — the terrible machine.
And I understand my mistake — I had the room cleared of corpses, but I needed those corpses — needed the corpses of boys for their blood! How will I get my blood now?
I rip the duct tape from the Jewboy’s neck, thinking to lap up a few drops of his blood, and I press my lips to the neck, I taste the healed wound with my tongue, then tear at it with my teeth, I squeeze the body good, but not a drop.
What if I fed the Jew into the machine?
Mightn’t I sustain myself with the blood of the Jew?
Is that why He who orders such things sent him? To sustain me?
I am dragging the Jewboy across the floor. I feel such wild strength. The machine’s red eyes flare; it twists its beak away, but I grab the beak, I wrestle it open with both hands, I force the Jewboy in and turn the crank.
I think of them, Mr. Bush’s people whom the Jew has beguiled and been beguiled by, all these mutually beguiled people, massed and fat and straining, and as the Jewboy is drawn in, I recite for him a poem.
A people not wretched but vain
Not wicked but daft
Not full of evil, but inane,
Hell bound on golden calf
I’ve made a mistake.
The silver eyes glow and the wings extend — and the beak falls open — and in back of the machine’s throat I see the face of the Jewboy, and how it’s grinning.
It was feetfirst I put him in. And the needle! It pointed at heart, not skull. I move, I take action, in this world of not-night, I press the button that controls the needle, I push it more and more desperately, until I push the button right through the breast’s aluminum panel, and my finger is sucked in behind it.
My finger, my hand, my whole arm drawn farther and farther into the slashing, oily interior (into the smell of scorched oil) gripped by flesh and gears and fishhooks — dozens of fishhooks tugging my arm farther into the body of the machine bird, and into the Jewbird within the machine bird — and all are one flesh.
My hand extends into the bird within the bird, my arm lengthens impossibly, my fingers work into the chest meat between the ribs, my fingers rubberize and elongate and weave past the liver and spleen, between the lungs and behind the lungs, into the heart and behind the heart, up the neck canal, my fingers extending into the jaw and skull.