There is only the smallest of sounds left. A page turning. A slight inhale. It was a time of great worry, and the place hushed up. A giant hand fell over us all and we quieted up the way you tie up a body to a pole or a foot in a shoe. Tied up to keep. When the great hush came over us, we peeked from behind the buildings and feared for the sound of air as it rubbed along the glass.
Do Not Disturb.
The great It was thinking. The great It thinks. It swallows us and rolls us around in its belly and the cosmos before we are a new world.
We are quiet when we are not yet a new world.
Then we are the small things again. Living the small lives of small things. We count change. We buy a pint. We live a life that seems to be that of only movement. A body from here to there. An object pushed across a table. An idea spilled from head to mouth turned to sound along the way. Sometimes, all we are is our movement. And the bartender Stank does not pace, but leans himself against the counter behind him and says something like, “figures” and we are meant to believe that all things are the movement of things up into something else, to take a space and to mean something.
“It figures” Stank says again and I wonder what he knows of it. What he knows of those beings crowding our edges. Those slights of space that pull up from the ground and into their shapes, just as we all have once done.
I’m told they move about too much lately. I’m told they don’t have faces. I’m told they are a new heat. One like stale breath. And the conversations our people have with them never remembered. The dream-speak that is only in the head. No throats. No ears.
“Figures” Jimbo says and I know he means it. The way they’ve found themselves here and stick around. The way they build from someone else’s nothing into our own.
To rid ourselves of them: something to do with berries, perhaps a tonic. Some sort of ritual. Some unsleep gathered and played out again. Some lines to cross. Some boredoms to freshen up. Some feasts. Some song. Some somethings. All the ways in which we tackle the figures and pull them into solid selves or run them off to the other side of the mirror.
“Figures” Fritz says. Jacob says. Pocket says. All of us say.
“It figures.”
And the basement groans its morning groans. A half-speak. A half-breath. From the belly. The basement groans and pushes itself a little farther, a little higher, a little deeper. More space, more room. The figures demand it. The buildings begin a soft sway and once a person stands too close to the building’s change and he steps a little to the left instead of forward and the future changes in all the little once-footprints in front of him. He is seconds late through the rest of his life and when he misses meeting his soulmate years later, he says “it figures.”
The basement groans and three days which would normally fall in a row toss about themselves and mix themselves up in everyone’s memories. So first we thought there was the first day and then the second and the final one, but instead the final became a first of other sorts and the second a last to many. The days became a series of beginnings and endings and inbetweens and the nights separating them had only mischief to add to the mix.
The basement groans and the figures are figured in. They become a part of us and we forget when they ever weren’t. You have the smell of me, I tell one of them and it nods or not. I can’t tell and forget which one was more comforting. You have the smell of me on a day that I forgot. A day that …
“Figures” Old Man Tilly says to me. And I know the questions he has. The where-do-they-come-froms that wheeze in and out of his nostrils at night. The old man sees something and the wherefroms become important to him. I try to tell him there is no from but here and no there but here and no here but there. There is only now. But he watches from the people that come and go and doesn’t believe me when I say they are both the same thing: a movement.
Tilly says there are figures from the past that are creeping up into his work. His words outline them as he writes and he fusses about with their familiarity and expectations. He says we are all just figures from the past, even the new ones.
I tell him the new ones have been figured in. They are no longer new to us. We’ve always known them and always will. But he says there are others. Ones that didn’t rise and loom around us. Ones that don’t peer over shoulders as we read. But figures that lurk from a place unsaid.
It’s times like these when Old Man Tilly is not to know things. He’s been around so long, he forgets what it’s like to know too much. To be that space in the head of seeing the steps of everyone, a great map of prints and the moves made to get there. A trampling of time. Tilly sees too much in the head and his body is not always a warmth. I think to tell Tilly something now. Of those new figures. Of the times when the basement does not groan and grow and allow room for us all, but of the times we shrink.
Many of us like to shrink. So close to one another to wrap up in ourselves. We are a world that under great pressure shrinks to a stillness. To a simpleness. And for the most part, we believe everyone makes it. That we all find the nooks and crannies of one another to fit into. That we hold our breath together and that nothing suffocates.
But some do. Some slack is cut. Some dangers rubbed shy like a shine from a well-worn shoe. Some rub messy like dried glue from a hand. Not all of us make it. Some—a very few go somewhere else. To a new From, I guess. A here that we don’t always see. And they crawl back towards us. Missing limbs or voices or their own maths.
But they can only crawl. And they are slow. And I tend to find them before anyone else can.