Her daily ritual called for the obligatory recording of the daily events in her
journal. She was sat on the floor on a pile of comforting pillows. She seized her
reed pen, the paper, the empty canvas she was to cast words upon, lay waiting in
front of her. She attempted to gather the turmoil of her thoughts into a coherent
stream of words. After a moment, she had to admit that she had little recollection
of what had indeed transpired on this particular day that had not already the day
preceding this day, or that day, or any other. Time had become the stream from which
her dreams travelled gently into her days and thence returned. Only fading memories
remained in the distance as though mirages in some desert.
She arose. As she was stood, she idly cast a glance or two across the room into the
small window adorned with delicately crafted woodwork. She decided to leave.
Although it had not rained in a great while, outside in the courtyard there stood, in
the shade of a palm tree, a pool replenished by some remote source. Suddenly, she
felt very, very tired and worn out, as if the fraying tapestry of her very being
began to surrender to the indefatigable will of time and age. Her task, her mission,
of supreme and utmost importance, or so she had been told, as it would appear, had
at no point surrendered very much in the way of good sense. Sometimes she thought
that she had little reason to continue holding on to it but she did nonetheless, for
reasons she did not dare delving into. Not that the matter at hand was difficult or
complicated. It was, in fact, very simple. She sighed. She retrieved with monotonous
obeisance, rendered to an unspecific entity, from her comforting robe the letter
bearing all the official seals and signature, in their correct places and manners of
placing, required in order to vest it in authority due. Then, ceremoniously, she bore
the letter in her hands and read:
"You are to, at once, repair to the village by the name of (illegible) in the
province of (illegible) in order to ascertain"
Signed:
High Commissioner José Francisco de Azevedo e Silva
Commonwealth of the Pale
13 August 1911"
As she had come to notice, there was little to ascertain, or to ascertain the
particular objects of ascertainment thereof, or whether there was anything to
ascertain at all, or what, or why, or, for that matter, where, if anywhere at all,
she was.
Not that there was, as such, nothing. In fact, there was a great deal of what was
clearly not nothing in the slightest. If only for its peculiarly persistent refusal
to subject itself to being recorded or even regarded with any reasonable amount of
consistency: what was at once there and appeared to be such and such, the next
week, or morning at times, or even a half-day later, was either no longer there at
all, or rearranged sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, or replaced with
something entirely unexpected. A singular pillar of ancient, antediluvian even,
appearance, stood upon a hill with majestic stature surrounded by a patch of white
lilies in an odd hexagonal pattern that bore, at first, cuneiform she could not
manage to decipher and then, Ancient South Arabian she equally failed at deciphering,
and eventually, an appendix of the "Book of the Misers" by al-Jāḥiẓ containing 9th
century Baṣran cooking recipes that, after 3 weeks, turned into a monumentally
humongous spear, piercing the occasionally appearing cloud, surrounded by a patch of
smaller spear-flowers, each bearing miniscule spears on its spear-shaped petals,
surrounded by spear-shaped bees busily casting spear-shaped appendages at it. A door
that, for almost one half-year, most stubbornly refused to offer any means, no matter
how much creativity and persistence was invested into this task, to open it, lay open
the day after the half-year had passed to then lead to the same door in a completely
different village that was, for some reason, entirely bereft of any other doors and
of sunlight, perpetually bathed in treacherous moonlight. Seemingly endless paths,
streets, alleys, roads, trails, and stairways that although led hither and thither,
turned more absurd and bizarre the further one should choose to explore them, until
their geometry assumed such grotesque nature that all volition to entertain this
whole trail of thought vanished and, as soon as this had become manifestly clear,
vanished themselves only to be replaced by a map thereof that now no longer referred
to any territory except for its own. A hudhud bird that sang words in old Andalusian
metres from which more hudhud birds emerged which busily drew trees made of letters
in old Andalusian script of impressive calligraphic qualities where more hudhud birds
then hatched until nightfall, at which point they all feasted upon the letters and
words of their creation, only to then repeat this process, ad infinitum, the next day
by the coming of dawn.
Page after page after page - the fact that she was evidently in possession of an
infinite number of pages and reed pens no longer bothered her nor where they came
from - of endless phenomena of this sort, or these sorts, for at first she had
attempted to subject the same to rigorous phenomenology, a futile task that soon
faded into the infinity of the Pale. The more of it there was, the less of her there
seemed to be.
An inexplicably haunting atmosphere of the uncertain and ineffable surrounded her.
The pool by the palm tree that was now her pleasant refuge from the midday sun had,
almost certainly, not been there last night. Nor the courtyard nor her very room,
although phenomena of this sort had curiously ceased to induce anything but
indifference within her since soon after her arrival. Her arrival. She could hardly
remember having been anywhere else, for where she was, was anywhere and everywhere at
all times, it seemed. None of the inhabitants of the village she had spoken to seemed
to take note of this either. Were it not for her obligation to record the daily
events in her day, she surely would have become one of them as well: fading in and
out of existence, going from the furthest place to the most distant time, formless
and free.
On what she had now, for unspecific reasons, ascertained to be the 777th day, the
calmness of clarity descended upon her. Everything, finally, made sense. She went
back upstairs to record her last journal entry and then left the village by
descending into the pool towards its remote source, towards the remote outskirts of
wherever it was she was spoken of to later, in a week, arrive at her destination, the
planet of Venus. Perhaps.
"After 777 days, I have, with supreme and utmost certainty, ascertained that this village does not exist. Nor, by all appearances, do I."
