I’m not nothing. Approaching the white being, I hear Thrushchurl’s song, maybe I sing it, although there are many voices I hear. As long as I can go on speaking like that, I’m not nothing. I’m sure this is some other part of the vast cemetery but there is a persistent feeling that this is some other cemetery in the vicinity but separate. It’s too dark to see the monuments around me clearly enough, and the light there is so intense—I turn my head to see what it illuminates but the brilliant streaks it sheds around me block my view, and I can’t stop or turn all the way around it I am certain will get darker everywhere else if I do, and that thought is like death, dying to be alone here when everything goes completely dark. A bowl of light in the earth, a shallow bowl, with a white figure or some figure in there, lying there in such brightness that I can only see some of its outlines, a pink glow through the fingers ears and toes, the thin tissues, and the shadows where its legs are pressed together. It looks naked and is lying down. It lives because I see some regular palpitation and it rolls, now on its back, onto its side, back onto its back. It’s having a nightmare. Out of the egg of its sway I see the paper thing shake its body of wind on the far side of the bowl, a dream I can see but only from the vantage point of another dream that I’m in at the moment. I’m still alone. The dream is real in the world—I see the person having the nightmare is the paper thing at the same time—he lies like a corpse there in the light, then shakes roll onto its side, then onto its back again the head turning back and forth, dimly dark opening of the mouth, like its decomposed belly is swollen with the gases of its decay and now it belches them in a long harsh voluminous emission that seems it should splinter the throat, as full of pain as a scream, and the dream-rotten thing is still twisting at my feet, now so small I could squash it with the toe of my boot. The serial nightmares all together say I am the war: and now the war is over.

Alone, I am lost in the nightmare now. We won. We won. I’m turning into a tower. I am growing vaster than the mountains, my head rising far above the world, staring down at the bare ground by my feet miles across miles away, I am becoming transparent to the darkness of the surrounding space, everything around me is intense light, and I am rolling over retching transfixed and suffering, I am darkness and empty space.

*