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The Tower
As expected, precisely twelve hours before my thirtieth birthday I was given the name of my first Predecessor. A knock awoke me at 04:23 sharp, but the messenger was gone by the time I draped myself in a towel and opened the door, leaving only an unmarked envelope resting on my doormat. The name written on the embossed cardstock inside was in a language I did not know, its script a set of neat, serif bars I had never seen. The location, printed below, was in my own tongue:
Earth-Green-Sagittarius A*-Tlön-Calumny-Temerity. Box 12.
Planet. Color. Month. City. Words. Box. In the time it took me to dress myself, make coffee, and buy a train ticket, I memorized the location. The words cycled over in my mind as I sat with my forehead against the window, watching the trees dart by. Earth. Box 12. Temerity. I spoke them in time with the train wheels thudding against the breaks in the track.
I first saw a Tower when I was young, accompanied by my mother, who came to retrieve her third Predecessor. Due to my age I was not permitted inside, and even if I was, I would not be able to comprehend it. A great obelisk, ink black, without end, barely tapering before it was swallowed by the sky. Its exterior was unblemished, save for the faintest of series of jagged lines, as if mirroring the stairs that ran up the interior. It was said that on clear days, if one was at the peak—and if the the Tower had windows—you could see its six nearest sisters, great spikes that thrust out of the bedrock to pierce the heavens.
It wasn't even 06:00, and there was no line. Earth: The third in a series of eight staircases branching off from the ground floor. Green: the first of three lifts when one exited the stairs. Sagittarius A*: floor fifty of one thousand, for the first thousand named black holes. Tlön: the fifth section out of a hundred on the floor, for each of the one hundred great cities. The remaining words could be mapped from a book that rested where Prague ended and Tlön began. Calumny: Tenth row. Temerity: fifth shelf. Box 12.
I gently extracted onyx vessel, no larger than a paperback book, from its home. The smooth black stone slid noiselessly from its wooden slot in the shelf. My mother told me that the first person to be appointed a Predecessor was given the box of god's only daughter, who gave her life in a war with the Kassites. According to a librarian, this is a myth, but he informed me that her box is in a Tower in Iraq: Mercury-Green-3C 273-Urik.
I placed my card in the empty crevice and left, clutching my Predecessor to my chest.
I did not open the box until I returned home, at which point I still had plenty of time. The notice arrives twelve hours before. After your thirtieth, you have twenty-four hours.
I sat on my bed, among unmade sheets and pillows and half-read copy of Operette morali. I put the box on my lap, felt with my finger where the lid was mated to the sides, and pulled it apart.
Inside was a worn pewter ring, cold, plain, and heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I assumed it was a wedding band, although the words written in the interior were in the same script as the name on the card. For a minute I just sat, cupping it in my palm, as though it were a bird or rare insect; I half-expected a vision, a flash of light, the voice of god whispering sacred axioms in my ear. There was nothing.
It felt wrong to put it on my hand, even the index, so I fished an unused silver chain out of a jewelry box in the bathroom and threaded it through. It rested low on my neck, enough that I could idly turn it over while resting my elbow on a desk.
Centuries ago we warred with god, and when he tumbled from the lap of heaven onto the dirt, this was the result. A worn wedding band, belonging to someone who was never given a Predecessor.
Six months later I consulted a librarian. The language on the band, and on my card, was a dead Germanic tongue, perhaps Dutch, or Swedish. I had been too nervous to make a copy of my card before I left it in the Tower, but another librarian supposed it was a Scandinavian name based on my vague recollection of the shapes, perhaps sixteen hundred years old.
Five years on, I still kept the band on that same necklace, and every evening I would sit on my desk and roll it between my fingers. What if the ring had been mine, and it was god who pulled my spirit from darkness and told me that an act of armistice required me to pick a single object, small enough to fit in a box, to represent my life?
It was fifteen years before I started to understand, and I started to feel the weight of the ring around my neck at every turn I took in my house. The bookshelves and the espresso machine and the porcelain trinkets and the boxes of carefully curated childhood memorabilia: All larger than the small stone box, yet somehow lesser than the ring. This was the point, of course. The war ended, with god bloodied and humanity quartered. We got our immortality, but if we didn't know death, we would be forced to forever mourn its passing. Forget your Predecessor, forget all those who did not get the gift you were given, and you would loose the gift yourself.
Much to my parents' and siblings' dismay, I had started to clear my house of things. My ownership of the ring had gone on for fifty years, with fifty more left, but it still grew heavier. The handmade mug from a vacation to the west could not fit in a small stone box, nor could it distill a century of my existence. My desires, lusts, and heartbreaks could not be contained in vintage dinnerware or leather-bound dictionaries. No traumas could be transmitted through surplus kitchen knives and drawers full of trinkets.
Ten years later I had reduced most of my study to little more than a desk. An unfinished collection poems I had written could fit inside the stone box—I had even checked—yet the papers still loomed over my psyche every morning from the corner of the desk, as though accusing me of some dishonestly. I had not added to them in nearly twenty-five years. Surely something so neglected could not mean much. My predecessor had, I assume, worn that ring every day, until he died. But surely, I had time enough. What was one lifetime to someone to someone who had enumerable lifetimes?
For ten years I looked at the poems gathering dust, along with the half-finished manuscripts and wooden dog I had carved from the tree I climbed as a child, and I told myself that a year of my Predecessor's time was a single breath to me, and that soon the book would be done, the dog painted, the couplets resolved. When I was done, I could even carve my own box, for my own totem, and surely then, I would feel at peace.
Another decade passed, the poems bleached by sunlight in a corner of my room. I noticed the cracks in the wooden dog I had carved and left on a windowsill, nearly forgotten until I re-discovered it while looking for a misplaced house key. I took the ring off my neck, returned it to its box, and placed it under the bed, where I would never again see it.
Earth-Green-Sagittarius A*-Tlön-Calumny-Temerity. Box 12.
Planet. Color. Month. City. Words. Box. In the time it took me to dress myself, make coffee, and buy a train ticket, I memorized the location. The words cycled over in my mind as I sat with my forehead against the window, watching the trees dart by. Earth. Box 12. Temerity. I spoke them in time with the train wheels thudding against the breaks in the track.
I first saw a Tower when I was young, accompanied by my mother, who came to retrieve her third Predecessor. Due to my age I was not permitted inside, and even if I was, I would not be able to comprehend it. A great obelisk, ink black, without end, barely tapering before it was swallowed by the sky. Its exterior was unblemished, save for the faintest of series of jagged lines, as if mirroring the stairs that ran up the interior. It was said that on clear days, if one was at the peak—and if the the Tower had windows—you could see its six nearest sisters, great spikes that thrust out of the bedrock to pierce the heavens.
It wasn't even 06:00, and there was no line. Earth: The third in a series of eight staircases branching off from the ground floor. Green: the first of three lifts when one exited the stairs. Sagittarius A*: floor fifty of one thousand, for the first thousand named black holes. Tlön: the fifth section out of a hundred on the floor, for each of the one hundred great cities. The remaining words could be mapped from a book that rested where Prague ended and Tlön began. Calumny: Tenth row. Temerity: fifth shelf. Box 12.
I gently extracted onyx vessel, no larger than a paperback book, from its home. The smooth black stone slid noiselessly from its wooden slot in the shelf. My mother told me that the first person to be appointed a Predecessor was given the box of god's only daughter, who gave her life in a war with the Kassites. According to a librarian, this is a myth, but he informed me that her box is in a Tower in Iraq: Mercury-Green-3C 273-Urik.
I placed my card in the empty crevice and left, clutching my Predecessor to my chest.
I did not open the box until I returned home, at which point I still had plenty of time. The notice arrives twelve hours before. After your thirtieth, you have twenty-four hours.
I sat on my bed, among unmade sheets and pillows and half-read copy of Operette morali. I put the box on my lap, felt with my finger where the lid was mated to the sides, and pulled it apart.
Inside was a worn pewter ring, cold, plain, and heavy. I turned it over in my hands. I assumed it was a wedding band, although the words written in the interior were in the same script as the name on the card. For a minute I just sat, cupping it in my palm, as though it were a bird or rare insect; I half-expected a vision, a flash of light, the voice of god whispering sacred axioms in my ear. There was nothing.
It felt wrong to put it on my hand, even the index, so I fished an unused silver chain out of a jewelry box in the bathroom and threaded it through. It rested low on my neck, enough that I could idly turn it over while resting my elbow on a desk.
Centuries ago we warred with god, and when he tumbled from the lap of heaven onto the dirt, this was the result. A worn wedding band, belonging to someone who was never given a Predecessor.
Six months later I consulted a librarian. The language on the band, and on my card, was a dead Germanic tongue, perhaps Dutch, or Swedish. I had been too nervous to make a copy of my card before I left it in the Tower, but another librarian supposed it was a Scandinavian name based on my vague recollection of the shapes, perhaps sixteen hundred years old.
Five years on, I still kept the band on that same necklace, and every evening I would sit on my desk and roll it between my fingers. What if the ring had been mine, and it was god who pulled my spirit from darkness and told me that an act of armistice required me to pick a single object, small enough to fit in a box, to represent my life?
It was fifteen years before I started to understand, and I started to feel the weight of the ring around my neck at every turn I took in my house. The bookshelves and the espresso machine and the porcelain trinkets and the boxes of carefully curated childhood memorabilia: All larger than the small stone box, yet somehow lesser than the ring. This was the point, of course. The war ended, with god bloodied and humanity quartered. We got our immortality, but if we didn't know death, we would be forced to forever mourn its passing. Forget your Predecessor, forget all those who did not get the gift you were given, and you would loose the gift yourself.
Much to my parents' and siblings' dismay, I had started to clear my house of things. My ownership of the ring had gone on for fifty years, with fifty more left, but it still grew heavier. The handmade mug from a vacation to the west could not fit in a small stone box, nor could it distill a century of my existence. My desires, lusts, and heartbreaks could not be contained in vintage dinnerware or leather-bound dictionaries. No traumas could be transmitted through surplus kitchen knives and drawers full of trinkets.
Ten years later I had reduced most of my study to little more than a desk. An unfinished collection poems I had written could fit inside the stone box—I had even checked—yet the papers still loomed over my psyche every morning from the corner of the desk, as though accusing me of some dishonestly. I had not added to them in nearly twenty-five years. Surely something so neglected could not mean much. My predecessor had, I assume, worn that ring every day, until he died. But surely, I had time enough. What was one lifetime to someone to someone who had enumerable lifetimes?
For ten years I looked at the poems gathering dust, along with the half-finished manuscripts and wooden dog I had carved from the tree I climbed as a child, and I told myself that a year of my Predecessor's time was a single breath to me, and that soon the book would be done, the dog painted, the couplets resolved. When I was done, I could even carve my own box, for my own totem, and surely then, I would feel at peace.
Another decade passed, the poems bleached by sunlight in a corner of my room. I noticed the cracks in the wooden dog I had carved and left on a windowsill, nearly forgotten until I re-discovered it while looking for a misplaced house key. I took the ring off my neck, returned it to its box, and placed it under the bed, where I would never again see it.