hanaϡelah and the chair

when hanaϡelah was invited to meet with the chair, it wasn’t as though she were trepidatious, through callowness or cowardice, but more probably, as some would have it, as if she were not indifferent exactly, but something that resembled indifference, not entirely dissimilar to when the world considers a woman to be one of its ten most beautiful, when this is only the case because she is rich and famous and the star of a recent blockbuster movie and the daughter of the senate majority whip and the lover of the winner of this year’s triple crown and a citizen of the earth’s sole superpower and a reputed descendant of the aztec pipiltin.  It is, most assuredly, not as if she resembles a squashed wombat, but, even so, naked, upon waking, random in a nameless bed, hundreds of thousands of others would be equally aphrodisiacal.

she spoke about it with her brother.  The reason or reasons for the request to meet, while not unfathomable, she said, remain opaque.

to you or to others? he inquired.

even that’s not wholly clear.

to you?

well.  To those who consider such things.

of course.

she stretched her limbs, not unlike an athlete preparing for a sport not yet invented, thinking to herself of the bitter tree she used to exist for in her youth, but without wishing to bring this into articulation due to associations she thought best not left unburied.  The chair isn’t known to be of the type that is unacquainted with the matters that we are.

i’ve heard roughly the same, though with some qualification as to the nature of the lack of unacquaintance.

yes.  This, frankly, is what disturbs me.  Not simply this orientation—or lack of it … it’s hard to tell … — but the basic fact of its existence.

i understand.  More than might be realized.

hanaϡelah paused in her thinking, and considered her approaching thoughts from another sphere.  Nevertheless, i’ll attend.

when are you called for?

three days hence, at fourteen-thirty hours.  I must begin preparing.

certainly.  Since you have decided to not absent yourself, an absence of diligence isn’t an option.  On that, at least, we’re in agreement.

hanaϡelah picked herself up, followed the departure protocols, and left toward the preparatory tasks which were, as can be imagined by the imaginative, substantial. 

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intermezzo 

⅟       the sky is incipiently turbid, almost macabre in its dissipatings

⅟       rooks the size of american footballs raucously mate in the air, broken infinities fall from the highest firmaments

⅟       a coach pulled by nine performs night’s pulchritudinous transport

⅟       do we not, announcing to no one, don the foreordained fashions, taken by that coach through tributaries of tribulation til deposited under destiny’s door?

⅟       “phhszzt, no! nothing! not lady szetto under the tumescent tree!”

⅟       i have heard it said that you said that i said that franz, the scornful bastard, whom i loved like dangling lemons under an atavistic sun

⅟       your interpretations are as paracetamol plunked into the pacific

⅟       being welcomed, being mannered, being been, having being

⅟       lairs are liars and words are truthful and minnie hummed a little song through the history of her sweetling crack 

end of intermezzo

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 now, said the chair, settling into itself, it is seen that you have not been absented.  Beyond the question of why this might be—or, rather, setting such questions aside, placing them, as it were, in time’s stinky incarnadine compost, along with newtonian geometry, garburators and catholicism—or even be might this why (as my ancestors would ponderously intone whenever fat-bottomed guests were guested), beyond the question of the beyond, beyond even questions, beyond beyonds, not questioning questions, why are you here?

hanaϡelah had not been unprepared for this approach.  She watched the chair, its cornucopia of vicissitudes, its stolidity, questioning her next move.

regardless, said the chair, have you not been told of the riddle of the multitudinous legs and the albatross, how they flopped their way to glory in porto alegre just moments before being undone.  The last time i told it, not disundone myself, of rancid disposition, shellac’d most miserably, i almost wept if i had not been past weeping and weeping passed me.

as the family of hanaϡelah had adumbrated on its vatic verandah, 7 of its 117 two-bys faulty, none of them unflawed, a descendant, gross in fame, would eat her way to glory, without a stitch in time.

ponderously.  We can’t escape it.  Said the chair.  Some have spoken, speaking of the dreams of the ancients, of dreams, the itch of seeming.  We would not.  Your ancestors, for example {and here, how could not hanaϡelah twitch, remembering the simulacra.  Nought was not, she thought, but then corrected herself, knowing better}, living in the wood near dover, never would have.  Why would you?

hanaϡelah pondered her options.  She could neither assent to nor pursue the why.  This was certain from her preparations.  Yet, disturbingly, as she had glimpsed, neither could she avoid it.  This was not some simple either-or, some dialectic in a stream, a frosty maiden.  Something else.  Like a minisery, or a bapterasmima.  Or a thong.  She dug deeper.  Time still timed.

when you and i—if you and i—had been of the sort to sort, would we have sorted sordid swords in sardinia, would we have tangled two—or more?—tangentos in tartufo?  You know we wouldn’t.  Instead, we would have remained as we always are, in the limbo of our in-betweenness, in grace and reverence, in a rhyme …

there.  The chair had failed.  Hanaϡelah saw it clearly now.  The work had paid.  She reached out her tongue beyond its usual extensions and performed the diligence required of her by the codes.  When she returned to her brother, later, offerings in the wake, the clouds hung far below the sky, their ground and benefactor, songs were not unheard.