We laid our bricks in kilns and stacked them in the modern fashion, not knowing that this would camouflage us against the hoarders of time and antiquities, who collect figures of dancing nymphs and erect penises to place in the hall during parties and, in the morning, arouse themselves and ejaculate histories of their own desiring. We culled our bodies into the center of the mound, for every son with a soul must find a place to lie, and carving the images of unicorns into lapis lazuli and steatite, we disappeared, leaving no advice, save what can be found on our coins; we took great pains to make these symbols unintelligible.
They built libraries in Spain and Babylon, lost them again in Alexandria and Babel. As our children wander the stacks of these ghost structures, they begin to wonder if there ever truly was a world outside these walls, some place with skies and light breezes, yawning caverns and geese, islands in a lake, modifications of/ processes toward/ destructions of/ privations of/ qualities of/ Love or Strife, those of Form or Substance. Objects misrecollected, misapplied. A sister missed.
She fell when she was ten, we saw her from the height of the walled citadel at Mohenjo-daro, the doctor busted her arm just about in two. But we were unable to speak. Those who came after us would have to speak for us, and imperfectly at that. She bit the doctor on the shin and brought him to the earth, where he screeched the name Modthryth. He would have to marry her in order to tame her. With her good arm, she grabbed the hair at the top of his head and pinned it to the ground as she bludgeoned him with the swinging bone of her free hand.
The children in the library find a stone slab in what they assume to be the center—though, lost as they are, it may well be in any corner—of that cursed place. It is in a room called the room of dusts, on the sign that hangs by a chain, in which there are no books on the shelves, only all the objects required to reference and build an encyclopedia galactica. Included among the various stores of jewelry, lamps, scalloped rhinoceros horns, groaning armor, pie tins and paper plates, are also a chisel and hammer, on which is printed the only bit of language in this room, Hermes is not in the stone 1. Should they apply the chisel to the stone, searching for him, they might find the footnote, left by a careless editor, obsessed with stating the obvious.
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