‘We should give thanks,’ the voice said to me, ‘that a poverty of knowledge has so narrowed our vision of things as to allow the possibility of feeling something about them. How could we find a pretext to react to anything if we understood . . . everything? None but an absent mind was ever victimized by the adventure of intense emotional feeling. And without the suspense that is generated by our benighted state – our status as beings possessed by our own bodies and the madness that goes along with them – who could take enough interest in the universal spectacle to bring forth even the feeblest yawn, let alone exhibit the more dramatic manifestations which lend such unwonted color to a world that is essentially composed of shades of gray upon a background of blackness? Hope and horror, to repeat merely two of the innumerable conditions dependent on a faulty insight, would be much the worse for an ultimate revelation that would expose their lack of necessity. At the other extreme, both our most dire and most exalted emotions are well served every time we take some ray of knowledge, isolate it from the spectrum of illumination, and then forget it completely. All our ecstasies, whether sacred or from the slime, depend on our refusal to be schooled in even the most superficial truths and our maddening will to follow the path of forgetfulness. Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence. To know, to understand in the fullest sense, is to plunge into an enlightenment of inanity, a wintry landscape of memory whose substance is all shadows and a profound awareness of the infinite spaces surrounding us on all sides. Within this space we remain suspended only with the aid of strings that quiver with our hopes and our horrors, and which keep us dangling over the gray void. How is it that we can defend such puppetry, condemning any efforts to strip us of these strings? The reason, one must suppose, is that nothing is more enticing, nothing more vitally idiotic, than our desire to have a name – even if it is the name of a stupid little puppet – and to hold on to this name throughout the long ordeal of our lives as if we could hold on to it forever. If only we could keep those precious strings from growing frayed and tangled, if only we could keep from falling into an empty sky, we might continue to pass ourselves off under our assumed names and perpetuate our puppet’s dance throughout all eternity . . .’
The voice whispered more words than this, more than I can recall, as if it would deliver its lecture without end. But at some point I drifted off to sleep as I had never slept before, calm and gray and dreamless.
The next morning I was awakened by some noise down in the street outside my window. It was the same delirious cacophony I had heard the day before when I first arrived in the northern border town and witnessed the passing of that unique parade. But when I got up from my bed and went to the window, I saw no sign of the uproarious procession. Then I noticed the house directly opposite the one in which I had spent the night. One of the highest windows of that house across the street was fully open, and slightly below the ledge of the window, lying against the gray façade of the house, was the body of a man hanging by his neck from a thick white rope. The cord was stretched taut and led back through the window and into the house. For some reason this sight did not seem in any way unexpected or out of place, even as the noisy thrumming of the unseen parade grew increasingly loud and even when I recognized the figure of the hanged man, who was extremely slight of build, almost like a child in physical stature. Although many years older than when I had last seen him, his hair and beard now radiantly white, clearly the body was that of my old physician, Dr Zirk.
Now I could see the parade approaching. From the far end of the gray, tunnel-like street, the clown creature strolled in its loose white garments, his egg-shaped head scanning the high houses on either side. As the creature passed beneath my window it looked up at me for a moment with that same expression of bland malevolence, and then passed on. Following this figure was the formation of ragged men harnessed by ropes to a cage-like vehicle that rolled along on wooden wheels. Countless objects, many more than I saw the previous day, clattered against the bars of the cage. The grotesque inventory now included bottles of pills that rattled with the contents inside them, shining scalpels and instruments for cutting through bones, needles and syringes strung together and hung like ornaments on a Christmas tree, and a stethoscope that had been looped about the decapitated dog’s head. The wooden stakes of the caged platform wobbled to the point of breaking with the additional weight of this cast-off clutter. Because there was no roof covering this cage, I could see down into it from my window. But there was nothing inside, at least for the moment. As the vehicle passed directly below, I looked across the street at the hanged man and the thick rope from which he dangled like a puppet. From the shadows inside the open window of the house, a hand appeared that was holding a polished steel straight razor. The fingers of that hand were thick and wore many gaudy rings. After the razor had worked at the cord for a few moments, the body of Dr Zirk fell from the heights of the gray house and landed in the open vehicle just as it passed by. The procession which was so lethargic in its every aspect now seemed to disappear quickly from view, its muffled riot of sounds fading into the distance.
To make an end of it
, I thought to myself –
to make an end of it in whatever style you wish.
I looked at the house across the street. The window that was once open was now closed, and the curtains behind it were drawn. The tunnel-like street of gray houses was absolutely quiet and absolutely still. Then, as if in answer to my own deepest wish, a sparse showering of snowflakes began to descend from the gray morning sky, each one of them a soft whispering voice. For the longest time I continued to stare out from my window, gazing upon the street and the town that I knew was my home.
WHEN YOU HEAR THE SINGING, YOU WILL KNOW IT IS TIME
I had lived in the town near the northern border long enough so that, with the occult passing of time, I had begun to assume that I would never leave there, at least not while I was alive.
I would die by my own hand, I might have believed, or possibly by the more usual means of some violent misadventure or some wasting disease. But certainly I had begun to assume that my life’s end, as if by right, would take place either within the town itself or in close proximity to its outskirts, where the dense streets and structures of the town started to thin out and eventually dissolved into a desolate and seemingly endless countryside. Following my death, I thought, or had begun unwittingly to assume, I would be buried in the hilltop graveyard outside the town. I had no idea that there were others who might have told me that it was just as likely I would not die in the town and therefore would not be buried, or interred in any way whatsoever, within the hilltop graveyard. Such persons might have been regarded as hysterics of some kind, or possibly some type of impostor, since everyone who was a permanent resident of the northern border town seemed to be either one or the other and often both of them at once. These individuals might have suggested to me that it was also entirely possible neither to die in the town nor ever to leave it. I began to learn how such a thing might happen during the time I was living in a small backstairs apartment on the ground floor of a large rooming house located in one of the oldest parts of town.
It was the middle of the night, and I had just awakened in my bed. More precisely, I had
started into wakefulness
, much as I had done throughout my life. This habit of starting into wakefulness in the middle of the night enabled me to become aware, on that particular night, of a soft droning sound which filled my small, one-room apartment and which I might not have heard had I been the sort of person who remains asleep all night long. The sound was emanating from under the floorboards and rose up to reverberate in the moonlit darkness of the entire room. After a few moments sitting up in my bed, and then getting out of bed to step quietly around my small apartment, it seemed to me that the soft droning sound I heard was made by a voice, a very deep voice, which spoke as if it were delivering a lecture of some kind or addressing an audience with the self-assured inflections of authority. Yet I could not discern a single word of what the voice was saying, only its droning intonations and its deeply reverberant quality as it rose up from beneath the floorboards of my small backstairs apartment.
Until that night I had not suspected that there was a cellar below the rooming house where I lived on the ground floor. I was even less prepared to discover, as I eventually did, that hidden under a small, worn-down carpet, which was the only floor covering in my room, was a trap door – an access, it seemed, to whatever basement or cellar might have existed (beyond all my suspicions) below the large rooming house. But there was something else unusual about this trap door, aside from its very presence in my small apartment room and the fact that it implied the existence of some type of rooming-house cellar. Although the trap door was somehow set into the floorboards of my room, it did not in any way appear to be
of a piece
with them. The trap door, as I thought of it, did not at all seem to be constructed of wood but of something that was more of a leathery consistency, all withered and warped and cracked in places as though it did not fit in with the roughly parallel lines of the floorboards in my room but clearly opposed them both in its shape and its angles, which were highly irregular by any standards that might conceivably apply to a rooming-house trap door. I could not even say if this leathery trap door had four sides to it or possibly five sides or more, so elusive and misshapen was its crude and shriveled construction, at least as I saw it in the moonlight after starting into wakefulness in my small backstairs apartment. Yet I was absolutely certain that the deeply reverberant voice which continued to drone on and on as I inspected the trap door was in fact emanating from a place, a cellar or basement of some kind, directly below my room. I knew this to be true because I placed my hand, very briefly, on the trap door’s leathery and irregular surface, and in that moment I could feel that it was
pulsing
in a way that corresponded to the force and rhythms of the voice which echoed its indecipherable words throughout the rest of that night, fading only moments before daylight.
Having remained awake for most of the night, I left my backstairs apartment and began to wander the streets of the northern border town on a cold and overcast morning in late autumn. Throughout the whole of that day I saw the town, where I had already lived for some time, under an aspect I had not known before. I have stated that this town near the northern border was a place where I had assumed I would one day die, and I may even say it was a place where I actually desired to make an end of it, or such was the intention or wish that I
entertained
at certain times and in certain places, including my residence in one of the oldest sections of the town. But as I wandered the streets on that overcast morning in late autumn, and throughout the day, my entire sense of my surroundings, as well as my intuition that my existence would be terminated within those surroundings, had become altered in a completely unexpected manner. The town had, of course, always displayed certain peculiar and often profoundly surprising qualities and features. Sooner or later everyone who was a permanent resident there was confronted with something of a nearly insupportable oddity or corruption.
As I wandered along one byway or another throughout that morning and into late afternoon, I recalled a specific street near the edge of town, a dead-end street where all the houses and other buildings seemed to have grown into one another, melding their diverse materials into a bizarre and jagged conglomerate of massive architectural proportions, with peaked roofs and soaring chimneys or towers visibly swaying and audibly moaning even in the calm of an early summer twilight. I had thought that this was the absolute limit, only to find out at exactly the moment of having this thought that there was something further involved with this street, something that caused persons living in the area to repeat a special slogan or incantation to whomever would listen.
When you hear the singing
, they said,
you will know it is time
. These words were spoken, and I heard them myself, as if the persons uttering them were attempting to absolve or protect themselves in some way that was beyond any further explication. And whether or not one heard the singing or had ever heard what was called the
singing
, and whether or not that obscure and unspeakable
time
ever came, or would ever come to those who arrived in that street with its houses and other buildings all mingled together and tumbling into the sky, there nevertheless remained within you the feeling that this was still the place – the town near the northern border – where you came to live and where you might believe you would be a permanent resident until either you chose to leave it or until you died, possibly by violent misadventure or some wasting disease, if not by your own hand. Yet on that overcast morning in late autumn I could no longer maintain this feeling, not after having started into wakefulness the night before, not after having heard that droning voice which delivered some incomprehensible sermon for hours on end, and not after having seen that leathery trap door which I placed my hand upon for only a brief moment and thereafter retreated to the furthest corner of my small apartment until daylight.
And I was not the only one to notice a change within the town, as I discovered when twilight drew on and more of us began to collect on street corners or in back alleys, as well as in abandoned storefront rooms or old office buildings where most of the furniture was badly broken and out-of-date calendars hung crooked on the walls. It was difficult for some persons to refrain from observing that there seemed to be fewer of us as the shadows of twilight gathered that day. Even Mrs Glimm, whose lodging house-plus-brothel was as populous as ever with its out-of-town clientele, said that among the permanent residents of the northern border town there was a ‘noticeably diminished’ number of persons.