I stand before
“The first time I saw the door was on the Pacific, off the coast of
Lightning!
Thunder, cracked
in the far-off; fishing boat tossed upon the waves.
Nauru.”
Did you enter it then?”
“No, we only
saw it out there, I swear to God,” Dorian said, and I listened, eyes focused through the intermittent gloom, pressing my cap against my wet, windswept head—until, “There!” he cried and I
saw it, horizontal on the waves, perhaps thirty feet ahead.”
“Just on the water?”
saw it too, a burst of lightning (!) revealing its dark rectangular silhouette on the ocean’s raging surface.
“We fired a harpoon, hoping to latch on. To pull it open.”
“Harder!” Dorian yelled.
The spearhead had embedded itself in [T]he door[.] came unsealed, (as we) heaving on the slick rope (lurched backward, onto the deck—) [becoming]
—ajar,
opened: the alternate dimension leaking between door and frame.
as a breeze, cold upon the skin, escaped. Dorian and I breathed it in,” I said, “taking it into our lungs, our blood, internalising
The door shut.
Leak ended, only the storm remained.
The door—rattled/ing—had submerged into the ocean.
Only [sound] waves beating…
unreality.”
”That was it?” he asked.
”For a decade.
”We continued hunting for it, but slyly the door eluded us.
“Until finally we managed to track it to Cincinnati.
”It started appearing on walls, in buildings.
”A door unbelonged.”
”That’s where you later built—”
”The Escher, yes. Itself construction of which took several years.
”The world’s first impossible structure,
fruit of the alternate reality we had inhaled. Blasphemy of space-time. Architecture = infinity. Exterior impossible < interior unending.
“Rumors say some of the workmen went mad.”
”Trying to comprehend.”
the door.
”The uninhaled can never understand its nature,” I said, “only its purpose.”
“To capture it,” Dorian had said.
“Build the Escher in the center of Cincinnati, and drive the door into it, like a wild animal into a trap.”
“And once it was inside, seal it forever in.”
Hearing the breeze
“And what is it like, inside the Escher? How would—”
“You mustn’t think about it!
“Imagine merely a corridor lined with doors which loops into itself; but not itself, so that the space presently traversed becomes a space, secondly no longer the same
on the other side[, rattling against the bones] of human reality.
“And you two too intend to enter?”
“Dorian and I shall enter never to exit, to hunt to enter the within within.”
“Some call us madmen,” Dorian said on the last night.
Under blanket midnight
I am grown [c]old.
stars shone.
“I would follow you anywhere,” I said.
Dorian has [c]hanged
—swinging on vines like apes if we had not followed where curiosity lead.”
himself,
opening the door, on[c]e and for all
“Mankind will be history!” he screamed, suffocating.
into a hollow wind rushing blank future presently past [me] into a neverending corridor to everywhere—
condensing everything into
The Escher
whose density: approaching
“Infinity.”
becomes a black
/0