world.
I have no memory of the explanation my mother or my father might have offered me as the reason why I had to stay in the house the rest of that day. Actually I had no desire to go outdoors that winter morning, not while that voice, whose mystery remained undispelled by my mother or my father, continued to speak to me in its harsh and quietly distant tone from all the dim corners of the house, as the snowflakes floated outside every window, repeating over and over that the ice was breaking up on the river.
It was not many days afterward that my parents placed me in a hospital where I was administered several potent medications and other forms of treatment. On the way to the hospital my father restrained me in the back seat of the car while my mother served as driver, and I calmed down only during those brief moments when we passed across an old bridge that was built over a fairly wide river which I had never before seen.
During my stay in the hospital I found that it was the medications I was given, rather than the other forms of treatment, that allowed me to grasp the nature of the voice which I had heard on a particular winter morning. I knew that my parents would be crossing that old bridge whenever they came to visit me at the hospital, so on the day when my doctor and a close relative of mine appeared in my room to explain to me the details of a certain ‘tragic event,’ I was the first one to speak. Before they could tell me of my mother and father’s fate, and the way in which it had all happened, I said to them: ‘The ice has broken up on the river.’
And the voice speaking these words was not the voice of a child but a harsh yet whispery voice emanating from the depths of that great and ancient machinery which powered, according to its own faulty and unknown mechanisms, the most infinitesimal movements of the world as I knew it. Thus, as my doctor and a close relative of mine explained further what had happened to my parents, I only stared out the window, watching the machinery (into which I had now been assimilated) as it produced each snowflake that fell one by one outside the window of my hospital room.
III. THE ASTRONOMIC BLUR
Along a street of very old houses there was a building that was not a house at all but a little store which kept itself open for business at all hours of the day and night, every single day of the year. At first the store appeared to me as merely primitive, a throwback to some earlier time when a place of business might be allowed to operate in an otherwise residential district, however decayed the houses of the neighborhood may have been. But it was much more than primitive in the usual sense, for the little store declared no name for itself, offered no outward sign to give an indication of its place in the world around it. It was only the local residents who called it ‘the little store,’ when they spoke of it at all.
There was a small window beside the dark wooden door of the building, but if one tried to peer through the foggy glass of this window, nothing recognizable could ever be seen – only a swirling blur of indefinite shapes. And although the building’s interior lights were always left on, even in the middle of the night, it was not the bright steady illumination of electricity that seemed to shine through the window of the place but a dim, vaguely flickering glow. Neither was anyone spied who might have been regarded as the proprietor of the little store, and no one was ever seen either going into or coming out of it, least of all the people in the surrounding neighborhood. Even if a passing car stopped in front and someone got out of the vehicle with the apparent intention of entering the store, they would never get farther than the sidewalk before turning around, getting back inside their car, and driving away. The children in the area always crossed to the opposite side of the street when walking by the little store.
Of course I was curious about
I have no memory of the explanation my mother or my father might have offered me as the reason why I had to stay in the house the rest of that day. Actually I had no desire to go outdoors that winter morning, not while that voice, whose mystery remained undispelled by my mother or my father, continued to speak to me in its harsh and quietly distant tone from all the dim corners of the house, as the snowflakes floated outside every window, repeating over and over that the ice was breaking up on the river.
It was not many days afterward that my parents placed me in a hospital where I was administered several potent medications and other forms of treatment. On the way to the hospital my father restrained me in the back seat of the car while my mother served as driver, and I calmed down only during those brief moments when we passed across an old bridge that was built over a fairly wide river which I had never before seen.
During my stay in the hospital I found that it was the medications I was given, rather than the other forms of treatment, that allowed me to grasp the nature of the voice which I had heard on a particular winter morning. I knew that my parents would be crossing that old bridge whenever they came to visit me at the hospital, so on the day when my doctor and a close relative of mine appeared in my room to explain to me the details of a certain ‘tragic event,’ I was the first one to speak. Before they could tell me of my mother and father’s fate, and the way in which it had all happened, I said to them: ‘The ice has broken up on the river.’
And the voice speaking these words was not the voice of a child but a harsh yet whispery voice emanating from the depths of that great and ancient machinery which powered, according to its own faulty and unknown mechanisms, the most infinitesimal movements of the world as I knew it. Thus, as my doctor and a close relative of mine explained further what had happened to my parents, I only stared out the window, watching the machinery (into which I had now been assimilated) as it produced each snowflake that fell one by one outside the window of my hospital room.
III. THE ASTRONOMIC BLUR
Along a street of very old houses there was a building that was not a house at all but a little store which kept itself open for business at all hours of the day and night, every single day of the year. At first the store appeared to me as merely primitive, a throwback to some earlier time when a place of business might be allowed to operate in an otherwise residential district, however decayed the houses of the neighborhood may have been. But it was much more than primitive in the usual sense, for the little store declared no name for itself, offered no outward sign to give an indication of its place in the world around it. It was only the local residents who called it ‘the little store,’ when they spoke of it at all.
There was a small window beside the dark wooden door of the building, but if one tried to peer through the foggy glass of this window, nothing recognizable could ever be seen – only a swirling blur of indefinite shapes. And although the building’s interior lights were always left on, even in the middle of the night, it was not the bright steady illumination of electricity that seemed to shine through the window of the place but a dim, vaguely flickering glow. Neither was anyone spied who might have been regarded as the proprietor of the little store, and no one was ever seen either going into or coming out of it, least of all the people in the surrounding neighborhood. Even if a passing car stopped in front and someone got out of the vehicle with the apparent intention of entering the store, they would never get farther than the sidewalk before turning around, getting back inside their car, and driving away. The children in the area always crossed to the opposite side of the street when walking by the little store.
Of course I was curious about
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