The Book
of Glass
It is impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling
blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special
tongs and sets it on the ground. A dagger sticks out of the
cover and it is stained with the blood of previous readers.
Smaller glass daggers stick out of the larger dagger making it
impossible to touch any point on the larger dagger without wounding
hands. The blood against the yellow and purple glass of the
larger and smaller daggers, when hit by sunlight, is stunning to the
eye. You will have to take my word for this:
it’s so beautiful it causes the reader to lose her senses and
she can’t help but try to open the book. The reader
grabs for the cover, and the blood that is then drawn forms the text of
the book, which is filled with the blood of previous readers.
The reader’s blood swirls across these first pages and the
blood informs us that the text is about writing itself: here
the writers are readers and they have gone too far with their own
mortality. They die to read, die to write, and in the blood
that swirls around the page and mixes with the blood of previous
writers and readers there is the image of a massacre: the
readers are rounded up by a God-man and some are forced into rocks and
some into caves and some into mountains and some into rivers; and the
water and earth and grass and leaves and air are dead and filled with
the murmurs of the lovers who wait for that silence where thought
refuses to think. To die to read, to die to write:
the Book of Glass is a constant reminder that when people die their
words unravel, flow out of their mouths like poison, and when their
words hit the earth the soil loses all of its nutrients, the rivers dry
up and the readers are thirsty. Or so it says in the Book of
Glass, whose final chapter, written with the sharp edges of broken
bottles, tells of a man who dreams of his own death in the pages of the
Book of Glass. In this tale the Book of Glass is enormous,
and the man is tiny in comparison. He needs a crane to help
him open the cover, and when he finally gets it open he hops onto a
page. On one corner of the page, there is a tower of sharp
glass, which reads: in order to continue you must climb this
tower. The man hoists himself onto the tower, and with each
step he takes blood is drawn from his feet, hands, legs, chest, arms,
and fingers. The blood drips down the tower, wells up on the
page between the deadly glass formations and coagulates into a sentence
that says something along the lines of: the book will end
when there are no longer any readers; your job, dear reader, is to
disappear to make the words possible, to make the blood possible, to
make the destruction of the book possible, and this can only occur if
you live forever and die on this page at the same time. The
man continues to climb the tower of glass and as he climbs he feels
himself becoming a parable about a parable that does not know if it is
reality or parable. He lives like this for many decades until
finally he forgets about himself, which is to say that in the final
scene birds carry him away and drop him in a field of strawberries or
sunflowers, where he forever murmurs the question: what is
the weight of light?
The Book of Forgotten Bodies
The reader who opens the Book of Forgotten Bodies finds
nothing. There are no horses galloping through deserted
villages in search of the men who used to ride them. There
are no children crying for their parents who were thrown out of air
planes and into the sea. There are no soldiers who had their
arms sliced off for refusing to obliterate innocent bodies.
There are no rich men leaning against paradise trees as the drunk
bodies of poor men stumble up to their houses to kill them.
There are no bodies of hopeless virgins smashed on city streets by
Mercedes Benzes cruising through the gentle drizzle of a foggy
day. There are no bodies abandoned on beaches.
There are no corpses floating down rivers. There are no
bodies hanging in the military barracks on island XYZ off the coast of
nation ABC. There are no bodies that pound rock against rock.
No bodies that stand on one leg with hoods over their mouths mumbling
words we don’t understand. No bodies covered in mud
murmuring to the bodies who lie on top of them. There are no
bodies that smell of chemicals and rest in puddles in the rain waiting
for flowers to fall on their heads. No blind bodies that are
painted by artists who value aesthetics over breath. No
bodies that imagine their children’s bodies as ghosts and
cadavers and skeletons. No bodies that live in bodies that no
longer know if they are bodies. No bodies that fall from
windows as they try to catch glimpses of the bodies that have fallen
before them. There are no bodies discovered by rabid dogs in
houses abandoned before they could even be built. No bodies
surrounded by barbed wire as the countries die in the
distance. No bodies whose skin burns in the strange machines
that buzz like tropical nights. No bodies that burn in
buildings that have been set on fire by bodies with no reason to
live. There are no bodies that fry in the sun, that drown in
the shadows, that roast on gas, that ooze algae and moss, that are
covered in black rags as the lakes and the mountains die. No
bodies that hunt or are hunted, that murder out of charity, that are
murdered out of charity. No bodies that shutter the windows
and hang themselves in libraries of their favorite books.
There are no soul-less bodies, no frozen bodies, no bodies gnawed to
death by insects. There are no practical bodies, no transient
bodies, no empty bodies, no blank bodies that twist between forgotten
body and dream.
