Don’t worry about who I am. Don’t guess my appearance. Believe that I exist. Now picture a ninth birthday party. The child holds no belief in gods, powers, or life immortal. A shimmer passes through the cramped kitchen window that illuminates the gathering of this small, strained, and sickly family. The child sees the shimmer yet also stares right past it down to depopulated streets and the picked-thin hills beyond. The child understands deeply, and not at all. Both gazes are true at the same time. You the mortal and I the other both know that water is formless. It can be held but not grasped. The child looks away, and at command, expels breath.
The nine candles’ thin emissions rise and lend a fleeting definition to the shade newly present in the room. For a moment the child espies them: twin eyes set inside something cold and dark from outside of time. It is I. I am not a deathly thing, but I am a thing which surely does not know death. The child consults from left to right. No-one else sees this watcher, hanging half-defined in the distorting smoke. Nobody sees what the child sees. Nobody feels what the child feels. And yet the child is not insane. This shimmer is its own. We are to be companions.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Don’t ask if I’m a boy. Don’t ask if I’m a girl. The answer is don’t think about it.
All I ask is quietness and acquiescence: habits I practiced to help keep the angel secret. To be a good child who goes unnoticed. Unfettered by correction.
My mother never asked why I became distant. She made no remark upon the inflating hours I spent in my room. My father had died. She never asked me if I missed him. I returned the favour and never interrogated her either. I never asked about her own ninth birthday. Whether or not on that day a cold, dark thing had drifted in unseen and attached itself to her.
My father was quiet and obedient like me. Because of this I never knew him very well, and his death set that lack in stone. I have only one striking memory of him: the man standing in silhouette against a placid grey sea, one hand in his pocket. Turning away from me. For most of the next year, in fact most of my childhood, I fixated on finitude. Over and over I tried to picture my terminal moment. We all move toward our own, I reasoned, so why not process it in advance? One method I tried a lot was screwing my eyes shut and pressing my fists against my lids to make strange colours appear. I imagined this might be a thing which dying people, confused and fading, are forced to perceive. Whenever she spotted me playing this game, my mother lifted my hands away and kissed my forehead, but she never asked why I did it.
For more than ten years, my angel never spoke to me. Instead it guarded me. All my attackers, cast to the floor. Cruel words cut short by power unseen. Gradually I came to the conclusion that this ‘angel’ was not an invasion from outside, but some weird outgrowth of my own psyche. Reading about Freud and Jung brought me to ideas about the unconscious. Surely, from nine years old, I had been channelling my own powers to create this angel. After all, I needed all the help I could get. I was reading difficult books. Browsing odd websites. I didn’t smile. My laughter was a little too loud. I was that kind of teenager. High school ought to have been hell for an easy target like me. But because of my angel, it was bearable.
At university I made a very interesting friend. He was real. He was from overseas and had an overseas name, but he demanded we all call him ‘Quentin.’ Nobody ever came closer to uncovering the secret of my angel than Quentin.
The world’s economy was in decline and our nations were heading for war, but Quentin did not care. He spun tales set in examination halls and astride ink-black mountains. He spoke of walled cities, wandering masters, caged birds and crystal-thread streams and churning flood-plains, the coupling of transcendental ascent and total dynastic collapse, the needless slaughter of millions…and pervading between the gaps: a bubbling aether overpopulated by spirits and low gods. I will let you guess which country Quentin comes from.
Quentin studied bioscience, but like me, he believed in the conundra behind flesh and light. Three months after our first meeting, he told me outright: whenever we were ‘alone’ together, he sensed in the room the presence of a noumenon. It was an extremely persistent intuition, and so, seeking to resolve it, Quentin decided to show me how to play Pen Fairy.
In the secret lament of vagrant scholars too gentle to flourish in this vulgar world and in the rushed insistences of scorned monks, their papers burned and their ashes buried, you can find the instructions for this dark game. And you can read them online too.
All you need is two or more people, a sheet of paper, and a pen or brush. You mark the paper with glyphs for MALE, FEMALE, YES, and NO. Pen Fairy is an ancient rite, but the culture it belongs to is neither rigid nor extinct. Therefore, you may add a Latin alphabet and Arabic numberset to your sheet.
Quentin and I were living in Edwardian housing repurposed for poor students. We chose a date near Christmas, when every housemate except we two had returned home. We set up in the spare bedroom on the top floor. It seemed safer that way. Unclaimed territory. Non-space. No man’s land.
The rules of the game state that inside every pen dwells an omniscient immortal. The purpose of the game is to interrogate that immortal, the so-called ‘Pen Fairy’.
Pen Fairy will ‘belong’ to one of the players of the game. Pen Fairy may be that player’s ancestor or a ghost unknown. Whether Pen Fairy was, is, or ever could be human is a question for the philosophers. You must use your very first questions to ascribe an identity to Pen Fairy.
A gender. An ‘owner.’
Pen Fairy knows everything, so, you can ask it anything…within certain bounds.
Don’t ask Pen Fairy how it died. Pen Fairy may never have died at all.
Don’t ask Pen Fairy ‘desire questions.’ This is inviting disaster.
Don’t ask Pen Fairy to befriend you. This bond blossoms best with a boundary between.
At games’ end, say goodbye to Pen Fairy. Sweetly, if you can. A bitter parting is a parting incomplete, and a sentence without its stopping mark runs on forever, seeding discord in the universe.
Quentin and I sat. We laid the paper on the desk between us and each clasped the pen. As my friend’s warm, pasty fingers interlocked with my own, I felt ashamed of how thin and cold my own must feel. No matter, I told myself. Focus. Follow the rules. No elbows on the table, pen’s tip in paper’s dead centre. We spoke the first line together:
“Pen Fairy, Pen Fairy, I am your descendant. You are my past life. If you wish to begin, please draw a circle.”
Nothing happened. Failure, I assumed, but then I thought I saw the lamps glimmer when Quentin asked, “Pen Fairy, are you there?”
Our hands began to move. They guided the pen until before us, marked on the paper, was a perfect circle. Channelled by our shaking hands, the pen traced its way to the YES glyph. I tried to speak, but Quentin hissed me quiet then mouthed ‘your turn,’ so I gathered my resolve and asked Pen Fairy—my angel, I was sure of it now—a question that I generally detest, but which nevertheless the rules dictated:
“Pen Fairy, are you male or female?”
MALE the pen said, and then veering backward declared: FEMALE. Then once more back to MALE, FEMALE, MALE, FEMALE. And next, YES, NO, YES, NO…
In that moment, I suspected that Pen Fairy had confirmed my theory. My angel was a part of me. It was my soul-tool. I am both and neither male nor female, and my angel conforms to this.
“Pen Fairy, are you mine?” Quentin asked.
NO
“So are you mine?” I tried.
A pause. Nothing, then…the pen leapt.
YES
I was more stupefied than shocked, but aimed to present as the reverse. Quentin wore a smile troubled by the fear it masked. Without a scrap of strategy, we began our conversation with the noumenon.
Pen Fairy told us that Quentin would get rich and I would not. Pen Fairy told us we would both make our parents proud. Pen Fairy told us neither of us would marry happily. After that particular revelation, we stuck to trivial questions. At games’ end, just before we said goodbye to Pen Fairy, it moved its pointer, unprompted, to the two as-yet untouched rows of glyphs marked on the foot of the paper. The Latin alphabet. With slow precision, Pen Fairy spelled out a new question. A question for us:
MAY I BE YOUR FRIEND
I felt the lamps glimmer again. I glanced around the room, scanning for a malformed shadow. A distortion in the light. An item out of place. Any penetration of the norm, however marginal. But there was nothing. Only the spare room, and the desk and lamplight we had brought to it. No clue as to which point in space my angel occupied. Perhaps it was inside the pen. Perhaps it was embedded in a mote of dust, floating behind my head. Perhaps it was already fleeing like gas from a vent, like feathers from a fan, through the entry-points of my skull. Sinking without friction through the placid surface of the grey ocean resting hidden in my core.
‘No!’ yelled Quentin, breaking both his silence and my stupor. ‘No!’
I opened my mouth. I was going to go against my nature. I was going to disobey.
“You can’t!” Quentin insisted aloud, but I hissed him quiet and replied to Pen Fairy.
“Yes. You can be my friend…on one condition. Tell me…are you…no. Were you once my father?”
A pause. And then I felt Quentin’s interlocked fingers digging into my own, trying to prevent the delivery of the next message, but the will of the spirit was inexorable. In that moment, I really did believe the being was the postcarnation of my father, preserved within the pen. The man I wished to speak with more than any other. I believed it to be so because I wanted to believe it to be so. There is no fallacy more human.
I AM NOT WERE
“What?” I protested, but the spirit continued…
I AM NOT WERE I AM NOT WILL BE I AM ALL AT ONCE
“…how?”
I AM BEYOND A GATE YOU CANNOT PASS
“So you’re a ghost.”
NO
“Why not?”
For two seconds my question hung suspended, and then Pen Fairy rushed to communicate with such force that Quentin and I almost lost hold of its medium.
ACROSS ALL OF TIME OF FLESH I AM NOT NOR CAN BE TRUE NATIVE FOR IN THE COLD AND DARK CORE OF TIME I AM EMBEDDED IN THE ETCHING OF MY NAME FOREVER UNSPOKEN
I could see in Quentin’s watering eyes and feel in his shuddering grasp that he understood as little of this long and ominous message as I. He might very well end the game soon. So I took another risk. “Pen Fairy. You’re a god, aren’t you?”
THERE ARE NO GODS
“But will you die?”
UNTIL TIME COLLAPSES I WILL EXIST
I took a breath. “You’re lucky, Pen Fairy. You never have to face the awful wrongness of it all. The pointless, hateful…waste. You’ll never have to fear the trap you were born inside.”
I AM SUBJECT ONLY TO THE CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT FLESH
Quentin’s once eager face turned sour. I’d always hidden this side of myself, even from him. My fear. My disconnection. My fixation on the unsurpassable. That boundary beyond which the human mind ceases to perceive. In a way I had always lived on its edge. He mouthed his pleas to stop, but I wished with all my heart to disobey. I wished to know this bodiless thing which I had long and wrongly believed to be little more than my own tool.
SO MAY WE TWO BE FRIENDS
“Yes,” I assented.
The pen dropped from our hands. Quentin rose and fled without a word. Poor Quentin. He did not know that he would never speak to me again. Not my true self.
That night, when stars replaced sun and I sat in solitude with a cold tin of beer and an open book, it happened. My angel invaded and overcame me, and though we were both It and I at once, both a synthesis and a separation, a void and a body occupied, it held the reins. I was relegated to somewhere removed. I was diminished. My angel held me there—as a prisoner or a passenger, a guest or a taxidermied animal—in my own body.
My angel never said a word to me, but I could not hate it. Often it would sit in lonely places and use what were once my hands to draw pictures in charcoal. Sometimes it drew battered landscapes and collapsing cities. Sometimes it drew the faces of fatigued passers-by, down to every last line or as scraps of refracted impressions or as both at once, rendering the figure embodied as light, darkness, as flesh, body, emptiness. Sometimes it drew people I hadn’t seen in years. It knew everything about me and could impersonate me perfectly. It had nothing to learn; it only need conceal that which was extraneous to the persona it had adopted. Quentin, for example, never knew that my doppelganger spoke his language. In fact it spoke every language. It knew every word and every name of every thing in existence.
Using the body that was once mine it finished university, quietly pursued a career, and cared for my mother when she grew sick. From my diminished position I felt approximations of warmth from the world outside, despite the onslaught of storms, the onset of new wars, and the slow unravelling of civilisation. But I did not fight to return. Here I will admit that to surrender the body, to live between wakefulness and sleep, to concede all struggles, all justifications, all explanations, all delight and all deprivation and every failure upon failure…is a relief. My angel possessed all the wisdom and experience I had so achingly lacked in my own life. It knew its own path. It had neither fear nor pride. Its navigation of the decline of mankind in the 21st century was flawless. Minute. Frictionless. That is more than you can say for any human born without consent into this unjust world, where small acts of kindness are the isolated exception to a law of rapacious consumption.
Once a year my angel sat down at the window of its riverside home, and produced a pen and paper. In small geometric letters, it would write a story. The stories were never quite the same, but they were always about my father. They were always an amalgam of memories: unadorned, or adjusted, or improved, or invented, or of possible futures. In not one of the stories did my father die just before my ninth birthday. After drafting the story and revising it, my angel would burn the original copy, write the whole again from memory, and at the first available opportunity, perform a reading. Sometimes in bars, sometimes with friends, and sometimes—while she lived—to my mother. When the body that had once been mine grew too old for long ventures, the angel would read the stories to itself, aloud.
When the body that was once mine died, I died soon after. Water is formless. It takes the shape of that which contains it. As death opened the gates of perception and the last colours danced, I sensed my angel leaving. It did not know death. It could not die. It tells my story now.
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
Long after the last civilisations burn away, when stars are dust and echoes do not emanate and the decay coded into existence outpaces itself, time collapses and all who survive to bear witness are with me now, hounded by causality, sheltered on the head of a pin. The final iteration of the consciousness without flesh cannot see past this moment; with the end of time comes also the end of our certainties. I have guesses and sentiments left. Such things are borrowed, learned, imitated; tacked on to the hollowness at my core. All is illusory, and soon to be null. All is sentiment, incorrectness, void. And yet…without my consent…one such sentiment possesses me, here at the end of everything. I think to myself: how I miss that cynical, innocent, heartbroken nine-year-old. How I wish my little friend could be with me