Uncorrected Proof: Locations and text – 2

from Uncorrected Proof

….’He would not accept the logic of the hermeneutical geography written into maps of this A to Zedded city, deciding in truth it consisted only of a river and a handful of canals. Obsessed by his own diagrams he walked half-crazed by insomnia in a defacing January sleet. Finally, his hands and feet almost frozen solid, he stared across a narrow waterway at a darkened building. The broken windows told him he had found his destination, even though he found no street or house number. He stood on the threshold of his own future. After several fruitless attempts to find a boat, a canoe, a piece of wood even to help him get to the other side, he walked in the nearby streets until he found an entrance with Chiselinghale Studios written above the door. But this entrance proved just as enigmatic as getting to it from across the waterway. Returning to the point where he first witnessed its sublime decadence, Alessandro now ventured into the icy stream. Half-drifting, in and out of a delerium of pain, half swimming as if in a dream, holding his seaman’s canvass holdall aloft, he floated like a corpse, an ice floe, until he was able to claw his way up onto a concrete path on the other side. He lay shivering, staring up at the pitiless disk of a moon. The sky that had remained closed throughout his long ordeal was now open. He took this as a sign he would succeed. Climbing somehow to his feet he found a ladder of metal bars built into the brickwork and clattered up, his feet hitting the iron in tune with his chattering teeth. Forcing his way onto a small empty terrace he lay stretched out, numbed into comatic silence, in a bed of sodden leaves. He might easily have slipped into a true coma, his story never told, had he not spied a broken window latch fifteen feet or so above his head. He forced himself to stand. An icy wind was blowing hard as he clambered up a water pipe. Opening the window he pushed his bag before him and with the last of his strength pulled himself inside.

He fell several feet onto a tiled floor and lay in a darkened bathroom as if the survival of his soul depended on an eternity of referred pain. Some time later, he has no idea how long, he stood shakily, amazed there was no blood on his skin, no split bones in his head. The pain almost subsided in the rhythmic slap of his water-soaked shoes on concrete. The echo his limp made calmed the confusion in his heart. He negotiated dark empty corridors, knowing only by instinct how to procceed. At the end of the second hallway he found a room with a bed made up. He threw off his wet things and climbed shivering in between the sheets. He lay there drifting in and out of a parody of death, his mind reproducing one recurring image: a blank white page with an exclamation mark in the middle, Alessandro staggering across an icy waste, peering into a black hole and falling into an entire epoch of forgotten history. Only a voice speaking out of that empty wilderness broke the void his mind had discovered. “Who are you?” the voice said in a language from another universe. Lifting his head, Alessandro stared at an indistinct form, replying with all gravity he could muster to befit the solemnity of the moment. “I am Alessandro Scrittone, orfar, come here on divine orders.”
With that he collapsed back onto the pillow and fell into the dreamless winter of bears.’…..

Uncorrected Proof by Louisiana Alba pp52-53 published by ElephantEars Press