on coeurblanc

on cœurblanc

the collected weight of spent shells on the battlefield weighed more than all the slump flesh of the slain and at one point in the morning the sun reached a certain angle through the fog where it couldn’t be said whether the glints of the shells caught in the light or the reflection in the stillopen eyes of the new dead returned brighter and from that vantage it likely couldn’t even be said which is which. a mangy halfspaniel weathered in years navigated slowly through the massacred soldiers bodies scavenging for packbread rations or sugar pills that may have spilled from the pockets of the falling soldiers. in the est the dog saw the hastily built fence where the prisoners were being kept and sometimes if he got there early before the guards he could creep up to its perimeter where the prisoners spoke lovely to him and reached through the fence to caress his wiry silver fur and so he trotted over to the encampment and saw the tall man beckoned him and kissed the air but as he loped up tail flicking he heard the rattle and flunk of the meshguns pecking in the soil under his feet and he fled back down to the mute obscenity of that battlefield. from below he faintly heard arguments above and people yelling in the flood of the fog and he saw the skyward flash of fire and heard the echo of the tall man’s sobs and pleas as the shorter man went still, alight. the fog settled into the ridges outside the motion then inward and at some point between the inhale, exhale, inhale of the tall man the stillness was full and haunting.

–

clamshell worked her way along the pathway testing each brick individually. the manual test then the pedal test then on, off, on the infrared torch. first the manual observation take two fingers and run the grout slowly, slowly develop the map understand the pattern and the chemic meshing of the grit and ungrit. on the corner then left forty five degrees then two centimeters traced then forty five degrees into twelve centimeters then the corner repeated into a smalledge for six centimeters and then double that for the other edges she knew the length of a centimeter just by the pace of her hands. this brick a standard size and shape with no significant details and no variations notable. after thoroughly working down on it she would then pull a tidy notepad from the breast pocket of her khaki mucker and crib down her observations then replace the notepad and tap the pocket twice gently. she would do the pedal test again lean the toe in front to back then roll it cantwise on the left over to the right like she was taking a fingerprint her shinbone shipmast stiff moving economically then a quick stamp downward then two miniature percussive heelfalls then taking the notepad out and comparing the findings to the others and onward to brick three hundred forty eight. 

–

brick two hundred sixty one had recently been replaced and the grout hadn’t been mixed properly and when she traced its edges it unmade under her fingers. sixteen had been too small and the layers hadn’t accounted for the incongruencies which resulted at first in a vague change in direction which amplified into a catastrophic failure by the two hundredth. a hasty fat grub of grout was their solution and it looked miserable. the inflexible march of the indisposed and uncaring. after the manual test the on, off, on of the infrared torch the issuing of the light elemental and cubic. some dull carnelian worn down by the measure of footfalls impunctual and heavy over years. toe, heel, toe the double test. patience. log it all. monotone is perfection there are reasonable margins in everything repetition is nature’s most radical display of our perceptions. the evening wore on and the plummeting sun flashed photonically green its speckle sinusoidal along glass.

–

eight hundred fourteen. the manual test. minor curvature in the angles but just standard and worn down. grout spackled with cigarette ash and skeined brown from some accident with paint. on, off, on the infrared torch. collected on top were small accents of rain from the night before and pepper and clove off the shoes of the chefs inside. the musk of the kitchen roti, masala and men sweating into their hands pressing into their caps laughing freely. underneath the colors something entrusted to her benignly present unspoken. follow the procedures excitement is failure. the manual test again. perfection. on, off, on the infrared torch. clamshell stared down at the brick and was acutely acquainted with it. she dug a small flipknife out of a boot holster and shucked out the grout and as she gouged it came willingly to her accepting her designs. she finished and drove the knife home into its holster and kneeled down next to the space then pulled the notebook from the breast pocket and its total cleanliness was welcome in her hands. she opened to the marked page and drew a tight clean circle around the number eight hundred fourteen and wrote

seven o two am september twelve twenty forty four, after removal of the brick my confusion is only deepened but the matter at hand now is no longer to understand the what but the why and how.

she lifted the brick easily out of the dirt and underneath it a scrum of microbes turned away from the early beams. she examined the sides and the bottom and unticked the sack attached to her pack at her hip, opened the sack, slid the brick in edgewise, and replaced it at her hip. returning to her notepad

brick eight hundred fourteen found to be conform to expected standard dimensions but possessing no physical weight whatsoever.

clamshell spent the rest of the morning performing the tightly controlled rituals of the test confirming what she had already theorized. a thousand standard bricks somewhere between three point two and three point four kilograms and exactly one weighing zero point zero kilograms, absconded into her pack to be given further consideration in her apartment on dogshit boulevard. she lifted her bright sleepless eyes toward the east and felt the pavement produce itself just in time to meet her feet as she made her way back toward the bus stop. 

–

the city bus scudded into the platform at puffin street and thorpe seventeen minutes and four seconds past schedule the knobby scurled tires compromised against the curb and the bus door shrieked mutely as it opened catching for an instant halfway looking like the wild zipper of some jacket come stuck on the fabric. clamshell folded her pass between her palms open, closed, open again and flashed it to the driver then brushed hastily down the aisle about halfway the turbulence of the ride coming in waves rumbling and rough and she held the cross bar until it warmed under her hand and then she shifted it to a new still cool segment her eyes closed and rolling under their lids in the ugly restless fluorescence. she could feel the rough fibers of the seat clinging to her desperately like cilia as if she were plugged in the intestine of some mongrel bounding, bounding, bounding up out and through the enamel of the city with the streetlights tapping codes through the windows and if only she or any other passenger could decipher their postulates. they sped past the bicycles lined up tidily on port sofie outside the café where families dined on poached eggs with charred scallion and their coffee swirling in mugs with teaspoons laid sidelong and spent, children with their fists pressed apelike into the weary plastic benchcovers and when they pulled them off the recollection of their knuckles in the seat. they sped past the tenements at montlauré where cats pissed angrily in the stairwells and last year a man jumped off the third floor balcony head first in the middle of the afternoon but landed in the backseat of a candy painted convertible his neck bent unrecoverable and when the owner found him sweating and in shock he pulled him out of the rear and kicked the shit out of him which only hastened the jumper in dying but got the shit kicker life in prison where he was laughing, laughing, laughing at the intolerable irony. they sped past the clumsy gangland at humber’s cross where pistols rang in the air euphorically like ideas and the crack vials chimed in the stormdrains all hours of the day all days of the week and some junkie walked around in one sandal and a tee shirt that said claire valley debate club and asked you if you’re comin up or comin down but didn’t listen if you answered and if you said what he said what back. they sped past the orchards at rue daniele where plums and pears grew for miles, miles, miles and the field hands sang songs about rivers and gods and heaved their baskets in the wooly wet leaves late in the day and they rarely complained even though the pay was shit because they were working with their hands and the plums were sable black and fat and they could eat as many as they wanted because the orchard owners lived on the grounds and were tireless and gracious. clamshell knew she was getting close to her stop and patted her notebook twice neatly in the breast pocket and pressed the stop button but the signal did not respond and she pressed it again to be sure. as the bus scudded into the stop outside her apartment she stepped out holding the sack close to her body and felt weightless in the air before she hit the pavement but as she touched down she was harshly returned to our present earth weary from a lack of sleep though feeling a promise from the pack on her hip.

–

“do you know why there are twenty nine days in the month, or thirty? or thirty one?”

“it’s because of the moon or some shit, i thought?”

“ well, yeah, but why is october thirty one and why is february twenty nine and then sometimes twenty eight and so on? did you ever wonder what they were thinking?”

“honestly i just assumed it had something to do with grains or wine or festivals about sexual gods or whatever.”

“at one point yeah, maybe. now they think the romans were just obsessive about not using even numbers, like some roman emperor was just standing around stimming in his toga and honking down grapes wondering when the next harvest was going to be so he started inventing months and marking them on the calendar.”

“isn’t that kind of unlike the romans? didn’t they like, invent stoicism?”

“yeah, and concrete.”

“concrete? what?”

“yeah, the romans had this super special fucking concrete that even nasa can’t figure out how they made it so strong.”

“stoicism and concrete? that’s just the same shit, isn’t it? did the romans ever do anything that wasn’t mega autistic?”

“luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

“what is that, fucking seneca? i know you’re not quoting stoics at me right now.”

“i found another one.”

“wait… for real? and you’re just telling me now?”

“for real. and i’m just telling you now.”

“you gotta show me clams, i’m literally gonna die if you don’t.”

“okay, okay. but you still can’t tell anyone. and you can’t fucking touch it, i swear to christ.”

“i already told pickerel but he was so stoned on 5-hg he thought the cat was a payphone, he won’t remember”

“you cunt. i told you specifically not to tell pickerel.”

“it’s basically like i didn’t tell him.”

“that’s not how basically works.”

“are you gonna show me or not? i’m cool, clams. come on.”

“you are decidedly not cool man. that’s why we live together.”

“how am i supposed to keep being excited if you won’t show me and won’t even let me pick them up?”

“i don’t know big guy, you want to see it or not?”

clamshell retreated into her bedroom and pulled down the small chest where she was storing the items. she had found six so far the most recent one being brick eight hundred fourteen found at seven oh two am on september twelve elevation positive sixty eight meters and air temperature four degrees positive celsius relative humidity seventy one percent, coordinates on the blowers matrix twelve point four nord and six point one est. she had found the first one completely by accident, poking through vinyls at the record shop on cœurblanc where some clumsy stoned hipster had walked behind her with a mountain of records piled too high and bumped into the corner of the stand. they flew everywhere and even though she didn’t make him fall she still felt like somehow she was responsible but when she picked up the copy of muddy waters’ ‘at newport, 1960’ she felt its complete unburden in her hands and she knew immediately something was off so she hid it in the stacks and waited until he left to snag it and take it home. she played the record through top to bottom six times straight and as far as she could tell it sounded just like it should, even though she didn’t know the music. 

“god damn it, clams, just let me hold it for one second.”

“not gonna happen.”

–

the masts of kingly skyscrapers supplicate upward to the shallow sea of the sky baptising its children in hues urgent and broad as the streets below send their messengers perpendicular to build tirelessly as if one day the arrangement may precisely pluck the taut string of man’s enthusiastic inquiry which will mean all things est west nord south acutely mirror eachother in quadrant symmetry and meet meshlike toothlike folding in on each other and together all being swirled down the draining suckgutter at the center origin of it all grinning, grinning, grinning.

–

clamshell woke from her dream suddenly warm and strangled up in her sheets. the brick was still on her bedside table. why didn’t it float? she took it in her hand and held it sidelong over the edge of her bed and dropped it, to which it responded with a standard flunk. she picked it up and dropped it again. flunk. she got out of bed and returned it to the chest and the chest to the closet and then her body to the bed. it made no sense to her mechanically because vinyl records were a physical medium and if the record had no weight then how did the cartridge know which sounds to communicate and how could a brick with no mass support a person standing on it? which way could the vectors be pointing and with what amplitude? she stared up at the pucked ceiling and watched a furry small spider clappering across the peelpaint ridges clumsily and if she could see its lineages spread out in front of her she might alight at the multitudinous hordes of generations that had lived and died during the span of her one existence. she did not fall back asleep that night but watched as the spider climbed to the highest inverted peak of the ceiling above and went still as if to mock her, though it was only waiting for the mention of any shivering morsel flickering through the air. the dust settled into the ridges outside the motion then inward and at some point between clamshell’s inhale, exhale, inhale the stillness was full and haunting.

–

cœurblanc was only a short trip from her apartment and so on september thirteen five o four am temperature six degrees positive celsius clamshell set out to loiter around the record shop where she had found he first item. she carried the record in its cardboard shell inside its plastic slipsleeve and could feel the corners pressing the canvas of her bag outward against the back of her elbows and she walked briskly down the hills through the helmsridge past the alabaster albino doves that hung in dotted patterns on the power lines and waited for seeds and nuts left behind by the clumsy schoolchildren who played below in their cold pressed linen uniforms singing rosa, rosa, rosalina! and running in all directions outward like a ripple. she stopped at the fence and waved at the kids and they told her she had funny hair bashfully and giggling at each other and they said you look like our teacher are you her sister and she told them no my sister lives under water and the children gasped and ran kicking up dust immediately forgetting their fear but startling the doves who had come down to peck so they flicked back up to the powerlines above to wait and coo. 

–

she stepped into the low threshold of the record shop and smelled the sharp scent of black tea and saffron and felt whorls of smoke kiss her hair and neck. she nodded to the clerk and slipped back through the aisles to the section marked for blues records and then to the panel with the ‘w’ on it where there were two copies of other muddy waters records and one of the same recording she had in her pack. she stood the two of them up side by side six centimeters apart and removed the plastic slipsleeve from both and traced the ledges of each with two fingers. develop the map understand the pattern and the thirty two centimeres with a hard ninety degree at each edge in a square with no serious deviations between the two she knew the length of a centimeter from the pace of her hands. the copy in her possession was the one in better physical condition but the edges of both cardboards were flagged and curled roughly and they had white capillaries where hands and time had worn the ink off across the front of both cases she could make out the imprint of the record inside from sitting under a stack for decades and she saw where the round vinyl inside met the est west nord south edges of the paper case perfectly. on, off, on the infrared torch and the color played dumbly in the loud yellow so she stepped inward to hover over them slightly pulling both records out from their cases and laying them flat in front. she traced their perfect circumference along their bulged horizons ninety five centimeters three hundred sixty degrees the microgrooves spirallike a fingerprint specific to each record and the different atmospheric conditions minutely affective during their pressing. she flicked each one over twice in her hands and then on, off, on the infrared torch again and she started directly above each and worked downward in five degree increments at a time peering acutely into the grooves where the music spoke triumphantly in polyrhythmic dialects of physical waves that carry the miracle of sound. she briefly felt that she was able to recognize the patterns but then she lost them again and was determined and she ran their edges again monotonous with her hands knowing them intimately already but testing twice always to be sure this time leaving her handprint’s perspiration hovering just above its surface and then on, off, on the infrared torch and she was tuned to its dictation. she knew where to expect ridges troughs and perforations and she felt the hiccup of the static in her elbows as she hummed the riffs of the tunes and felt completely ethereal. she tucked it back into its case and its case back in the slipsleeve and took her body back to the front of the store where the clerk had been trying vainly to clean up the mess of incense ash that had lumped up on the counter and it had stained his hands all over and when clamshell asked him if he could play the record over the loudspeaker he took it in his filthy hands and left a handprint halfsplit over the front of the vinyl and when he dropped it on the turntable it caught halfway down the spindle and looked like it was floating weightless before he tucked it down onto the platter and dropped the tonearm.

“i got my brand on you…” sang muddy waters

“there ain’t nothin’ you can do honey… i got my brand on you…”

–

clamshell stepped down out of the darkened stoop of the record shop with the item tucked safely back into her pack now again pressing out into her elbows and she pondered what she had just learned if anything. had the record responded to her or she to it she didn’t know which was more likely or how any of it was even possible and she felt a thin electric chill run from her sternum up through her collarbones and down her arms like antennae. there was no pattern no thread no system no way to relate the items to each other and no reason they should exist in the first place. what was the function? they didn’t act any different and they didn’t look any different so the only thing notable about them was that she experienced them different and it was only then that she admitted to herself that she would need to let jupiter in on this experimental and foreign world of untied physics. a sweet young spaniel stepped out of a pile of garbage in front of her and stopped to bite at his paw and she reached down and gave him a sweet scratch under his speckled chin and he wagged and trotted off following clamshell’s trail backward from where she came and he stopped at the fence where the children spoke lovely to him and reached their hands through the fence to caress his wiry brown fur.

–

“you’re literally shitting me clams, this is just a normal brick. you just picked this up outside and now you’re fucking with me. give me the real one. or the unreal one. or whatever you call it.”

jupiter dropped the brick on the floor and it landed heavily with a flunk against the carpet.

“i’m not joking at all dude. give me that.”

she picked the brick up off the floor and it pressed into her palms in all the proper directions but she did not feel it pull downward.

“maybe i have to hand it to you”

and she dropped it into his outstretched hands but when it passed she saw the level of his unfit arms dip under its obvious weight, and he steadied himself against its gravity.

“clams this is easily the most shitty joke you’ve ever tried to pull. i mean what the fuck is actually even the punchline here? i’m honestly so sick of you dude.”

he picked the brick up into the air and held it over his head locking his elbow into place and swaying a little bit under it and suddenly he cranked his arm back and launched it straight into his bedroom door where it chunked through about three quarters of the way and sat lodged awkwardly and they both stared at it silently for twenty seconds or so when it angled itself out of the panel and fell to the floor with a defiant flunk.

“shouldn’t it just go right through shit? i mean you know like if it’s not made of anything or it doesn’t exist or whatever?”

“i think we can both fully agree that it exists at least as much as that hole in the door exists. and you’re for sure paying for that.”
“that’s actually not my fault at all clams, you obviously have to pay for that. that’s the punchline. you suck at jokes and now the door is fucking busted.”

“you’re honestly just a fucking slug jupiter.”

“ew.”

clamshell went back into the bedroom and grabbed the trunk of items and brought them back out into the common room where jupiter was holding the brick again passing it across his body. he lost hold of it onto the edge of the coffee table and it toppled across its width scratching a deep gouge as it tumbled. she turned the chest over and each of the other items clattered est west nord south to its own position on the surface and she and jupiter stood across from each other numbly glaring down at the mess they were making.

“we need a new coffee table too now, this one’s a piece of shit. we can’t have people thinking we actually live like this. look, it looks like you can see cœurblanc from here.” 

jupiter pointed down at the deep gouge that the brick made as it had flunked across the table.
“ sometimes i absolutel- ”

and then what jupiter said did a full revolution in her head and she grabbed her pack and folding knife and full sprinted out the front door of the apartment. left, right, left, the pounding pavement to the bus that would deliver her to blowers matrix coordinates twelve point four south and six point one west which arrives every twenty minutes on the twenties and is never more than thirty seconds late which gives her at most eighteen seconds to get there. she slips but doesn’t fall on a slick of garbage bags and makes it to the platform right as the bus scuds into position. the achingly pristine geometry of time. she folds her pass open, closed, open and shrugs by the driver and two passengers standing in the aisle and slumps into a seat at the back of the bus and in a few quick stops she is fast asleep. 

–

she was at the beach with her sister building sandcastles and her sister was telling her all kinds of long stories and she piled up a little lump of sand and carved it into a salt white heart and said remember that time when we saw mom and dad holding hands in the middle of the road. she had been in the water and lightly held clamshells sandy arm and left a slender dappled handprint fingers pointing inward toward clamshell’s chest. i’m going to live underwater clams. she exactly remembers how it happened and she remembers her sister whispering in steady tones directing her to count to one thousand using grains of sand from her palm and once she got to one thousand she was allowed to come find her. close your eyes and feel each one slide into the infinite rest of them. clamshell was frightened but she always trusted her sister and so she picked up a handful and started counting them out one two three. she couldn’t feel out their size and kept dropping too many at once and having to start over. once she got all the way to three hundred forty eight and the wind picked them all up and scattered them outward like a ripple and she let out a halfanimal primordial scream frustrated and the sound carried out across the lapping water. her sister was just knee deep and came back to her and told her it’s okay clams look, stand up so you block the wind and don’t try to pinch them just use your fingers to roll out a couple and then push them off one at a time. see you can feel them out with the pace of your hands. be steady. monotone is perfection. the morning wore on and the ecstacy of the golden sun speckled a tangent along water.

–

eight hundred twelve, eight hundred thirteen, clamshell felt a pull in her legs and neck and looked up instinctively to stretch out and her sister had floated so far out into the sea that she was no longer any bigger than one peck of sand in her palm but she was still floating on the water or so it looked. how did she expect her to come out to get her? eight hundred fourteen. she looked back down at the towel below and felt guilty for cheating. she stomped her foot heel, toe, heel in the sand clumsily to keep them from aching and stiffening and as she finally reached one thousand the sun had fully risen above the horizon and she looked up expecting that her sister would have come back shallower so she could come out and catch her in the waves but scanning, scanning, scanning she saw no sign of her. she slumped down next to the small salt white heart her sister had built in the sand and dug her hand into it and let the sand filter through her fingers into a little pile. the sand settled into the ridges outside the motion then inward and at some point between the ebb, flow, ebb of the waves the stillness was full and haunting.

–

their mother had once told them cœurblanc got its name from a folk tale of prisoners in a war who were kept in containment in two cells adjacent and fell in love the tall one would pass his packbread and beans through the links in the fence to the shorter one because he couldn’t bear to see him hungry and he had always been rail thin all his life anyway. the guards constantly jeered at them and whipped buckets of water at them but at night the shorter man would speak lovely to the taller man and reach through the links in the fence and caress his wiry black hair then one morning as the victorious militants were marching up the horizon to free all prisoners the shorter one was set alight burned to death by the guards out of spite and when the fire died down all that was left was his heart a tiny salt white prism at the core of the ash and when his tall love picked it up in both hands it crumbled into fine white dust finer than chalk and stained his palms eternally. their mother had told them that the street’s meridian runs directly along the same latitude as that fence once did and businesses and homes painted white handprints on their doors and couples walking down the street do so down the middle of the road holding hands tightly across the meridian line. she had told them that love is weightless and that all the melancholy and pain in the world might end if someone could just be patient enough to listen, listen, listen to the syllables spoken to us by the small electric signals that run beyond our eyes under our feet and through the smallprint of our hands.