PASSE-PARTOUT: Book Two, Chapter 9
The room of the cabin was renewed. There was a couple of sacks of dried meat, a blanket made of pelts, and three rolls of parchment. The keeper wouldn’t let Cype give him anything in return, but only said that he wanted to repay Amos in some way. Cype told him that he could not let him do that, and that if the keeper needed anything, to wait until Cype returned the following week and he would repay the favor. The keeper had smiled and said, “I will not, but I look forward to seeing you next week. I want you to tell me more about the old man, about Amos.”
Cype had rolled one of the pieces of parchment out on the table and cut it to the exact size of one of Amos’s “completed” scripts. The parchment was rougher than Amos’s…perhaps the old man had prepared the surface for the writing. Cype stoked the fire, blowing on the fire, and when he was sure that he wasn’t going to get the flames hot enough, he removed the blanket from one of the windows, hoping that the winter wind would fan the fire. He looked at the kernel in the center of the fire, picked up the nib with the tongs and placed it into what seemed to him to be its whitest, most intense part. The nib sat, but over a few minutes, it again took a red hue, changed to orange, and then, again, to white.
He was careful not to put too much pressure on the nib with the tongs as to not bend or distort it, lest he ruin the instrument. He removed it from the fire and placed it again in the stylus. His hands ached in the heat of the nib, and he wondered how the old man had been able to stand it. Cyprus sat on the bench and leaned over the parchment, not realizing that he was in the exact position of creation that Amos had assumed hundreds of times over their separate years. He picked a smooth place just off of the center of the piece and began to draw. The wisps of smoke again raised into the air and were again moved out of the window and into the dark.
He whispered into the air, “What do I write, Amos? Do I let the pen move me?”
He moved the pen in circles, but, feeling that he was wasting the pen and paper, decided to do as Amos did, to draw in words. He did not know the language that the old man had used, so Cype decided to use his own. He began to write the stories that he had heard when he was a boy. Stories that his mother and father had told him when they tried to ease him to sleep. Stories that Amos himself had told him—stories meant to soothe him in the loss of his father. Those came so easily. He had told them to his own children.
He stopped and placed the stylus on the table. His children. The stories he had given them would be lost in the air forever. He began to weep, and his tears fell from his cheek and onto one of the lines, sweeping bits of char along with it. Cype wiped the parchment and it smeared across the page. A sting of memory struck his heart, reminding him of all those that left him. That he left. At one time, he had almost forgotten the old man, now he had forgotten his children, his wife.
“Is this what you wanted me to do? To suffer for letting you go? To have my sorrow writ in ash?”
A tearful sob caught in Cype’s throat, and he rose from the bench, picked up the stylus, and removed the now-cool nib from its nest. He walked to the fire and sat on the pallet, turning the nib over and over in his fingers, trying to stifle the surges from his chest. In every other rotation, the nib caught a gleam from the fire, and it twinkled, a spark held in his bare hands.
He picked up the tongs and placed the nib again in the fire, then moved to the table to wait for it to be ready. The wind gusted through the window and carried with it a wave of dust, pitting Cype’s skin, grinding under his eyelids. He raised his hands and began to rub at his eyes.
“This is foolishness. Why did you come here?” he thought. “Because you have nothing to leave behind. You ran away because you were scared. Because you are a coward. Your family didn’t just die. They left, and they didn’t want you to follow.”
He picked up his filled cup and poured a little water into each eye, letting it drip down the sides of his face. He breathed a deep, aching breath into his chest and slung the cup against the wall. The wooden vessel cracked in two and water flew onto the wall and floor. Cype paused, then walked over to the cup and picked up the halves and placed them on the table. He looked at pieces and began again to retreat into his mind. The million guilts began to corrode him and he felt himself being eaten away.
A log on the fire snapped in two and threw a fan of embers onto the floor. Cyprus’s eyes caught the light, and he turned his head to face the fire. The nib was white as sun on water. He retrieved the nib, reassembled the stylus, and began to write again. “I will write until I cannot write. I will write until I cease.”
The stories once again stanched into the parchment. Cyprus pushed and pulled the pen into stories, into memories, into the slights the world visited upon him, the slights one revisits as one waits for sleep on quiet nights. He wrote poems, prayers, curses, recipes, challenges. He wrote words for no reason. And, as each hour melded with the next, his words, letter by letter, formed into lines and each line grew into others. Where Amos had grown buildings and towns out of the remaindered ash of parchment, Cyprus’s mind evolved something different onto the page. He could not recognize it yet, but Amos would have. Amos would have seen that the words that were being written were no longer the words that Cype could have understood. Amos no more understood the glyphs he himself had composed any more than a fish would have understood the open air. They just were.
When Cype had exhausted, he pushed himself back from the table and looked at what he had burnt in. There were beginnings of columns, stumps planted into the beginning traces of what might be called a foundation of a building. Here and there were curves that were likened in his mind to faces. (He thought one of them looked like it could be Amos.) But, the words. The words had turned foreign to him. Cype traced the lines to what he thought was the beginning, but those stories were no more intelligible to him than the script at the end.
“This is what you did, isn’t it? This is what you wanted to finish.”
The nib had grown cold again and Cyprus picked it and the stylus up and placed them in the box. He rolled Amos’s work into a scroll and placed them alongside them. Then, he took his own, folded it as a square and placed it in the pouch that Amos had left for him.
He laid down on his pallet, looked into the fire, and fell into an exhausted sleep.
A small wisp of smoke flew from the windows of a stone house in the crevice of the mountain and dissipated as it lingered upon the wind’s hands. Its ghost moved through the trees of the forest, curled around dried tendrils of grasses on the forest floor and finally came to rest upon the ground. The ghost fell through the dust and lighted upon two sockets containing what had once been eyes but had fallen to blood in torment. Fingers clawed at the ghost in the “eyes” and the mouth began to vomit the grisly whine of the dead.