Member-only story
The Hole at the Heart of the World
The temple is empty. That’s the point.
“I open this awful machine. To nothing.” — Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, ‘Heart’s Arms’
How long has this been going on?
Waking bleary-eyed and cotton-mouthed. Empty bottles clinking with every stumbling step. Pulling open the blinds to swear at the sun and beat a clumsy retreat, one hand raised in a claw over eyes filled with sand. How many pointless decisions or non-decisions, how many bleating fears, how many missed chances and stony regrets does it take to make a life out of simple protoplasm?
It all trails out behind us, the contrail of a gleaming silver jet leaving fading scars across a shrugging sky. Everything matters, or nothing does.
Everything mattered once.
In a cheap hotel room in Portland, I saw a vast future opening up in front of me through a tear in the filmy gray curtains. I said goodbye for the last time to a silver-eyed woman on the platform of a subway station in Vancouver, then saw her again and wished that I hadn’t. In a tiny hotel room in the worst part of town, the carpet smelled of bear spray. The staff knocked on the door every day at noon to check that no one had died in the night. Sometimes they had.
