The Logbook of Cillius: Maintenance Records from a Lighthouse That Never Existed
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The logbook entry for October 23rd is identical to October 22nd except for one detail: the storm that never came is described as having lasted exactly seven hours, with waves cresting at precisely 2.1 meters. The handwriting is mine. The ink is fresh. I haven't used the storm gauge in thirty years—it rusted solid the year the last supply ship didn't come. But tonight I dreamt of a red hull breaking through fog that smelled like cinnamon, and woke to find my boots still damp with seawater that wasn't there yesterday. I feel for the storm gauge to be certain it is still where I left it, soaking in the wet sand. It feels like sound plaster, felt like porcelain. Like I recall, but certainly not like I could verify. A brief flash of ice-white memory makes me panic and sleepwalk, feel along the old rail until I find what I'm looking for: uselessly familiar. Toothpicks for driftwood, as I already knew they were. The sky is dusted with flakes instead of moonlight, the flakes drifting to earth not soft and comforting as snow, but dense and sharp as needles, tumbling through the black sky in heaps as if grown from gravity itself by way of some hideous sorcery. I have already lost my footing three times and scuffed the small toe of my left boot. Nine degrees of arc towards the stars. My arm muscles are numb and rigid from gripping the rail. The cold is not severe, but it is invasive, like ice in my veins instead of blood. I'm not sleeping, but time is going on, and my arm is no longer capable of lifted. Below the stars the glittering foam is drawn into a turbid vortex by forces invisible to the naked eye, visible only on a photographic negative. Along the rim, the beads of moisture and crystals of salt conspire to spell out the word "paradox," carved into the glass, then swept down into the dark and lost. The pen is useless now, exhausted as I am after final industriousness, pressing shell upon unbroken eggshell cannot be made whole. At last I am forced to capitulate, to surrender the passenger side of this floating stage to the dark itself. And as the second hand sweeps gloatingly down to midnight, I finger the storm gauge ever so cautiously and yet somehow deep down the knowledge comes that I have felt nothing, I have held nothing, this afternoon seemed a long time ago, four o'clock seemed a long time ago. I open my notebook and write one word: "CILLIUS." The letters are void of midnight deep beneath my bed, a square glass does not shatter itself, but delaminates layer after spinach layer and pulls into the thin whorls of an infant's first image, splintering the glass like aimless strafing. As my face appears in the glass, for the first time I realize thanks in part to the◆ About the ending
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