The Memoria Hotel and the Fly That Dreamed It Was Time
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
She noticed the fly had been trapped between the windowpanes for exactly seventeen days, its position unchanged despite the daily sunbeam that should have moved it a fraction of an inch, and for the first time she wondered if time itself could be caught between glass surfaces like condensation. Perhaps the fly’s boredom had bred a kind of consciousness that its medieval compatriots lacked. It had measured one medium month-farthings of its own youth with the sirens’ orchesias and false suns and furbelows fluttering all about—it knew the moon in a half-grown way of its own. From sleep it could awaken into a flash of flame that no one else knew the nature of and forget what knowledge it once learned. Perhaps time had become, to these new men, what it always had been to the insects that lived through it, obscured by a matrix of perhaps this-now and maybe-that-next and what’s-the-difference-anyway, the short, unhurried days slipping through their jaws with grace. With that thought, in her mind’s ears a sudden chorus of bee-muffled insect voices dissolved to the rush of waves offshore.
“I’ll tell you another time,” she said.
He settled back on the table, watching her with soft, brown eyes, his desk one of the few against a faintly glowy, misty background where the sea eagles had set down their lamps. He stirred them in long, slow arcs, turning and contenting himself with a single unlimited sky. Memoria leaned back in her chair, trying to remember where she had left the opal, but her thoughts were many years old. Her eyes were heavy from the noise that lived within them, in their fleshly surrounds, her nerves crackling with static.
The cat settled down beside the desk to watch her. Memoria, on the edge of falling asleep, felt motionless, infinite. With a start she asked herself, had the cat always been in the room, or did it come from nowhere, and its eyes, a burning blush red shine. She would not remember if the sound had always been there, a massive metallic roar rising from the inner surface of the world, like trees in the last days of a winter fire, or did it arrive from nowhere. Somewhere else in the distant edges of her memory the vague skirts of a shape began to materialize; the strenuous roar of the pulses inside her began to disengage from space or sound and to tighten like wires, to fling at the mind’s ear, shred worse upon remembering.
“Virgins are made of wax because they break.” There were too many words on the page, the words were crawling. She was crying no words but her eyes kept crying. “Who wouldn’t rather die?” And already her parents had been dead for a decade and her colleagues for perhaps seventy years. She stirred the wind to warm her blanket and that moved her frame to other places in time.
Between dreams Memoria opened her eyes and saw — was already dreaming — that the hotel desk had turned upon itself stage-lighted from under, assembling into a vast phantom clockwork that continued to flicker with desperate yearning, to play hide-and-seek with the lampshades among the pianos and secretaries. How could she explain to the masses how all things between the glass swam in an infinite mediocre summer, the hot light dark, subtle as snakeskin, disturbing as clouds clouds losing their form. Wind whispers among the beast, the voice of the song of the bone Music itself seemed, in its purity, calamitous. She constantly stood on the limb from which she had just fallen, awake sometimes intimately and other times in darkness, dream without dream. She was all alone.
Meanwhile, beside the desk an invisible fly hummed the long spectrum of obscure desires that comprise the prestress on the wings of generation, a complex shade of storm cloud buried in rich imperceptible details. The window seemed to need wiping, or was this just one of Memoria’s odd forgotten afternoons. The room felt as if it had aged and this was why she was seeing it all as if with new eyes, suddenly knowing it to be a disguised temple, a setting for the rites of initiation, a room in which there was also no time. As she pondered this, however, she heard a rustling like liquid silk in a pillow and a deep voice said, “What shipcall are you?”
“Listen to me.” It was a black voice trembling with exhaustion, and the cat sprang silently from under the desk and glided soundlessly across the parquet floor as if a tiny bird hovered invisible just above it, and moved with the softness and self-motion of a dead hand. The kitten became the cat, and the, cat a hooded fox. “Stop this. Stop this nonsense at once, and get down on all fours.” Memoria sprang from her chair and felt a terror so cold it seemed to come from a great distance. That room was an airgiorgry, it was half past noon in the Memoria Hotel on not any planet she would ever actually see or hear about, but none in all that tank of blacks and greens which now had settled forever across her mind some minute gesture from a vanished morning of innocent youthful speculation, of starry nights, could tell her anything.
But she sat thus as the last tugboat with planks around its body sang beyond the windowpane, and let out a little sigh, and began to speak, clearly, sharply, without hesitation or more or less. Once there was raw fear in all these thoughts, horrific and sweet, but now they were all frozen crystal, and in place of her usual sense of being embedded in slides of notes describing fevered phenomena, there came to call a voice a-singing. It was the voice of that nameless brooding sorrowful spirit whose immanence bleeds away from the late wet songs of his field, and once upon a time a specteral storm boy had ridden a flirty ghost across the dunes. On their tongues a taste of a taste of icy moments, through steam windows and starry steppes and in the misty mud, the join the calm fuster to the great terrifying road, and arrive to form together the speed of young boys, the undersea cave where skeletons germinate in whips under the sands of eternity. They were wandering insects with one language and a single determined dream. His greedy bright soul swam up the green channel, intoxicated with every pipe of the waking world, only the surreal world was immortal. Hand in hand together and in great amazement, they pressed the horizon in perpetual crystal song.
In an instant she was no longer in the Memoria Hotel but inside a silvery fountain spawned in the most refused moment of the dead center, at the apex of some ancient winding labyrinth.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title