At the age of thirteen, I went to my first concert. It was performed at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska by Gwen Stefani—Gwen, the modern blonde bombshell, fashion maven, and self-declared American ambassador of all things Harajuku. The performance was part of her Sweet Escape Tour. She slid up and down the stage, platinum hair set unwavering on top of her head, accompanied by four dollish Asian women who mouthed lyrics, fluttered hands, swayed their asses to the beat of “Wind It Up.” My then-best friend, who had invited me to the concert, waved her renegade camera in the air (no smartphones yet in 2007). To sneak it past security she’d hidden it in an empty tampon box. Her younger brother, forced upon us by her mother, fell asleep in the row in front of us.



For the next few months, I would listen to Gwen’s “Hollaback Girl” on repeat on my MP3 player, lying on top of the cool sheets in my parent’s bedroom. It was July, but their windows faced west, so in the late afternoons the room was always cool and dark, permeated by that kind of woozy clarified shadow which filters through Venetian blinds. Sometimes, my friend and I would sit, bare-kneed on the hot cement in her backyard or mine, and we would look up pictures of how to tease our coarse black hair into perfect ringlets. It was the summer after seventh grade. She was more popular than I was, and she always wanted to make me over by painting my nails, as if a different color were the secret to a second skin.



The highlight of that summer was when she received, as a birthday present, a set of Harajuku Lovers fragrances, including bobble-headed bottles of Love, Angel, Music, Baby, and Gwen herself wearing plastic Marilyn Monroe hair and a so kawaii outfit. For those who don’t know, Love is the pretty one, Angel is the sporty one, Music is the artsy one, and Baby is the cool one. Gwen is the leader of their posse. In commercials and music videos, she stands in front; their images are encompassed by hers. In the bathroom, my friend would choose one of the Girls, perform a temporary decapitation (the spray nozzle was underneath the bobble head), spray her wrist and necks, and set the little bottle on the counter, where it would sit smiling among its sisters. I would imagine that the little perfume figurines had travelled all the way from their native land: Tokyo’s Harajuku fashion district, an expanse spreading from Harajuku Station to Omotesando, where, according to legend, otakus roamed freely in their dark makeup, Lolita dresses, and almost-perfect curls.



And then I would be so bored, in my hot midwestern summer with my nails painted a sparkly pink, quickly chipping as I dragged them back and forth over concrete sidewalks. I wondered how Gwen’s Harajuku Girls got to be so beautiful—and they were beautiful, though always silent. Only Gwen ever sang, or spoke. The Girls only meowed, sometimes, dressed in cat costumes with black whiskers streaked on their porcelain faces, in the music videos or under bright concert lights, their red-red-lips barely moving save to replicate that cattish “O”. A round spot of blush on both cheeks, a cultivated body, a patch of red on the lips—was that really all it took?



As if in answer, an emphatic “No” comes from Harajuku district, in the 2000s dominated by Japanese street fashion. In the first years of the millennium, a movement gains momentum called Decora, which takes accessorizing far beyond even the standard set by Gwen and posse. In Decora, beauty is found in excess. A Google image search produces pictures of Decora girls—and boys—wearing colorful wigs, long socks, a medley of layers, and ring upon necklace upon bracelet upon ring. In a documentary, a Decora girl says she takes two hours to put on her outfit before heading out to walk the streets with a group of similarly-dressed friends. Some cover their mouths with faux medical masks, as if guarding against a disease of plainness, the dull life of a salaryman or woman.



A secret: There is no such thing as a single Harajuku Girl. She is a block of city by the train station, she is fantasy, she is pure Gwen creation. In the Harajuku district, if you take a walk around the block, the women are mostly civilians. The humdrum crowd is occasionally interrupted by a variety of mostly young people, teenagers, pimpled and sweating under a vast array of subculture styles, wearing gothic Lolita dresses, or covered in pastel amulets, or smelling faintly of hairspray. They are not all alike. They are not all beautiful.



***



I couldn’t quite tell the Girls apart when they were onstage. Their outfits were different, each one embroidered with her name—Love, Angel, Music, Baby—but their makeup was the same. Perhaps they were intentionally cast that way, but I couldn’t tell them apart however I tilted my head. Gwen calls their identity a ping-pong match of culture, America bouncing back the best of couture Japonais. The Girls don’t speak in public, by contract. They hover around Gwen like four silent familiars or human Decora accessories. I wonder if they all use their own perfumes, beheading and recapping their tiny selves each day.



But perhaps Gwen is right, and cultural back-and-forth is an accurate description. A slice from the Japanese side of the table: One of Japan’s most popular pop phenomenons, a girl group called Morning Musume, will turn seventeen this year. Fear not, the group members never become old. Membership is renewed as older performers “graduate” and fresh girls move up the ranks. The group has become a veritable institution, a nation in and of itself, fueled and fed by fans ranging from preteen girls to adult men. This year marks the twelfth generation of performers. The girls grow up together, perform together, and promote themselves together.



Morning Musume’s mastermind is a bleached blond man-child who goes by the name “Tsunku.” In photos, his face is surgically smooth, and he’s usually surrounded by his girls, who pout and make victory signs with their hands. Until the early 2000s, Tsunku headed his own band, a Japanese rock group called Sharam Q. Nowadays, he commands the Hello! Project, a vast network of interchangeable girl groups of which Morning Musume is but the flagship. Hello! Project has a performer for every taste. The name of the groups sound like space cadet units in some alternate universe, where fruit and dessert names are bubbled with sexual references: Pocky Girls, Shugo Chara Egg!, Coconuts Musume, etcetera. One popular group, Minimoni, auditions performers with the caveat that their height must be under four feet eleven inches.



Members are moved from group to group as the need arises and as their ages change, but over the entire empire presides the constant and omnipotent Tsunku. No matter the group, Tsunku designs the costumes, writes the songs, determines the makeup, and choreographs the dances. No matter the group, the girls are expected to remain virginal, at least in public. In 2007, the same year as Gwen’s Sweet Escape tour, group member Yaguchi Mari (Morning Musume, founder of Minimoni) was caught in a relationship with a member of a boy band. She was eventually ejected from Hello! Project. Despite their enforced purity, the girls are each expected to publish swimsuit photo books for their fans, the sales of which are so popular that they require their own charts.



Tsunku says his role is benevolent. He has said that his girls are so busy with their performing lives, that they don’t have time to experience the normal emotions of adolescence—so he recreates those emotions for them in the lyrics, the thoughts of a teenage girl written by a middle-aged man. A typical Musume music video involves choreographed group dance with kawaii hand gestures, elaborate baby-doll dresses, simple upbeat lyrics, and plenty of computer-generated sparkles. The singing is nearly purely choral. Everyone opens their mouths at the same time, and even if one voice is singing, it comes as an overlay as the performers strike poses and smile into the camera. Like the performers themselves, the songs resist time. A section of 1997’s “Morning Coffee” could be transplanted into 2014’s “What is Love” with little notice from fans.



Tsunku’s imaginings must strike some marketable chord. Morning Musume has sold about 18 million album copies in Japan alone. The American market, however, has proven harder to crack. Morning Musume’s second ever concert in the States was held at the Best Buy Theater in New York on October 2014—a single 4 p.m. show on a Sunday, it was hardly a knockout event. Perhaps American audiences are uncomfortable with the power dynamics and sexual politics governing the group members. More likely, though, the ultra-cute aesthetic and ultra-synchronization, not even translated from Japanese language, had not quite found their place in the American pop lexicon.



This miscommunication has forced American audiences to depend on the cultural translation of performers such as Gwen Stefani. Like Tsunku, she becomes the intermediary between reality and representation. The lyrics to her song “Harajuku Girls” are easy to understand:



 



You’re looking so distinctive like D.N.A.,



?Like nothing I’ve ever seen in the U.S.A.?



Your underground culture, visual grammar?



The language of your clothing is something to encounter



A Ping-Pong match between eastern and western



Did you see your inspiration in my latest collection?



Just wait ‘til you get your little hands on L.A.M.B.



’Cause it’s super kawaii, that means super cute in Japanese.?



The streets of Harajuku are your catwalk, bishoujo you’re so vogue.



 



But what exactly is she translating? Does she draw upon the aesthetics of Morning Musume or the titular Harajuku district? If so, are the girls of the real Harajuku district mimicking a mass produced pop culture, or are they subverting it through excess? Japan is silent on the matter; few people in the country are fans of Gwen. Like Morning Musume’s lackluster appearance in the States, Gwen’s Japanese platform never quite took off.



None of these thoughts came into my mind in the summer of 2007, as I lay on the cool sheets, mouthing the words to “Hollaback Girl.” In the music video, Gwen and the group perform “American High School” the way pop culture imagines it to be. Like Tsunku, Gwen dresses her girls in school uniform, albeit in short cheerleader skirts instead of sailor suits. They prance their way through the traditional high school type spectrum, from punk girls to jocks to band geeks, though, in this high school, everyone is inexpressibly cool. My thirteen-year-old self would have wanted to be a part of her posse, even if I’d have to remain (contractually) silent.



The Harajuku Girls have dispersed now, gone their own ways. Their real names are Maya Chino, Jennifer Kita, Rino Nakasone-Razalan, and Mayuko Kitayama. Maya lives in Los Angeles and teaches at a dance academy, Jennifer performs in hip-hop companies, Rino is now a choreographer, and Mayuko was a backup dancer for Britney Spears’ Onyx Hotel tour—after that her internet trail is lost. In memory, Gwen’s girls are as virginal as Tsunku’s. They never had a life, save that brief one lived as silent priestesses at the altar of pop rock.



Two years after the concert, my friend is working at a local ice cream store, when she swears Gwen Stefani walks in the door and orders a chocolate sundae. She wore sunglasses and sweats, but she had her trademark hair and signed her name on the receipt “G. Stef.” I don’t believe her, because of the unlikelihood of Gwen Stefani visiting a Coldstone Creamery in a Nebraskan strip mall, but it’s a pleasant fantasy.



***



There is an antiquated philosophical concept that regards the movement of the celestial bodies—planets, sun, and moon—as the movement of glass spheres. When ancient astronomers looked to the arc of these bodies across the sky, it must indeed have seemed like they were attached to invisible surfaces in the sky. The concept explains that as these glass spheres move, they rub against each other and emit harmonics: musica universalis, the music of the spheres. This music is imperceptible to human ears, but it resonates under all of nature. For the Pythagoreans, followers of Pythagoras in the 5th century B.C, mathematical patterns governed the music of the spheres and, in turn, mortal harmonics and rhythms.



The 2014 Morning Musume song “Beyond Space and Time” takes a very literal interpretation of this astronomical concept. The music video begins with the girls, dressed in gauzy blue dresses, pretending to play invisible instruments. It pans out to reveal a galactic background, filled with floating chrome spheres and a rotating vortex of stars. The girls dance with mathematical precision. They form a line and arc their arms in perfect succession. The lyrics go:



 



By the time we are united



Beyond the time and space



I wonder if this planet?



Will be purified.



 



Gwen never released any outer-space-themed songs. That mantle was taken up by another bleach blonde and fellow Japanophile by the name of Lady Gaga, whose given first name, coincidentally, is Stefani (the two could be twins) and who became the next big thing with the release of her 2008 album The Fame. By that time, I had graduated from my first concert to awkward eighth grades dances, almost always tuned to the beat of “Poker Face” and “Just Dance.” In the big gym decorated with fairy lights, my classmates and I would sway in circles facing each other, staring from face to sweaty face, uncertain in our femininity, if that was even the right word. Eventually, the more bold among us would pair up and drift into the interior circle (where the chaperones couldn’t do a thing), enacting a carnal ritual which Morning Musume’s cheery choreography never reveals, though it pulses under the surface.



Five years later, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, Artpops. The cover, designed by artist Jeff Koons of balloon animal fame, features Gaga with a shiny blue sphere wedged between her legs, surrounded by fragments of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Gaga promoted the album as a cross between pop culture and high culture, an elevation of her music and a catapulting of her body into the realm of art.



By comparative metrics, Artpops flopped, with first week sales at less than a third of Born This Way’s. Critical opinion on the album is divided; some call it over-the-top and euphoric, while others find it relentless and exhausting.



While Artpops’ sales chart followed a downward trend, Gwen Stefani updated her Harajuku Lovers fragrance collection, giving it a new look and a new name: Pop Electric. The perfume bottles are the same bobble-headed figures of Love, Angel, Music, and Baby, but with what she calls a modernized design. In a 2014 interview with the Home Shopping Network, Gwen officially lexiconized “artpop” by using the word to describe her collection. This prompted an ecstatic tweet from Gaga: “I love you even more Gwen Stefani. Thank you for using ARTPOP as an adjective. It made me smile #ARTPOP.” The collection’s sales description reads, “Harajuku Lovers Pop Electric are inspired by modern street murals and sculpture, looking like they were formed in simple vinyl, dipped in molten, lustrous color scheme, then frozen in time as the metal drips over the doll’s body.” A full set sells for $200, retail. The scent of each perfume is still tailored to each Harajuku Girl, as if a perfume could capture the essence of a person.



But maybe all this is crying wolf. It’s been a decade, and Gwen regrets nothing about the Harajuku Girls. Maybe the Girls don’t have any regrets, either. For all I know, they could be making a killing on their former names; Gwen’s clothing line, L.A.M.B (Love, Angel, Music, Baby) can still be found on the occasional preteen at the shopping mall. And Lady Gaga, unlike Gwen, has succeeded in becoming popular in Japan. In 2013, wearing anime eye makeup and a bow bigger than her head, she participated in and won a kawaii-contest on Japanese television—defeating Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japan’s current Decora queen bee. Maybe cultural translation has become easier since Gwen’s heyday in the summer of 2007. Maybe they’re doing the world a service. How many, like me, have listened to their music in the late afternoon, watching dust motes dancing in the light, imagining planets singing in their perpetual motion?



As for the immortal Tsunku: On April 4, 2015, he was invited onstage for the entrance ceremony at Kinki University, his alma mater. The new students were expecting him to sing some hit songs from Sharam Q. Instead he stood there for nearly a minute, saying not a word. Then a big monitor displayed a message: “I’ve chosen to live by throwing away my voice, the thing I had treasured most,” it read, “Regret would have no meaning. I will go forward from now on.” Tsunku’s vocal cords had been removed due to laryngeal cancer. While the audience looked on, he blinked under the blue stage lights, a tear shed or two, shy, smiling, silent.



Despite this setback, Kinki University was treated to a performance after all. When the message ended, Tsunku strummed a guitar, and his girls sang for him.



 

Two men, both shirtless, each holding an axe, and one, a gnarled saw, waded through waist-deep water toward a two-story house that emerged, strained, heavy with each waterlogged board and each rusted nail that pinned it together, from the soggy earth.  When they reached the doorway of the house, the first man laid his hand flat against the front door.  With effort, he pressed against the damp wood, and from the exposed upper hinge a shriek, the spoiled union of iron and air, echoed shrilly down an empty street, piercing the soft surfaces of damp wood and bouncing freely off the dark, swirling surface of the river. 



 



The water had been rising, now, for seven days.  On the first morning, without a sound, the cattle in the fields had begun to walk away from the river.  For three days they walked, slowly, heavily, as cows do, each purposeful step crumpling the grass and pressing down the wet soil beneath it, leaving an ever-growing half moon of pockmarked earth behind.  The townspeople noticed the cows before they noticed the rising water.



On the fourth day, the mill reversed direction.  The water, thick and dark, had risen above the axle of the wooden wheel, and when the swirling surface water overpowered the quiet channel below, the wheel slowed, and creaked, and began to turn again in reverse, snapping gears and mutilating machinery.  Then, when the sullen current licked a final splash up over the churning woodwork, it groaned to a stop, and everything was quiet.



On the fifth day, the doctor could be seen piling armloads of damp clothing into the back of an old horse cart.  Next to the cart, his wife and her four daughters, all barefoot and muddy up to their ankles, stared upward without speaking.  They watched for rain, but there was none to be seen, only clouds, and crows.  Most flew west, with the current, but some could be seen returning, circling and watching the river as it sucked up the land and pulled anxiously at the lowest boards of houses.  When the doctor’s wife drove his horse toward the road, the women clinging tightly to the dripping cargo, the wheels of the cart left grooves as deep as a man’s hand in the black ground.



On the sixth day the water turned salty.  Now, bits of splintered board could be seen drifting down the river, passing through the sunken windows of riverside sheds and picking up thick tangles of weeds.  The water, now spilling through doorways and puddling in dirty circles on the floors of empty houses, had washed away the grooves of a dozen horse carts, and twenty miles west, along the river, hungry donkeys dragged hungry families through thick mud, toward desperate hopes of dry inns and warm meals.  The cattle, which had been migrating steadily, ignored by humans, for almost a week, huddled on a hill two miles from the muddy bank of the river, chewing mouthfuls of muddy grass and blinking dumbly at the flat sky.



Single-story houses, which had once housed small families, looms, and coal stoves, now lilted against the current, until one by one they collapsed gently into the murky water.  Only the drunks and their whores still walked among the heavy, stained structures, checking bedrooms for gold and kitchens for wine.  In the daytime, they huddled together on the side of the hill above town, where the cows had once stood, and where small piles of scrap wood now sat in piles, some of it lashed together in futile rafts, most of it loose and damp.  They drank from bottles and crossed themselves under the grey sky.  Half of the town lay underwater; the other half, void of life, leaned quietly under its damp empty weight.



 



The two men, holding their tools high above their heads, waded through the doorway and into a small room, filled to the mantle with water, and from the mantle to the ceiling with thick, wet air.  The surface of a table drifted slowly on the water, propelled toward the far wall by the rippling progress of the two bodies.  When one of the men swung the head of his axe down onto a corner of the table, it dipped effortlessly down into the black water, lifting another dripping leg into the air.  The leg looked grey in the grey light, and it was lined with veins of green.  The man shifted his weight, lifting an obscured foot to brace against the corner of the table, and when he pulled the axe from the wood it bobbed back up into the air, sending ripples bouncing in patterns off the walls and the bare chests.



Against the far wall the men stepped carefully up a wooden staircase.  As they rose out of the water, green weeds clung to the belt loops of dark brown pants, and dark dripping leather of cracked boots curled down to expose white ankles streaked with straight black hair.  Their heads disappeared, followed by the tops of their pants, their ankles, the soles of their cracked boots, and then they were gone, creaking across the floor above the empty room.



In the single room, into which the men emerged part by part, a single body sat as still as petrified wood on a wooden chair.  It was the body of an old man, with small tufts of white hair growing from his sagging ears, clothed in a dirty white shirt and brown linen trousers.  Its eyes were half open, as still as marbles stuck in mud, and the men ignored it as they moved about the room, testing the softness of the wood of a small bureau, now a square dining table, now a painted cradle, now a small end table, on which a Bible lay, coverless.  The wood was damp but hard, and they took to it with the axes, snapping the legs from the larger table and splintering the flat boards and hitting at the bureau with overhand swings until it lay crushed in a pile on the floor.  They took apart the crib with their hands, and this wood, protected by the white paint, made loud snapping noises as they bent and broke its spokes.  When all but the end table lay in a pile by one wall, behind the seated body, the men lay down their axes and stood, breathing heavily, by the only window in the room.  Through it, they watched the river move quietly through town.  Crows stood on the branches of trees, and now and then one or two would take flight and drift over the black water to another tree to stand on another branch.  There were no sounds for a quarter of an hour, during which the river rose imperceptibly.



Both men had coils of wet yellow twine in each of their pockets.  They knotted the wood together in bundles, and when the third bundle was taut one of the men moved over to the small end table.  The Bible felt damp and heavy.  Inside, the inked letters were swollen.  He touched the top of the table again, and then motioned for the other man, who brought his axe and took to it with dull swings.  The man with the Bible carried it over to the seated body.  The floor in front of the chair was dry, and he placed the heavy book at a reverent angle in front of the feet.  Each man then took two bundles, wedging the tools between the twine and the splintered boards, and they stepped carefully back down the stairwell, disappearing part by part, leaving behind, among piles of splinters and small dirty puddles, only the still body in its chair and the wet book.



 



They had not known that he was alive.  The following morning his eyes drifted down to gaze at the Bible.  It had swollen slightly since the previous afternoon when the men had come into the house to take the furniture for futile rafts.  During the night, one of the puddles left in the center of the room by the men had trickled across the floorboards, snaking past sawdust deposits until it touched up against one corner of the book, where it was quickly absorbed by the already damp pages.  Now, in the grey light leaking through the window—although it had been cloudy for weeks, there was a certain heightened color in the room when the sun ought to have been shining in—he watched the book grow.



His name was Levi.  Like the cattle, he had known about the flood, sensed it, before the young and active townspeople.  It had been coming for months, perhaps always, and when his bones began to crystallize he knew that this was how it would end, still, petrified, in the rising water.



At first it was his fingers.  As a boy he had thrown stones and flicked insects, as all boys do, and as a young man he had run nervous fingertips over the laces of corsets.  But when he grew older his bones hardened and began to scrape against one another, until his wife and sister began to feed him, dragging a spoon roughly over the coarse white hair on his chin to catch the droplets of broth that ran down from his lips.



When he stopped eating, after his knees froze and his fingers closed permanently around the arms of his chair, his jaw, too, grew coarse and chipped inside, and his last few words had sent sounds like crunching gravel tearing through his skull.



And, as his bones rusted like the hinges of old doors he began to notice the moistness in the air, the dampening of noises in their wooden house and the sheen on his sister’s forehead as she pleaded with him to eat.



‘I do not need food,’ he had thought to himself; ‘hunger will not kill me, as it will them.’  He had waited patiently as the air thickened in his room, and when the cattle left he was the happiest he had been in weeks.  They would all leave, now, he thought, and when his wife came into his room, weeping, followed later by his sister, to talk in loud sobs about the flood, he had been happy that he could not speak, and hoped that they would not draw out their departure.



When the water finally crossed their hearth the women had already packed their bundles of moldy clothing into the broken oxcart and foraged what dry foods and fresh water remained in the house and the looted storerooms of their neighbors.  He wished for the women to leave, to forget to kiss the damp skin of his forehead and not to promise him that they would return with a boat and food, not to try to carry his rigid body somewhere dryer to die.  He had pretended to be dead, closing his eyes and slowing his breathing for hours until the small purple snakes that always clouded his vision had filled the room.  And then his wife had come upstairs to kiss him guiltily and hold his hand, weeping quietly, while his vision cleared.



They had left dry food in jars beside his chair.  The first time that men came upstairs, he had pretended to be dead, and they took all of the food in wet brown sacks that they tied shut with twine and carried over their shoulders.  That was when the men still wore shirts, when some decent women still lingered, when it was still a sinful thing to go into another man’s bedroom, to stare at a rigid body and be glad it was not one’s own.  He did not need to eat; he felt his end at hand, and with each tired beat of his heart, his crystalline body clenched tighter at the tunnels of watery blood that snaked through it.  The day after the men came for the last of the furniture, blue mold began to creep up the walls.



For two days he sat still, awake, no longer sleeping or blinking.  Each hour brought new growth to the walls, which smelled sour, and though Levi could not turn his head to look out the window, he heard and smelled the flood.  There were fish now, in the room below him, giant ocean fish, with stiff fins on their backs and thick red gills.  As they swam, he listened to the ripples echo off the walls in the ever shrinking cavern between the water and the ceiling.  ‘There are only a few inches of air left beneath me,’ he told himself, and through the window he could smell sea turtles and hear the dipping flight of pelicans.



The nails that held the walls together smelled like rust.  With the first effort he had made since moving to the chair, and with what he knew would be the final shift of bone on bone in his crystalline body, he let his head drop slightly until he was staring straight at the swollen book on the floor in front of him.  As his vertebrae shifted, they made the sound of stones colliding, and he blinked with the sharp pain of friction.  Then, still again, he felt the last of his unfixed joints fuse into place, as brittle now as a sprung and forgotten bear trap, crimson with rust, no longer metal, ancient latticed powder of no use to nature.



‘I will not drown, either,’ he told himself, for he felt, too, that he had ceased to breathe.  The only motion in the room, in which dilated time made a puppet-show of mold and rust, was the growth of the blue streaks on the walls, and the steady crowning of the book that sat wet on the wet floor.



What lasted?  Bone would outlive muscle.  What of fingernails?  He stared at the book.  How long would language persevere, and when would it be forgotten?  He thought of human bodies, and then of other animals, and then plants.  Wood was no better than flesh or bone, or tusk, or tooth.  No living thing would outlast stone; nothing that had been nourished by sunlight or that had coursed with blood would be any more than dust when cool pebbles still lay quietly in piles on mountaintops.  Was life itself the fatal flaw, the dooming touch?  What was bone, or muscle?



‘God has grown tired of men,’ Levi thought, as he listened to the barnacles bite slowly and tightly into the floorboards of his kitchen.



Later, he noticed the first black swirl trickle out of the round pile of pages, into the puddle that surrounded it.  Slowly, the ink was sucked out of the book, and the water darkened, then the wood beneath it.  ‘If I could move,’ thought Levi, ‘I would taste that water.’  The water was dark, and the pages, which had swollen and melted together, had grown lighter, inkless, like a slab of butter.



 



At a certain moment, consciousness itself crystallized into mere architecture.  When the water finally rose carefully over the last step, it entered the room slowly, in a thin, rounded film.  It rolled over exposed nails and joined in quick asymmetrical embraces with the puddles that stood in ruts, and when it arrived at the old book the clean mound dissolved without resistance in creamy swirls.  Levi, too, succumbed quickly to the rising water, and his powdered bones and paper skin swirled about the room, mere pigments, coloring the water as it overtook the blue mold and sucked up the splinters.



The following morning nothing could be seen of the town. Forty miles west, in a similar town, distant cousins and flushed innkeepers ate candlelit dinners on sturdy tables, while their cattle, with a sudden sense of purpose, blinked dumbly at the hills that rose up against the grey horizon.

He’s got utilization behavior problems, see, and so it’s no surprise to me that Garney is gonna fondle some sweet girl eventually. He’s done it before, even, so it’s not unexpected and far as I know there’s no resolving a mental situation like his, so sometimes he’s gonna automatically fix a spoke with tools no stopping and sometimes he’s gonna fondle a set of breasts and the fallout of the latter situation is where I come in with the mediation business. The former just ends up with useful hands, a fixed spoke and no need for mediation, so seems clear which of them I’d prefer. As they vow.