Fog

He normally isn't one who writes, but he has written a fable. There are drawings, maps mostly, that detach from the book. An area of the map, at left, is covered over in white pencil. It is in this location, this place in the story, that the moral is revealed.

His book has been published. It is being discussed. It has changed the possibilities of story-telling. Its boldness: the fable simply repeats and repeats and repeats. That's it. The drawings, maps mostly, and the area covered in white pencil - repeat.

It goes like this from the beginning of the book to the end. The book is thick and I haven't read it. I just look at the pictures: the drawings of trees, high trees without canopies, the trunks suggested graphically just as black bars. Then the same, horizontal. A train full of white ladies and gentlemen and birds staring out the window.

The fable is about not learning, as many fables are. And taking what is not yours, as many fables are. The fable is about the world changing underfoot, about being lost, all the while having the right map in your back pocket. I don't read the fable. I don't look in my back pocket. I look at the pictures.

The pull-out map is of New England, the colonies, and on the left just green and brown, with simple images of deer and foxes and birds. I see it's a fold-out map, (I hadn't heard that) and I take it out of the book and lay it flat and large. It is an image of North America. I think this is much too complicated for a fable. A fable is simple. In case you don't get it. I heard this was simple and just repeats.

I leave the map open. I guess I will have to read the story and I open the book. It begins, "From the first minutes that you wake..." I hear something, little pops and horrible cries. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the map changing. Industrial sounds, vague and extending, escape off my table. I lean closer. The little towns on the map multiply then erase themselves with white pencil, keep their names, redraw boundaries but become the same, multiply, repeat and repeat. Animals lift off the surface of the map and are gone.

Is this where the story starts over?
With a magnifying glass I can see closer, see someone in a hotel room, staring at his shoes. Next door, one person leaves, one person stays. Both cry. And this repeats and repeats in every town I see. All at once, everywhere, the children come inside. The houses, pulse blue from the inside, repeat and repeat and repeat. Little tiny images tell them their weakness. Little tiny images repeat until they get it.

At the left, from the Pacific, white pencil draws itself over Northern California, as it has this whole time. Advancing, receding. This is where I live. Again.

I look up from the book and see it come down the street, thick and enveloping. I am covered in white. My living room is covered in white. I forget what I've learned. It is a new day. I will live it. I will live it exactly like I did yesterday. Tomorrow I will repeat.

Through the fog, I can no longer read the fable, though it is simple and repeats so I can get it.

I don't read the fable.
I just look at the pictures.