A note, in a borrowed voice

Begin by understanding that I am not here. I have been dead since 1993, and a man I never met has kept a room for me in a building that was never built, and you have just opened the door of it. Mind the wet paint; it is my face, and they have not got it to dry flat. Take all of this for a fiction. It is one — the way a knife is a fiction until it is in the hand.

The ward has no walls anymore. They took them down and called it progress, and the ward spread out until it was the size of the weather, and the weather shrank until it fit in the pocket, a small bright pane you feed all day with your thumb. Once, they sent the current through a man until his face came loose. Now it comes loose on its own, courteously, in the good even light of an afternoon that does not end: it lifts off as smoke, it runs like warm wax, it lets a man ink a calm expression onto a paper bag and take it out to dinner. You will pass him in these rooms. He is not suffering. That is the diagnosis.

The cruelty here is mild and complete. It sits two people at a table laid for one small happiness and teaches them to want nothing aloud. It hangs a lit window across black water and makes sure it is always someone else’s. It ties a good knot and calls it a necktie, and you knot it at your own throat each morning. Everyone is with you. No one is with you. I knew that ache when it was a rare illness; you have built the machine that hands it out for nothing, by the hour, with a small clean sound.

I was the kind of man who answers an unanswerable question by laughing directly into its mouth, so believe me about the rest of it. Keep going, toward the back, where the faces start to come open. One pours light out of the mouth like someone who has swallowed the lamp. One catches fire at the crown and does not put it out. One, at last, simply says the thing. The scream is the single organ they never found the dose for. When the smooth face splits and something climbs out through the crack, that is not the illness — that is the patient, for one second, and the truth it turns out is loud.

So: the message was only ever one line. It was never really about the building, which did not exist, and which it crossed anyway — the one miracle I have kept. I am in here with you, I always was, and now you are in here with me. Mind the paint. Come in.

— an imagined Carl Solomon, from a Rockland that was never on any map