POST BURNING SITE

[MickNickPickMickNick]

Outside the sun is shining, there is no tree, no bush to cast a shadow, and you walk under the sun shielding your eyes with one hand you stare ahead, only a few yards in front of you, at a few yards of dusty asphalt where the wind makes patterns of parallel lines, forks, and spirals.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

The sun does not get in here, nor the wind, nor the rain, nor the dust.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

The fine dust which dulls the gloss of the horizontal surfaces, the varnished wood of the table, the waxed floor, the marble shelf over the fireplace, the marble top of the chest, the cracked marble on top of the chest, the only dust comes from the room itself: from the cracks in the floor maybe, or else from the bed, or from the curtains or from the ashes in the fireplace.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for a while--for a few hours, several days, minutes, weeks--by small objects subsequently removed whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated as though by a rag.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

When the outline is distinct enough to permit the shape to be identified with certainty, it is easy to find the original object again, nor far away.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

For example, the circular shape has obviously been left by a glass ashtray which is lying beside it.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

Similarly, a little farther away, the square occupying the table's left rear corner corresponds to the base of the brass lamp that now stands in the right corner: a square pedestal about one inch high capped by a disk of the same height supporting a fluted column at its center.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

The lampshade casts a circle of light on the ceiling, but this circle is not complete: it is intersected by the wall behind the table.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

This wall, instead of being papered like the other three, is concealed from floor to ceiling and for the greater part of its width by thick red curtains made of a heavy velvety material.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

Outside it is snowing.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

Across the dark asphalt of the sidewalk the wind is driving the fine dry crystals which after each gust form white parallel lines, forks, spirals that are immediately broken up, seized by the eddies driven along the ground, then immobilized again, recomposing new spirals, scrolls, forked undulations, shifting arabesques immediately broken up.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

You walk with your head a little farther down, pressing the hand shielding your eyes closer, leaving only a few inches of ground visible in front of your feet, a few grayish inches where your feet appear one after the other and vanish behind you, one after the other, alternately.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

But the staccato sound of hobnail boots on the asphalt, coming steadily closer down the straight street, sounding louder and louder in the calm of the frostbound night, the sound of boots cannot come in here, any more than other sounds from outside.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

The street is too long, the curtains too thick, the house too high.

[MickNickPickMickNick]

No noise, even muffled, ever penetrates the walls of the room, no vibration, no breath of air, and in the silence tiny particles descend slowly, scarcely visible in the lamplight, descend gently, vertically, always at the same speed, and the fine gray dust lies in a uniform layer of the floor, on the bedspread, on the furniture.