1.00.1
The portable archive
There were no bonafides in the pockets of the poor outmoded corpse that bore a liquid resemblance to some party I had once let sing aside a silver trumpet in my days of booking clubs rather than writing down all the tremendously heavy for the portable archive. She carried it on her back, like they still do, and I wrote, and this was years before we were married and would spend our leisure time in the exact same way, and I was not only with her for the support, but that was a part of it. For a while I left notes for her in field reports, and when we stumbled upon ditches where the worst had gone to decompose, I often wrote her life story in for theirs, as I had imagined it. She had led hundreds of lives by the time she realized what I had done, and she was grateful, indeed, but that was again not the reason. I had fallen in love with her nape, we like to joke.

I gave the specimen before us this bit of her story: She had been the first to move into a large apartment complex some years back. It had been widely advertised, with a dedicated leasing office for potential occupants who, once toured and impressed, might need help with ammenities or other nuances of their habitat. There was the unsubtle implication that here, she might meet someone.

On her first night, she could hear at odd intervals the sound of a middle C, or something like a harmonic overtone that, lighter than its base, floated up as a middle C, definitively up. This happens every night, and meanwhile she is still the only one who lives in the building. There is a specific clause in the lease that she was to forgive the ownership in the event of a failure to sufficiently people the premises. Forgive, in the context, meant that it was not a viable reason for terminating a lease early. Among the city's by-laws, unlike those of this one, there was no ordinance or clause addressing either a surfeit or deficit with regard to the occupancy of a multi-resident complex. She likewise could not herself represent a quorum in a tenants' association.

It is in stories like this that she became a cosmology unto herself; all of the ways in which we do not like to think of the universe, she became. We do not like to think, for instance, that the universe does such banal things as go to the store, but this is precisely what she did, no more or less than before. I picture the universe as a vast flat sheet, covering acres, and every so often a small lump forms and eye holes are cut, and this is consciousness; there is nothing underneath it; there is nothing separate from the universe, and the properties of the lump are the properties of the universe, and no bigger or smaller are the lumps that know this.
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