Quiddity, 1. Sunbeam

{Novella} Quiddity learns about Within and being Dazed.

rem

What follows is the first chapter of Quiddity, a novella for my founding subscribers.

I wish to extend thanks to my first founding subscriber and her children, all of whom I leave nameless and faceless to protect privacy, for hosting me recently in Milledgeville, Georgia, and for listening, many months ago, to the first draft of this chapter.

Future installments of Quiddity will be sent by email only to founding subscribers. Upgrade your subscription if you’re interested.

1. Sunbeam @Quiddity

“Within is night,” my mother once told me. “A world of darkness. You think you know what darkness is, child, but the darkest night you’ve seen Without is as day to the darkness Within, the night in which One lives wakeful.”

“Are there stars Within?” I asked, squirming into her lap.

She laughed and began to braid my hair.

“Strangely, yes, there are stars,” she said, “but they aren’t really stars, and you can’t see them all at once. If One stands directly beneath a tarry-not and looks up, One sees a pinprick of light far away. Without. But it’s an unwise thing for One to do.”

She would not tell me what was foolish about it, though. As happened many times when I put questions to her about Within and especially about her life as One there, she only said, “Be grateful you are not One, child. Without is better.” And what was better about it? To this I always received the same answer: “Without is more real.”

Why my mother thought one place was more real than another baffled me for a long time. She had once lived Within. So had my father. So, in fact, had every Dazed I knew.

They had all been Ones, creatures of Within, and they were all real enough. Certainly, I reasoned, they could not have been born and then lived, some for many years, in an unreal place.

I struggled to understand how it could even have been a less real place than this, despite having no real stars and for that matter no sun and moon. Whenever I asked my mother what she meant by saying Without was more real than Within, she frowned and grew quiet.

All the other Dazed were just as circumspect. They looked at me sidelong, not without sympathy but in some way detached, almost as if I was not real, and then they shrugged. The most I ever learned from them was this: “One does not see.” That was no mystery, of course, if Within was darker than the darkest night Without.

Yet I didn’t begin to know what else it might mean until the day I saw my father embrace a sunbeam.

I was nine years old. By that time, I had begun to grow frightened of my father. He was not an evil or unreasonable man. Indeed, he was a sensitive man, a scholar with aspirations to become a scrivener, but he was prone to sudden, inexplicable anger.

He was never violent with people, but he abused objects when they frustrated him. Once, as we sat down together to a breakfast of gruel, he stared intently for a long time at his spoon lying on the table and then, instead of picking it up, he brushed it off the table so forcefully that it struck the wall on the far side of the room.

Then he glanced ever so briefly at me and, strangely, he began to cry. He rose from the table and went to pick up the spoon. When he knelt and extended his hand, somehow he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. Instead, he sat gracelessly on the floor, sobbing into his elbow.

I rose to go to him, but my mother chided me: “Leave him alone, Quid. Take your breakfast to the library. I’ll come get you when it’s time for work.” She never did, though. After eating, I selected a book, and when at last I grew bored of reading and went to find her, I discovered the two of them in bed together, wrapped in each other’s arms. My father was snoring.

Dazed lie together only on Touch, but that was not a touching.

Many other such incidents, all of them unforeseen, taught me to be apprehensive in my father’s presence. I might not have grown frightened of him if my mother could have predicted his rages and sent me away before they erupted, but she was usually oblivious to their imminence until they happened. So I learned to predict them myself and to scurry away.

Neither of my parents ever faulted me for my abrupt departures. It was as if we had a contract. In exchange for sparing my father humiliation, I was free to leave when I wished. I only broke the contract once, but once was enough.

That day was Think, and as the thought demanded, all the Dazed steered clear of each other. So I was used to keeping my own company on Think. Yet I had learned this solitude only as habit, not as any sort of stricture: I maintained it because everyone did, because apparently being alone was simply what Think was for.

So, when I walked by his cell’s open door just as my father stepped towards his window and threw his arms around the shaft of sunlight pouring through it, it didn’t occur to me that I should say nothing and keep walking, that I should pretend I never witnessed him doing such an absurd thing.

I stopped, stared, started to giggle. My father spun around, drawing his arms to his chest to hug himself tightly, but he didn’t look at me.

“What in kindness!” I cried out, forgetting my apprehension of him and stepping into the cell. “It’s light, Father! You can’t touch it!”

His face reddened. Immediately, I realized my mistake. His eyes still downcast, he strode forward, suddenly looming over me. I took a stumbling step back, fell to the floor. Then I heard my mother’s voice behind me, stern: “Stop, Cate! Stop right there.”

As quickly as he’d seemed to grow large and fill the room, my father now looked small, shrunken. He turned his back on me, and his shoulders sagged.

“It’s Think,” he muttered. “I’d like to be alone with my thoughts.”

I stood up. My mother grasped my hand, pulled me out of the cell, and closed the door behind us. Kneeling in the corridor, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye and whispered, “What were you thinking, child?”

I stared at her, jaw agape. I could find no words for my incomprehension.

Then, blinking, she looked me squarely in the face. It was one of only a handful of times I remember her ever doing so. She sighed, stood up, took my hand.

“Come along,” she said.

I let her lead me out of the dormitory, along the shaded colonnade, and into the chapel. It was a good place for a private talk on any day but Sing, when the Dazed used it for that day’s purpose. We sat on a pew and looked at the beautiful stained glass of the windows. At last she said, “I’ve told you far too little.”

“About what?” I prodded when she seemed hesitant to go on. “About Father?”

“Yes. No.” She wrung her hands, then appeared to realize she was doing so and placed them firmly on her knees. “About Ones, Dazed, Within and Without. Kindness, where do I start?”

I guessed my mother was seeking some way to tell me more, perhaps to explain everything, but without telling me too much. “Start with an analogy,” I suggested.

“Aren’t you a clever One?” she said, smiling. “All right, analogy. Have you read the Allegory of the Cave?”

“Plato. These people live in a cave, prisoners there, and they can’t see anything but what’s in the cave. So they see shadows on the wall, and they believe the shadows are real things, only they’re not. Then a prisoner gets out of the cave, and he sees what’s really real. But when he goes back and tries to tell the others all about it—”

“Yes, yes,” Mother said, clasping my hand. “Never mind that part. I’m not giving you a lesson in philosophy. Just tell me this: what happened to the prisoner who broke free when he left the cave for the first time?”

I considered the question. “He saw the sun. It blinded him.”

“And then?”

Now I considered at length. “He couldn’t look at things and see them for what they were, not right away,” I hazarded. “He had to look at their reflections first, and then gradually—” I stopped short. “Are you saying Within is a cave?”

“Yes, Quid! It’s a vast network of caves, in fact. Ones live underground. That’s where I’m from, where your father’s from. So now we’re aboveground, out of the cave. We’re looking at things for what they really are for the first time. But the trouble is, for us, every time we look seems to be the first time. So—”

“Dazed?” I surmised.

She squeezed my hand. “Dazed. What did you see your father doing?”

“He was trying to hug sunlight! As if that was something he could touch!”

My mother snorted uncharacteristically. With one word – “Come” – she rose and strode away to the chapel doors. I followed her out, across the colonnade and cloister, and into the blindingly bright sunlight of the small courtyard on the cloister’s far end.

There she stopped, though she said nothing. I stood beside her, and soon I began to feel the heat of the baking flagstones rise through the thin soles of my slippers. Then I began to sweat under my arms.

“What does this feel like?” said Mother at last.

“It’s hot.”

She nodded. “Draw your own conclusions, Quiddity,” she said. Then she briskly walked away.

rem

To learn more about the days of the Dazed, such as Think and Touch, see the section in the appendix on the calendar system.