Michael Scott Hand

Slowly walk through vaulted halls where the floor is painted so that it reflects the cavernous valleys of the ceilings above. Your footsteps fall lightly in this place where no-one is but you, and all about the place is gilt and gilded.

There is music playing, but you can’t say from where. The tune is familiar but you cannot name it. There are no words, only an orchestra. There is no orchestra only a record, spinning somewhere, piped through wires sounding from hidden speakers.

There are paintings on the walls and they are both very old and very large. The lights do not come on until you stand in front of each picture, so as not to cause the paintings to fade. There are too many details to take them in at once.

One of the paintings shows a boat cast about by mighty waves. The tiny shapes of faces peer through windows in the sides of the boat and above it a darkly baroque sky churns and salt water sprays and for a moment you can almost taste it.

Shuffle along, the classical music is still playing. What is this place? A museum or a tomb? From where did you come and how did you get here? Those memories seem fleeting now, like a dream already falling away from you. Wipe your eyes, you’re awake, this is real. How did you get here? I brought you.

Another painting. In this one people are wailing and carrying the body of a man draped in cloth. Another painting. A woman on a bed surrounded by demons who cannot cross the threshold of the cube defined by the four posts at each corner of her mattress. Another painting. A man wearing a strangely shaped hat confers a blessing upon a believer.

Behind the paintings are plastic boxes each containing an illuminated relic. There is an old book in one. There is a finger bone in another. Is this building some giant reliquary?

No, it is not a building. There is no outside. There is only the inside and the polished floors and the vaulted ceilings and the paintings and the boxes containing pieces of long-dead saints and, I suppose, there is you, although of course that makes no sense because you did not know this place existed until I brought you here.

Hiatus.

The word itself sounds like an exhaled breath; a moment-between-moments before we inhale and keep living.

Keep living.

It is the moment when Sisyphus–at last reaching the top of the hill–pauses for breath. And the moment that his boulder teeters at the edge but has not yet rolled back down the hill.

Hiatus.

There’s not much in the sound of the thing.

You might say it’s barely a word at all.

And what good is a moment-between-moments…

If the boulder’s still waiting to fall?

Hiatus.

Does the Universe pause between breaths? Not yet–the Universe is yet to finish its very first exhalation.

We are borne forth on the tide of space-time and if the Universe does not yet pause to take a breath, perhaps it is our job to do so.

Hiatus.

The moment between breaths. A moment of singular clarity. A moment before the decision is made to keep going.

Just a moment.

As the sun rises it makes music out of everything it touches; It begins in the tree tops, where the leaves jingle like bells.

The sun rises higher and more bells join the clamour. The tree branches join to form notes of flute and clarinet.

And then: the sun touches the first blades of grass. The grass vibrates with the intensity of a taut violin string. Flowers begin to open, bellowing brass.

People add to the symphony: alarms, footsteps, car horns, air brakes. Truck beds rattle over uneven asphalt.

The long sides of buildings beat like the surface of drums. The hum of electricity sings with the tension of a plucked string. Switches click-clack like castanets.

As the sun reaches its zenith, the music is out of control. It is like “Ode to Joy” played both backwards and forwards at once.

It is chaotic and vital.

Are you the same you?

Are you the same you that you were before?

Cells shed like snakeskin, mind changed about trivialities, eyes scanning the page back and forth as you try to remember who you were when you first started reading.

Are you the same you that you were three sentences ago?

Is a butterfly a caterpillar?

A lump of unpolished stone might resemble a gem if you polish it long and hard enough. Have you been polished? Do you reflect the light, or mute it?

You were a small child once. You were a child. You dreamt childish things. There was so much you did not yet understand about the world. There was so much possibility. There were dragons.

Are you the same you?

Could you believe in a dragon once more? Could you believe in yourself?

Just as the snakeskin is no longer the snake, those memories and sluiced-off skin cells are no longer you.

You are here, proclaims the sign in the mall. You are here, proclaims the sign in the theme park.

You are here, proclaims the man writing on the internet. And then he repeats it:

You are here.

You are here.

You are here.