LIGLAM

      Æons have passed since you've been a person. All this time, you've been wondering to yourself whether this alteration was meant as a gift or a punishment. You figure that, either way, things probably even out. You neither enjoy nor dislike being here. You wouldn't have asked to come here, but you don't necessarily feel a strong urge to leave, either. You don't know what you are anymore. Things that know what they are are people, exclusively. People are in a world beneath yours. There are worlds above yours, as well, you have decided. Those spheres are reserved for nothings that know what they aren't. You: you're in the Dead Center - neither thing nor nothing, neither knowing what you are nor knowing what you aren't (between the extreme poles of knowledge, there is a vacuum of ignorance).

     You don't know what 'this' is, but you can say: "this is..."

     "This is satiation."

     "This is equilibrium."

     "This is all my fault."

     You've been here a long time, though. And you are identical with your location. You are the shape of the capsule which contains you. But you are not really inside of it, because you probably aren't allowed to be inside of yourself.

     ...Are you inside of yourself?

     Probably not. Money doesn't exist here but, if it did, you would bet money that you are not inside of yourself. You are not outside of yourself, either; and you aren't on yourself. You're just... You are yourself.

     But, despite how long you've been here, something has finally begun to change. In a world of pure, timeless shapes, the shapes have gone brown and soft for you: bad fruit. Suddenly, you're in a world of bad fruit where everything is leaking and draining and imploding.

     This is especially frightening for you. As an ignorant... grehh... For the sake of argument, let's just call you a 'grehh' for now... As an ignorant grehh who lacks desires of any kind, you're effectively retarded. The word 'retarded' doesn't even exist, but you sure are it. And, because you are a retarded grehh, everything that has suddenly begun to happen around you is incomprehensible and threatening. At the slightest disturbance, entire colonies of fruit flies collectively erupt into a storm cloud above the shrunken skins of these blistered shapes. You are aggrieved by this event every time you are forced to witness it.

     You thought you were done with the world you came from - the world of persons. You thought you had finally discovered eternity. But something new is happening now, and you might lash out with an unmotivated jerk of your novel, reddened limb and snap something off of a thing nearby you if someone doesn't give you some information.

     What if I were to tell you that I've got a book? Books aren't terribly real or trustworthy things, no, but when you get ahold of one, open it up, and start to scan the lines, you realize that you hold a significant amount of control over whatever it is that you are reading - whatever it is that you have decided to understand. In fact, let's just be honest here. There is a conspiracy of books. They're really vampiric, if you think about it. Why do we turn to these inert tomes of paper as if to a cheering bonfire in the midst of a dark blustering field when we feel existentially bored? The truth is, books only show you what you are already thinking the moment you crack them open.

     But you are a grehh, and an illiterate one. I will tell you what is in this book.

     This is a book about all of the things at which you look in a given moment, about the things you see and the things you refuse to see. Here, in these pages, one may find unending enumerative lists, catalogues of latent items in the environment: a textured steel plate screwed down into the floor between two prefabricated blocks of cement in a suspended footbridge, a folded piece of tripe waiting in the gloom of an unmanned deli cabinet, a discarded tennis shoe under a seat in the elevated back end of the bus (there's something dense, residual, and wet inside of the shoe), an industrial park office...

     No, don't get flippant with me. It's that kind of irreverence that made you an oligophrenic grehh in the first place, landing you in this shape world. One must only speak of this book in solemn, cold tones. You must plunge your eyes into the protoplasm of surfaces, sight-unseen, before you can dart the spotlights of your vision over its printed vellum. You've got to wash your uneira, too, just in case.

     Look, I can get you out of here if you really want me to. Maybe you're tired of being a grehh and want to get back to knowing things. The way out is another word that won't exist until I speak it. It's a mysterious word... the name of the book.

     If you want me to tell you the name of this book, you will tell me what you want me to do, which means your desires will have returned to you. This is an impossibility, but I'm willing to make it happen. You will no longer be here, though, once I say the name. Then there will be further books in further worlds, and what comes next will be no more obviously a gift or a punishment than the state in which you currently find yourself...

     Okay... 

     If that is what you want...

     The name of this book is LIGLAM.