The Last Puzzle of Ys

I see that for every moment in time, there is a particular shaping of boundaries. Each instant is a small piece corrugated and colored such that it is uniquely identifiable from any other. Moments are qualitative, yes, but integral to their overall quality is their quantity; and there is not a single entity separable from a finite allotment. I reckon with this not as some mystical aphorism or divination of wisdom, but as a physical principle to my encountering of time and place.

I sit in my study, rigidly braced against a stool of elegantly carved wood atop floorboards borne of some elder decay. The shelves and cabinets have twisted, slanted and warped along the walls, tangled up in their dark shallows. I find the ashen light cast through the window brings a certain ancestral spirit to their deranged settlements, as though a tangle-web forest had taken up anew. Their moments are not yet spent, their centers pure; but their dimensions flayed at the edges to fit in this new, domesticated snarl. All things forced into being before their natural becoming are inflicted a transformative violence. More moments in the tally.

The door has been shut. For how long, I simply cannot say. The bedding is untouched, but for that same shimmering of silver-blue haze drawn in from the night sky. I stamp a razor down against a hardy plank laid across my desk, hewing a segment of thin wood into proper form. Upon excising the shape, I lift it to faint candlelight for examination and arrange it near a grouping of similarly convoluted pieces. There is no shortage of laboring exactitude in my movements. Were I not so viscerally acquainted with my common habits, I might not know the last time I drew breath. As I take up the razor once more, I am suspended between moments of intention by a sudden thrashing of the table. A stray piece rattles as it strikes the floor below.

Casper?

I saw him just now, I was sure. That old white coat bristled with recoil as he scurried from the desk to some darker nook.

I reach for my candle and lift it forward over the table edge, now beaming it upon the panels between the desk and bedding. That fretful cat; white as a specter. A muse for anxieties I am no longer capable of apprehending. A signatory of moments yet to be, conceived out of moments I have no way of recollecting. That expectant, whiskered compass tarnished the fragile balance of moments constituting my work with his tidings of amorphous forthcomings. But how could I be upset? A companion living in the future is a boon to one lost in a limbo like mine. Casper alone has the sense to imagine where I will soon be; but without asking it of me. What better ally to merely being! How did he come in? Perhaps he'd slipped past before the door sealed when I last crossed the threshold. When was it?

I suppose I should illuminate what must appear, by now, to be an eccentricity. For as long as I can remember, and to the best of my knowing, I haven't remembered much. So I have  -  by way of vested interest and an insistence upon self-edification  -  taken to calling myself an enigmatologist. Puzzles: a student by hapless obsession, and craftsman by apparent coincidence. Be it lamentable or the sacred rite of any person to seek order in discord, I've yet to fully ordain. The faculties one might employ to titrate such maladies as uncertainty are quite difficult to recall, as you might imagine. My discernment instead rests, hibernates, in the careful allocation of my jigsaws.

I characterized myself as hapless. I assure that this was less a judgment of any internalized emotional distress, and more an objective quality associated with my labyrinthian vocation.

I cannot help but to design puzzles for which there are no solutions. A perennial riddle of purpose, I suppose. My works, I've resigned, are not for me to fully know. Yet if I know anything at all, it is that I am the patient sort; insofar as I can experience a continuum like patience. I claim several tethers to notions like this, like vestigial organs in the mind. One ought to find tolerance for the interlude between creation and realization, lest its result becomes a patchwork stitched outside the rightful rhythm. All things forced into being before their natural becoming are inflicted a desecrating violence.

I see that for every moment in time, there is a center within its walls. A core that is captured within the totality of all that encompasses it. Each instant is its own paralyzed terrarium, enriched by novel detail but inert through inactivity. It is the sequencing of moments that alludes to life! The collective whole of all things can be found cold and barren in the frame of a single moment. But string them along successively, or jump between them recklessly, and the arbitrated narrative will never cease! It is only when all things now are contrasted with all things then that something can truly be explained. Solved.

A number of hourglasses line the window sill above the bed. They've elapsed, but their final beads of sand may well have dropped only moments ago. I cannot say I'm fond of their method, and sigh at the thought of any ancient optimisms that compelled me to utilize them. It's crude, isn't it? What use is a countdown when you have no reference for its beginning? At some point, I marked them with their durations; but what good is knowing an expired duration a moment later to me?

The clocks hung and watches strewn about fare no better. Yes, very good, it's three o'clock as I gaze upon it. And what was it a moment ago? Or moments before that? As I look away, what time is it now? Emblems of failed experiments appealing to a chronological paradigm that has rejected me.

I move the razor in again. Again, again, again. The collage of puzzle pieces seem to me predetermined in their diffused order. That might read obviously to one vaguely acquainted with puzzle-making. Conventionally, a puzzle is derived backwards from its solution. Jigsaws are scattered assortments comprising a singular portrait, dismembered for that purpose. While I do not trust myself even with that endeavor, my craft is patently more absurd. I dress each piece only after having cut them. One by one, I divulge an iteration to some narrative safekept by obscured memory. I cannot say when such madness convinced me to its hunt, but I find an alluring otherness to the craft: a captivation and continuity of the mind that remains unconsumed by my amnesic predisposition. Regardless, the withering of whatever cognitive framework housing these nobler attributes has taken a rather dizzying pace. I reason this progressive anemia shall render me empty soon.

It is on good account, then, that this shall be my final puzzle.

I press a brush of fresh paint against a singular piece. At every stroke, I begin from a new moment. A new motionless center. Frozen hearts meshed into a single cohesive entity.

Another stroke. I turn the piece over and back methodically and set it where it must go.

A tearing agony takes hold in my lower leg, like threshing against shale stone. I am coaxed to shrieking by an intoxicating heat eclipsing my better judgment. The rage fastens my fingers into fists sent to clamor against the desk. A stray piece rattles as it strikes the floor below.

Object of malignance. The pestilence of entitlement and presumed dominion. It was Pollux, that coarsely coated vermin; white as the harsh morning light. How could I restrain this wrath? For he is an ulcer made up of vanity and arrogance, cannibalizing moments that are not his own. I care for him as a token of bad habit. His wickedness is easily mistaken for vigilance; persistent in calculating the tolls that others must recompense. Always keeping the ledger. Always exacting his tax. Arbiter of blame; or justice, as I'm sure he would see it. To have an enemy in this languid oblivion, and no ally. Enough, damn you! If I know anything at all, it's that I've always been prone to wrath. Seething against circumstance. I claim several tethers to notions like this. I must be sure to seal the door more quickly.

There is no time for it. The blood trickles from my thigh, pooling at the curve of my heel. Here, there is no time at all. I move my shaking hand to the brush once more and paint in acerbic daze. I feel the integrity of the small wooden piece tremble near to splinters between my tensed fingers before I relent. More frozen hearts, but in darker hues of harsher rubs. The sequence builds.

I see that for every moment in time, there is an imprint left of it in the mind. Like closing one's eyes and seeing the subtle glistening framework of their surroundings, so too is every instance a projection. Eyes closed, in the same way that framework might transmogrify into any other thing - another moment, or a different orientation of the same environment - so too is every moment susceptible to this alchemical transmutation. Reach out to touch it. But from where do I reach? What is there to touch? As soon as my hand has appeared before me, is it not kin to that greater projection itself? Is it not a piece of the mural on the wall before me, and is it I who set the piece there? Or was it the piece prior, for which I have no recollection? Or is it the piece yet to come, the things unseen, that call me forth?

There is drying blood laced about my leg. I pivot my view slightly to scowl at it, but catch sight of a disheveled letter resting against an ichor-stained lockbox at the foot of the desk. I feel a sickly repulsion. There is a finely penned memo visible, but crude scrawling and strikes mar the fringes. An overly edited notice about some foul business or another. I retrieve the parchment and crumple it in my free hand. It falls to the desk's surface loosely, away from my work.

The pieces are nearly set. To what end, I haven't the faintest idea. But as I look across the room I see the many hourglasses that have emptied during my effort. I see the clocks on the wall spinning about. One reads four thirty six. I turn my head to another across the room. Five twenty nine. No two are alike. Are they? None repeat themselves. Do they? I gaze down and see spilled blood.

The room is aglow in soft orange. The bramble of shadows along the shelves come to life, weaving about the mounting aurora. There's no time for it. Here, there's no time at all.

I set the final piece in its row. Something like relief pours across my still heated flesh, soothing away a constricting enmity burrowed in my blood. A pattering of gentle paws alerts me to the end of my table. It is Castor, my dearest friend, perched inquisitively upon my lectern. Of all the memories I've abandoned, his I still cling to. The small, miserable life I pulled from the gutter so many years past, in the depth of some winter wherein ending my own small and miserable struggle had been so heavily weighed. I'd written the note. And I wrote it a hundred more times. How glad I was to keep you from that end.

Noble Castor, hapless Castor; white as jasmines. I extend a hand and he accepts it at the nape. This new serenity consummates the completion of my task with tears, now streaming from my weary eyes. I am glad you are here, Castor. Paragon of compassion. Symbol of mercy. He is wilted and sunken in, much like myself. I fear I've neglected him, but if memory serves - although it rarely does - his time of natural becoming is nearing an end. With another brief embrace, he slinks away to the floor.

I return to my assortment of moments laid out in its precise array. Each instance is foreign to me. Every stroke, every frozen heart. I inspect them, one by one, and see the infinite terrariums each piece encloses. But no chain exists between them. There is no sequence unifying them. There is no story to tell. I pause. When was my last breath?

Where Castor once sat, there are two puzzle pieces. They remained unmarked but for the traces of bloody paws. I take them in hand and return them to the others.

A dim shade arises before me in the blooming amber light of the room.

Casper?

There he sits atop the window sill, his paws slightly ragged and knotted, dried in some dark ichor. Casper. White as the frail sickness. White as morning snow.

I glare at the puzzle set before me. In the early light it seems to me almost a blank canvas; with tendrils of luminous character engulfing the subtle shapes and colorations of the jigsaw. Still it transforms. I salvage the crumpled note with reflexive lucidity and smooth it once more.

May this serve as my confession to all who read it.

I see that every moment in time is but a dream that I might absolve, for I cannot forgive myself.

My only child lay dead in our home; this foul gutter.

I see that every moment in time is one that I've allowed to die in my place.

He is broken, and I with Him. But with His heart, we need never be parted.

The shadowy projection of Casper's tail whips across the canvas. A story is rendered into being as a dreamlike asphyxia seizes me. The smattering of color, light and shadow takes hold in the shape of three forms - revealed one by one, and then fading as the tail's shade passes to and fro. The bloodied paw prints are joined and centered and now become a beating heart, its rhythm aligned to Casper's movement.

And though I know the cost of this betrayal, the minutes without Him grow longer. I am suspended here, where He may never rest.

If know anything at all, it's that I have inflicted a desperate violence. I claim this tether alone, and no more.

So I will carve this final puzzle; His heart will be with me, frozen in time as I, too, shall be. A portrait in time.

There Casper sits on the window sill in the morning light.

Until my final moment has left me.

And there He sits still.