SCENE. —A room furnished comfortably and tastefully, but not extravagantly. At the back, a door to the right leads to the entrance-hall, another to the left leads to [redacted]’s study. Between the doors stands a piano. In the middle of the left-hand wall is a door, and beyond it a window. Near the window are a round table, arm-chairs and a small sofa. In the right-hand wall, at the farther end, another door; and on the same side, nearer the footlights, a stove, two easy chairs and a rocking-chair; between the stove and the door, a small table. Engravings on the walls; a cabinet with china and other small objects; a small book-case with well-bound books. The floors are carpeted, and a fire burns in the stove. It is winter. A bell rings in the hall; shortly afterwards the door is heard to open. Enter [redacted], humming a tune and in high spirits.

A weakness of my character: I am at odds with things I don’t understand. Which wouldn’t matter much if I were a little smarter, but… What do I understand at all? Facts, mostly. Raw data is pure, comforting. I can say "My name is Liv," and know that means something. The message is clear: I am a thing called by this sound. The plain obviousness of the idea is comforting. I trip on everything else though… Why Liv? Because [redacted] wanted to call me Livy, so I was named Olivia. Neither of which are Liv, but I go by that now. It changed as I got older. Someone didn’t want to call me Livy because they thought it sounds childish, and I am (by reports) not a child now. Their doing influenced other's doing, and I go by Liv now. Mostly. Some—people who have known me since I was a child—still call me Livy. People at work and in other, more official capacities call me Olivia. On occasion I'm mistakenly called Olive. But most call me Liv. These are the facts, but why? I've never cared much for my name. Which isn’t to say I don’t like it. I don’t care what I’m called. It is, for me, irrelevant data. I don’t call myself anything. I don’t call me at all. I don’t engage myself—I am me. A body, a mind. The gross accumulation of sensory data arranged into a perennial I, for some ongoing, internalized narrative. My name seems extraneous. If [redacted] wanted to call me something else—a new name. If [redacted] hadn't let them decide—a new name. I could file some papers at a government office, or ask everyone I know very nicely—a new name. But how would that change me, if at all? And still, why? From the beginning, why this name? And other things—my face, my voice. The size of my hands, my feet. The shape of my fingers. Who was the first person to call me Liv? I know someone who named their son Michael, who gets annoyed when anyone calls him Mike. But I don’t know why. What’s the difference, really? What’s the use? People are fussing over the sounds for them, and what do I do? So much of life is vague, I think. Something stops me from remembering and understanding certain things, and I don’t know why I want to understand at all. For now, at least… If I could reduce my life to a single fact it would be this: I am a thing more concerned with what it’s called than being. And maybe, in the final analysis, this is what being is for me.

Something from the water jumps up, beats around the air for a moment. Its luminous scales catch my attention. I watch it drop back in with a plop, the water rolling away around it. Thick sheets of opaque green water cover the thing from view. I think, 'Waves don’t roll as much as they slither.' I consider the water washing up to bite my ankles. Feeding things with luminous scales into my body, to feed on what is inside of me. Perhaps it’s this thing—bludgeoning apprehension, thoughts of things killing me, transforming inert or lifeless things into sinister things with effacing malice at a moment’s notice—that I could do without. I consider moving into it, to live in the supple cushion of the creeping water. Maybe there things move too slow for existential consideration. I keep waiting to see signs of the thing with luminous scales break the surface of the water again. To see its face in the terse moment of passing. I want to look for signs of a furrowed brow, bruised skin around the eyelids. Lips condensed into thin lines and pulled taut across teeth. Ruinous impressions tucked behind the irises. Tongue held like a locked door. The water stays as still as it can be though, glistening as the sun skips light along the surface. Throwing it around haphazardly, ambiguous motions hidden underneath. I keep my eyes fixed on the surface of the water. [redacted] doesn’t say anything. I look at her. She's looking over the railing of the pier, at the water some thirty feet below us. Her face in profile doesn’t fit the glittering, still water further off. And the hills beyond, the trees and their thin, lithe contours wearing the faint blossoms of the arriving springtime. Rising ghostlike above the arched ground underneath, adding hollow illusory dimensions to its height. “So, what are you going to do?” I wait a moment like I’d been waiting moments for years. My hands slung in the pockets of my coat, curling into fists. I look back over the water. “You don’t look well.” “I know,” she says. Of course she knows. I look at her. How could she not know? I consider this being the last time I’ll be with her, our goodbyes said with degrees of finality neither of us understand. Maybe I’ll understand it later, despite the permeating sense that I could understand it now. The wind blows over the pier and pushes hair over my face. The rest of me stays still. I look down at the walkway. My feet point forward in a narrow angle. I don’t know why we came here, and she’s so quiet today. I look at her, see how unlike herself she appears now. Like she were dressed in an oversized sweater, her small body lost in the thick fabrics of grave thought. Her face looks nothing like it used to. When we were younger, during memories I have that are now, for some reason, difficult to recall. “Will you come with me?” she says, finally. “I don’t want to go alone.” For a moment I look away. Back toward the water, the mirage of trees above the hills. The sun curled like a fist. The multiform assemblage of clouds. And, suddenly, it doesn’t sound like her saying it. It sounds like a girl—just some girl—that I met at the pier today. As though I should have gone to [redacted]'s house, but I kept walking. Caught in some reverie. Intuitively led to the walkway, the railing. Stopping beside this girl looking out over the water, and she spoke to me. I look at her, and can't help noticing her slow atrophy again. Except now, standing in the center of all these wide open vacillating expanses, it seems to have bore deeper. Past points of notice, to degrade some incorporeal quality. Some quintessential property. It’s in the way her faint unsteady appearance has taken over every appearance of hers in my mind. It’s in the way her hands grip the railing a little too tightly in the gentle breeze. “We’ll figure it out together.” And she doesn’t respond to that. She looks at me. And she smiles in a small way. The expression looks wrong on her tired face. She looks back over the water. I keep looking at her. But I can’t say anything. Finally, she looks at me. Her face—and mine—are doing things I want to describe, but I can't right now. And she turns away from the water and starts walking. To where, I don’t know. I would like to know. But, instead, I follow her...

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space. Rayless, and pathless. And the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day. And men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation. And all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, the palaces of crowned kings—the huts, the habitations of all things which dwell, were burnt for beacons. Cities were consumed, and men were gathered round their blazing homes to look once more into each other's face. Happy were those who dwelt within the eye of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch. A fearful hope was all the world contained; forests were set on fire—but hour by hour they fell and faded—and the crackling trunks extinguished with a crash—and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits the flashes fell upon them. Some lay down and hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled. And others hurried to and fro, and fed their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up with mad disquietude on the dull sky, the pall of a past world. And then again with curses cast them down upon the dust, and gnashed their teeth and howled. The wild birds shrieked, and, terrified, did flutter on the ground, and flap their useless wings. The wildest brutes came tame and tremulous. And vipers crawled and twined themselves among the multitude, hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food. And War, which for a moment was no more, did glut himself again. A meal was bought with blood, and each sate sullenly apart gorging himself in gloom. No love was left. All earth was but one thought. And that was death, immediate and inglorious. And the pang of famine fed upon all entrails. Men died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh. The meagre by the meagre were devoured. Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, and he was faithful to a corpse, and kept the birds and beasts and famished men at bay. Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead lur'd their lank jaws. Himself sought out no food, but with a piteous and perpetual moan, and a quick desolate cry, licking the hand which answered not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famished by degrees. But two of an enormous city did survive, and they were enemies. They met beside the dying embers of an altar-place where had been heaped a mass of holy things, for an unholy usage. They raked up, and shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands the feeble ashes, and their feeble breath blew for a little life, and made a flame which was a mockery. Then they lifted up their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld each other's aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died. Even of their mutual hideousness they died, unknowing who he was upon whose brow famine had written Fiend. The world was void, the populous and the powerful was a lump—seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless. A lump of death. A chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, and nothing stirred within their silent depths. Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, and their masts fell down piecemeal. As they dropped they slept on the abyss without a surge—the waves were dead. The tides were in their grave, the moon, their mistress, had expired before. The winds were withered in the stagnant air, and the clouds perished. Darkness had no need of aid from them. She was the Universe.

Her leg moves to prophecy the light coming through the window. She knees me in the back, and I get up to close the curtains for her. Standing near the window, holding the two halves of the curtain like a finger trap, wearing the difference between what keeps you warm and what makes sense like a sweater, I see frost on the glass. I pull the curtains closed, and it could be 3 a.m. again as I go to lie down again next to her.