Act III — The Split

Page 16 — Zahlia Feels the Veil

The Veil is here.

I need to say what the Veil is before I say anything else, because the old world's priests spent their whole craft learning to read it, and I am one of them. The Veil is the thin place between the worlds. In the old world it was a wall you could read — I have stood at it a hundred times, in the high places of the sanctums, with my hands up and the wall in them. The wall was always the wall. You put your hand on it and it told you what was on the other side. That is what a wall is for.

The Veil is here on the third morning of the new world, on the black sand of a coast that has a name the world will not give it.

It was Zahlia who found it.

She did not find it with the looking and the reaching. She found it the way a word is found in a mouth — already there, before the mouth knows it. A word in the mouth is not a word the mouth put there. The word was already there, and the mouth was only where it lived.

The finding was in the air. It was in the stretch of air between our fire and the water, and the stretch had not been there the night before. On the third morning, the stretch was not the air. The stretch was the thin place, and the thin place had not been there when the dark came in.

Zahlia felt it.

She was near the fire with her hands in her lap. Then the hands came up. She put them up — palms flat, fingers a little spread, as she does — and the air around them went thin.

Not quiet. Thin.

The air around her hands went thin the way the air goes thin at the top of a place that is not supposed to have a top. I have stood at a top like that, in the high place of the old world's sanctum. The thin air at the top of a place is air that has been used. The air around her hands had been used. By what, I will not say, because I do not know, and Zahlia will not guess either.

I felt it too.

I have read the Veil with the hands, the way the old world taught me. I put my hands up as she had put hers up, and I felt it. And the feeling was not in my hands. The feeling was not in my knowing. The feeling was in the between.

The Veil in the old world was a wall, and I had read that wall a hundred times before I put my hands up on the third morning of the new world. When I put my hands up, the wall was not there. The between was there. The between is not a thing. It is the space where the thing should be, and the thing is not.

The Veil is not what it was, she said.

She said it with her hands still up. She said it flat, and once, and without the guessing — her craft does not guess.

It is thicker. Or it is thinner. I cannot tell you which, and I am not going to guess, because the guessing is where the world finds out.

Thicker, or thinner. The two are the finding. Thicker: the Veil has grown, and we are further from whatever is on the other side, and a comfort might be spent on the further. Thinner: the Veil has worn, and we are closer to whatever is on the other side, and a fear is spent on the closer. She will not guess.

She looked at me.

In the old world, the Veil was a wall you could read. Here it is a wall that reads you back. I put my hand on it, and it put its hand on me, and the hand was not mine.

The hand was not mine. I keep that one last: the Veil put its hand on her.

I asked her what that means.

She asked me what I thought it meant.

I told her I thought it meant we were in a place that had been in a place, and that the second place had not cleaned up after the first. The new world is the place we are in, and it sits inside the first place. I gave Zahlia that for an answer, and it was not an answer.

She told me that was not an answer. And she told me I was not a man who gives answers. And she told me the no-answer was the first question — asked since the second morning, never stopped, kept by the world the whole time. She said it flat, and once, and with her whole craft in the words. I stood there with my hands still up from my own test. The exchange went back where it had gone before — to the place where we keep the questions we do not spend.

The Veil is here.

The here is what the world does not let go of. And the thicker-or-thinner — the thing I could not name — is what I have kept against the third morning and every morning since. This camp has a Veil it cannot read.