Act I — The Crossing

Page 7 — The Crossing continues

There is a moment in a tearing where the two sides are still one. I have seen it in cloth, in ice, and in the face of a man who has held a word too long. The white gave me none of those three. It gave me a happening. A tearing, when it is finished tearing, is a place — a wound in the world with edges you can look at and name. In the middle of the tearing, while it is still happening, it is not a place at all. It is an event, and a body can be inside an event without being on either side of it. The happening has no noun, and I refuse to give it one.

We were in the happening. I want that plain and short. The five of us, the white behind us, the black ahead of us, and the happening around us like a breath held in a throat that does not know it is holding one. The white had let us go at the last of the old world. I felt it let go, and of everything the white did, that is what I have kept longest. But the happening had not finished with us. It was still in the middle of what it was doing.

What it was doing, I will say as plainly as I can: it was taking us apart.

Not killing. There was no pain in it. I have felt pain the way a mason feels a wall come down — all at once, and all of it, and the body does most of the screaming — and this was not that. This was the other thing, the thing the body does not know how to do: it was a word coming apart in a mouth. Not a breaking. An un-saying. I felt the five of us as a sentence is felt before it is spoken — five words in a line, each one still the right word, but the line short by a word, and the shortness in the same place every time. Rumzuck's shield was still in his hands, and every one of those stills was true, and the true did not add up. I felt it in the counting, the way a man counts a purse of coins that was a full purse a moment ago and is one coin light, and he counts again, and the light is the same light.

The ward was gone by then. It went at the last of the white — not broken. A broken ward is a ward that failed, and his did not fail; it finished. A ward, like a word, has an end. It is spoken, it holds, and then it gives out, like a held note gives out, and you feel it in your own throat. I felt it go. I know what it is to feel a voice leave a room. It is that. There was a sound in the five of us that was not the white, and the sound was his, and I knew it as I know my own ward. When his ward went, the five of us were all there was.

No ward. No line. Just the five of us.

And that is when I held.

I hold the shape of the story, and in the happening it was the only thing there was. In the happening there was nothing to hold the four of them except me, holding. So I held. It was not a ward I had made, and I did not make it the shape of anything I have made before. It was a ward I have not yet named, and a ward I have not yet named is a ward I do not yet understand. I will say only this: it was low, it was even, and it had no color I could name. I will not dress it. He is gone, and I am holding the four of them without him.

I held them as the mill holds the water — not as a man holds a thing, as a place holds a thing that passes through it. And I did not let go.

The four of them were in it. Rumzuck with his hands still on the shield, and the shield still the shape of the shield. Zahlia with her face still turned up, though there was no sky in the happening to turn up at. Wreckreate, counting — one, two, three, four, five — and the count stopped at five, and he started again, and it stopped at five again, and he did not stop counting. Smackage with his palm flat on nothing, and there was no ground in the happening to read, and he read it anyway, the ground that was coming. A man who has read enough ground knows it when it is on its way.

And me, holding.

The happening took the world apart around us, and it could not take the five apart. Not the happening, not the white, not the ward — the five of us, in the middle of a happening that had no name, holding the shape of the five, and the empty place in it.

And then the happening finished.

We came out of it all at once, a word coming out of a mouth, and we were no longer in the middle. After the happening there was a coast. The old world had no coasts.