[flashback] the book, i.

[Hadrian]

I can remember when I first fell in love with books, though I don't remember the title in particular -- I shall simply call it The Book without any epithets or qualifications, and in this sober reflection there is the barest hint of helplessness, a silent resignation before the enormity of the transcendental, for no words, no allusions, can adequately express the shiver of fear, the presentiment of a nameless thing that exceeds my capacity for awe. How could any collection of adjectives or a richness of metaphors aid me when I come face to face with that wondrous thing? Anyway, any soul-kin of mine, a true reader--and I address this reminiscence only to you--must understand me when I look you in the eye and try to communicate this revelation. A short, sharp look or a light clasp of the hands will stir you into awareness, and you will blink in shared rapture at the brilliance of The Book.

Somewhere in the dawn of childhood, the daybreak of my self-awareness, the eastern horizon had brightened with the gentle aurora. The Book lay in all its glory on my father's desk in Sylira, and he, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed with a quickly tongued fingertip the top of the pages until the mysterious hieroglyphs were explained to me in an indulgent voice.

O Father...

Sometimes he would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through the fine parchment leaves and the imperfectly interpreted pictures would rise before me. And as the wind turned the pages of the book, my increasing comprehension conjured colors and shapes from the columns of text, ideas and stories rising from the letters into flocks of birds.

This was a very long time ago, when I was all potential and no disappointment, when my hungry mind was a thing to be touted and encouraged, before my mother made me her pet to show off to the other rich ladies, when I could spend all day alone with my father in that room, which was the whole world to me.

As the words lulled me toward dreams, the crystals hanging from the chandelier filled the room with refracted colors, a rainbow splashing chaotic and playful about the corners of the room, and, when the lamp swayed on its chains, the whole room revolved in a kaleidoscopic spectrum, as if all the celestial spheres had shifted, one turning on the other.

I liked to stand between my father's legs, clasping them from each side like columns, I was so small. Sometimes he wrote letters; other times he kept ledgers. I sat on his desk and marveled at the magic in his hands, in his quill pen, entranced by the squiggles of his signature, crabbed and awhirl like the coloratura trills of an Akvatari soprano. Smiles were budding like spring flowers on the trees in the courtyard below, eyes hatched, somersaults turned. To amuse me, my father blew soap bubbles through a straw, sacrificing them to Zulrav; they burst in the iridescent air or floated down into the green leaves or, if they floated back into his office, their colors would still hang in the tamer air.

Then my mother appeared, and that early, bright idyll came to an end. Father had business in other cities, and I was seduced by my mother's caresses and sweet murmuring. I forgot my father, and my life began to run along a new and different track in his absence. Though little was required of me, there was nothing holy in the holidays, nothing miraculous in the miracles. I might even have forgotten the magic of The Book had it not been for a certain night and a certain dream.

To be continued...