She chewed her lower lip. “If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern,
or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea.”
“Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?”
“What’s your name?”
“Enn.”
“So you are Enn,” she said. “And you are a male. And you are a biped.
Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”
“But they aren’t different things. I mean, they aren’t contradictory.” It
was a word I had read many times but never said aloud before that night,
and I put the stresses in the wrong places. Contradictory.
She wore a thin dress made of a white, silky fabric. Her eyes were a
pale green, a color that would now make me think of tinted contact lenses;
but this was thirty years ago; things were different then. I remember
wondering about Vic and Stella, upstairs. By now, I was sure that they were
in one of the bedrooms, and I envied Vic so much it almost hurt.
Still, I was talking to this girl, even if we were talking nonsense, even if
her name wasn’t really Triolet (my generation had not been given hippie
names: all the Rainbows and the Sunshines and the Moons, they were only
six, seven, eight years old back then). She said, “We knew that it would
soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we
were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and
dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned
the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the
poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its
message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic
spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant,
the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once
again.”
“And then what happened?”
She looked at me with her green eyes, and it was as if she stared out at
me from her own Antigone half-mask; but as if her pale green eyes were just
a different, deeper, part of the mask. “You cannot hear a poem without it
changing you,” she told me. “They heard it, and it colonized them. It
inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way
that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its
verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation
their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather
than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was
no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh
and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.”
