Antiphony Read Online Free PDF Page A

than a sound. A vibration has engulfed him, and it merges now with a kind of milky amber light, gathering all about him.
    He is not sure what is happening—perhaps he is fainting; perhaps he has passed out and is hallucinating a dream. He is filtering through something that he can only relate to as layers of film. The light and vibration grow more intense as he passes through each layer. The sound that encompasses him is like a pipe organ in a massive cathedral playing every tone at once. And then, as if he has been swallowed by an ultimate layer that is not only around him but inside him, he hears a secret sphere of a voice emerge from the descent within his head, saying
I am, in a word, in an instant,
    and that is perhaps the extent of it,
    except for the fact that I go on and on,
    forever flooding forward.
    This is all inside his head, he cannot see or feel. He has been engulfed by pure sound, the sounding of these words.
    Profound the moment when the word came forth
    and the crackled sprawl of space and time burst into triumph.
    A seed of thought,
    a grain of sand that grows and grows,
    propelled by nothing more than the authority of my thinking.
    The voice is gone, suddenly; the ringing, shuddering noise shrinks and goes away, it folds itself up and the light which is also a part of the vibration lifts away and here he is in the hotel room again. He puts his hand on the bureau at his side, for balance. He looks around him and gathers himself. Perhaps he is going insane. He has never had anything like this happen to him before and doesn’t know what it can be. What was that voice inside his head?
    The closest thing he has experienced to this was the time twelve years ago when his heart went into a sudden spell of arrhythmia, first racing to an incredible speed, then slowing to a series of spastic and irregular thumps. It sent him outside of himself for a few brief moments, a feeling of being lost within a web of translucent space beyond the normal four dimensions. It had only lasted for a few seconds, this feeling of loosely floating outside his body, and he later reconciled it to a lack of blood or oxygen to his brain. Then, later, after Ilene had insisted that she take him to the Emergency Room and they spent the next few hours trying to get his heart back into a normal rhythm, they transferred him to a regular hospital room overnight for observation, to see if his heart would revert to a regular beat on its own. When it didn’t, they were compelled the next morning to shave two patches of his chest hair away and put him under before shocking him with the paddles they always use at moments of desperation on TV, though this had been, they assured him, a controlled and entirely standard way of getting his errant heartbeat back on track.
    What they conveniently neglected to tell him until much later, when the doddering cardiologist acknowledged that his heart was in good working order and this episode was probably the result of too many late nights working and too much caffeine, is that his heart would be stopped cold for a few seconds during the electrical shocks they administered. He had, in effect, come back from the dead.
    Maybe it is happening again. He puts his hand on his chest and feels his heart beating there trapped within the fragile birdcage of his ribs, slow and steady, faithfully accomplishing itssingular mission over and over again, time after time. No, what he just went through was something far beyond a spell of light-headedness. That sound, that voice, had filled him up—it was coming from inside him and all around him at the same time. And he had been transported, as if tunneling
into
himself—down into a higher part of himself somehow.
    But he cannot consider it now. He stares again at the clock by the bed and sees that he has only three minutes left. They will all be waiting there for him, the Calistoga Ballroom filled with his esteemed colleagues, wondering where he could be.
    Three