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Your Highness! I have reached the end of my tether! From here on out, your town chronicler adamantly refuses to meet with this despicable creature. You may kill me, my lord, but
I shall not go back to him
!
    WALKING MAN:
    I heard the voice
    of a woman
    coming from the town:
    That every man is
    an island
,
    that you c-c-cannot
    know
    another
    from within—
    I persist in trying: I resuscitate,
    awaken, endlessly clone
    cells of yours that still
    live in me, the final imprints
    of being that have not yet
    faded from the tips of my sensations—
    the touch of your child-skin,
    your voice still thin
    and secretive, yet lashing out already
    with a sharp salvo of irony, an impression
    of your torso moving,
    passing quickly,
    sliding (how happy I was
    when they said
    you walked like me).
    The corner of your mouth
    tugs with a fragile flash
    of doubt—
    I continue, I preserve,
    I treasure
    and revive the child
    you were, the man
    you will not be.
    You may laugh: What is this, Dad,
    one-human-subject research?
    I shrug my shoulders: No, it is a
    life’s
    work.
    Look, I suddenly exclaim,
    I will create you,
    or at least
    one life-twitch
    of you, and why not,
    damn it, why
    give up?
    I’ve done it once before,
    and now I want
    you
    so
    much
    more.
    WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:
    I drew
    all the blinds. I dimmed
    all the lights. My skin grew covered
    with wounds and blisters. Dark
    silence, dark
    silence, days
    and nights I was
    inside it, an overdue
    embryo, ossified,
    conceived by the tragedy
    in its senescence.
    Until I emerged
    from my torpor, and a voice
    was conjured up from deep
    inside me: I am
    losing
    my son
    once again.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: Under a streetlamp that glows with a yellowish light stands an elderly man writing in chalk on the wall of a house. A white halo of hair hovers around his head, his walrus mustache is silver, and my soul alights when I realize it is my teacher, my math teacher from elementary school, a likable man who suffereda tragedy years ago, I cannot recall what, and disappeared. I thought he was dead, yet here he is, in the middle of the night, standing by a wall befouled with lurid pictures, writing columns of numbers and exercises in tiny, neat handwriting. When he notices me he does not seem alarmed at all: on the contrary, he gives me a toothless grin, as though he has been expecting me for a long time, and gestures with his crooked finger for me to approach the wall.
    ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
    Two plus two
    equals four.
    Repeat after me:
    three plus three equals
    six. Ten plus ten—twenty.
    You’re late again, my boy;
    tomorrow you’ll have to bring
    your parents.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: But sir, don’t you remember me?
    ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
    Excuse me, sir, excuse me.
    The darkness, and my eyesight …
    You are the town chronicler,
    of course.
    So: with regard to the question
    that was posed, or about
    to be posed,
    I have so little to say,
    and I myself
    must wonder: after all,
    for twenty-six years
    this has been
    the singular
    greatest fact
    of my life.
    Yet surprisingly,
    and embarrassingly,
    I know nothing
    about it.
    “But what is it like?”
    people ask,
    and I, too, not infrequently,
    ask myself:
    Like a block of concrete?
    An iron ingot?
    An impassable dam?
    Like basalt rock?
    Or rather—like the layers
    of an onion?
    But no, I must apologize,
    for it is none of those.
    And do not think, sir,
    that I am evading
    the question:
    I truly know nothing about it.
    Just that it is here.
    A fact. And heavily
    it slumps
    on all my days. And
    sucks my life out.
    And that is all.
    Please forgive me,
    more than that
    I truly
    do
    not
    know.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: He turned his back on me and resumed writing numbers on the wall in his miniature handwriting. I stood watching him for several more minutes, drawing strange comfort from the ease and swiftness of his motions. Then suddenly I remembered what it was that had befallen him, amazed that I could have forgotten. I almost went up to him and said: Sir, such