That there is a message at all is enough. Just consider how we are, our ears turned to each other, to the march of history, to the genome, to the edges of mathematics, to music and the arts, to the very echo of the cosmos, for a message. Any.

We think the message is revealed to us, but it is the opposite, we are revealed before the message. The symbols I have been straining over, have laid me bare.

And as for the message humanity hopes for, whether or not there is any divine author to go with it, we can be sure the gods we have imagined are apparitions of a collective mind, inventions. It is madness to think the God we contemplate could be confined within our contemplation–we cannot even visualize a four-dimensional solid or an imaginary number. Even in the ancient stories, it is said the glimpse of Him would make one blind. And still we are naked before this drawing of ours, this As-If-It-Were-God, literally and emotionally, as revealed as in a painting or a song.

So how frightened are we, and what exactly of, that the moment we turn from the work of art or from the notion of the divine, to face each other, we immediately conceal and repress ourselves?

I hope I never do manage to decipher this message I found, waiting in this bottle someone once left it in. There is no limitlessness without mystery.

I want to live in the places of our mind. I want a free ride on the things that we aspire to. Haven’t I felt empathy for the unfortunate, predicted the events of the planet, conceived of great inventions and works of art that I would accomplish, if only I had the time? I’ve seen us, too, in my mind. We are in perpetual amazement with each other, honest without the slightest loss of mystery, somehow at the top of our arcs, with all the time to dazzle the world, and all the time to idle like a picnic with each other.

What is this awful place where we actually live, this city named for a better one, one that is a legend, and is mostly a myth? Are we, collectively, so dull that we cannot even name a river? Maybe you and I could never be together, we would try to escape but not quite manage, we would go to the end of the world, and still we’d be there, mechanical in our language, and like the actuaries or adjusters of romance, systematically disproving the best that we’d imagined, systematically hedging against the worst.

When I was a child, I hoped that later, ten or twenty years later, I would not know the difference between the things I had experienced, the things I had dreamed, and the things I had imagined.

They say a fog came one summer and lasted ninety days. When it lifted, it took the colours from our irises, revealed a city that had been repainted grey and chipped. No one was left who was in love, but every debt was forgiven.

I took the ferry to Halifax once and the trip stole my memory. As I stood out on the deck and felt the spray cold on my face it felt like hands were reaching up out of the frigid choppy waters to unravel me like thread, leaving me salty and clear. Absolved.

Let us destroy the Martello Tower. Destroy it again and watch them build it back every year, growing more determined to catch us. Growing craftier, subtler, causing all our friendships to falter under the weight of mistrust and betrayals, until only you and I are left. We both know we are too few, and too poorly equipped to keep the rebellion going. We try anyway and are caught. The prosecutor demands that we hang, one before the other. Instead we escape, and drown in the attempt, swimming from the island fortress to a land we imagine but know nothing about, except that we know it is hopelessly far away.

I know where the tunnel entrances are, beneath the Citadel and the Signal Station. They are flooded and murky and icy. They are dangerous and perfect. If you can show me something better, then I am yours.

But no one counts the hours or the years. There are no seasons, the days are unchanging. Nothing dies out, nothing freezes over—not the mosquitos, not the refuse in the river beds. Everywhere we look we find the litter of surplus, the riot of vegetation, the overgrowth of humanity spilling out, as if God’s thermometer has snapped apart over the streets and its mercury dots are the motorcycles.

Five men sit under a sheet metal screen, quiet as a constellation. They are waiting. They are blank with waiting, waiting for anything to happen. The hours pass uncounted, their trivia falling into the gutters with the rest of it, with the wastes of humanity.

This peace is mystic, ancient and crushing. They say never to add music to what silence has said best, but this is a peace I want to shatter with a chord. And you—with you I want to rouse the street, not to prayer but to life. I want us to inspire the roofs to lift and the vines to tumble, the city to erupt like the volcanos that surround it, leaving gardens in the craters and love letters in the igneous pillars.

Tonight, love, I want us to gather up and organize. For tomorrow before dawn, we storm the mosques, we fill them and spill out of their grounds, and like a choir of thousands, we sing through their megaphones. Tomorrow we will make an instrument of them, the greatest ever built, the throat of Jakarta, a resonance that will rise into the sky and fall onto our heads, a celestial finger that, touching our foreheads, will lift us to our feet for sunrise.

I want to dance between the monoliths we raise, chase you and be chased. I want the fire always burning, though it is already hot. I want us to flinch faster than the scorpions–they try to stab our hands we dart away. I want us to sing until we lose our voices. Our conversations are written in sand the wind erases. They are recorded on air the wind blows away. They are burned into memories the peyote confuses and the madness destroys.

We will not know where the water comes from, but it will come. Seagulls will dive into the spikes we set for them. They will not know what compels them. The authorities will look, but they will never find us. Our visions are not legal.

So I printed my old stories and cut them into pieces. I shuffled the small ones and folded those large enough into airplanes, doves and cranes. I assembled tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons with the fragments and rolled them together as dice. I wrote the parts facing up, and in the logic of seventy waking hours they formed like a hallucination, like the patterns hidden in those books you look at out of focus. On second reading, none of it made sense. None of my ideas do.

What I want is a collision. I want what comes out of the large hadron collider. I want what this city has, a skyline with the remnants of centuries rammed together, an original text with red editing between the lines. I want imperfections waiting to be scratched out, reflections and shadows falling onto the neighbours. I want a street of people who are incoherent in their passing, who are so far apart from each other that you can pluck at those distances like on the strings of a cello. I want so much competing music that there are accidental melodies in the clashing. I want them to last only so long, then veer away again to noise. I want you—the whispers I hear just barely above the crashing of your colours, smells and movement—a conversation left unsaid but glimpsed at in the veering apart of topics. I want the near miss, what can’t be captured yet, and when the dream is done, the only part that lingers.

Your first letter was a drawing of our alley raised so high it vanished in the clouds. There were zip lines between many of the ledges, flying paper birds, and the architecture of a medieval post-modern collision. My letters to you were straight-forward. I talked about the day, about ideas, plans, and my hopes. You might write for seven unpunctuated pages about what a needle wasn’t, or in technical and archeological detail about how an obscure civilization might have made bricks differently, had they just tried this or that.

I asked you questions you refused to answer. What was your name? You told me to make names up. What was your school? You told me the question was too boring. When I asked you to come out and meet, you agreed but refused to set a time. The next day, and on many others, I was sure I saw you waiting at the end of the alley, but by the time I could run down, you were gone. I was sure I saw you all around the city, your face disappearing behind a corner, a flicker of your coat, your eyes behind a mask in a water taxi I could not approach. Our spaces wove together but did not connect.

I suspect you used my letters to make those paper cranes. I wonder what a tourist would make of that, a visit to my world, and like their visit to the city, a voyeur’s dip into a stream, a vision that is honest but incomplete, or perhaps merely a reflection.

I came back to the alley. It is the same. I came to a canal and on the ledge there was a book. It can only be by you. The ISBN and the publisher are fake. So are the reviews and the names you acknowledge, the diligent editor, the spouse who stood by you all those years. I looked it up. I’m glad I have this now.

I have been grounded by fear. Any one of us could be the terrorist. And though we fight against the extremes of opinion and tactics, isn’t it delicious how the mainstream, the everyday commute, the engineered food and plastic computer are killing us? It is a quicksand, to struggle against it just swallows us faster.

All I want today is to turn the noise off, sink into a couch and play music neither of us has ever heard. I want to consign the cynicism of the world to others, and simply walk with you a while. I want to stay up all night making stories for you and forgetting them. I want a rebellion of the one real friend versus the eight hundred, of the private moment versus the public, of the things loved and forgotten against the clung-to, of the sensed and felt versus the reported.

I want to get to know you through the music you love, the books that have changed you, through your most fleeting and foolish fantasies, and through my own five senses. I want to know the you who has stayed up too late, gotten too drunk, indulged in too many daydreams out loud, and is not worried about how she comes off. When the end comes, I promise I will not care exactly where we all went wrong.

Halloween was delivered to us, a relic in a box of ash. We burned the witches to fill it.

There is smoke on the wind. It may be chimneys, it may be sacrificial pyres, it may be the forest burning. There is a smell we call fresh but comes from the decay of leaves. There is a smell like mercury, like amnesia, the wind has blown over a lake that is cursed and it has brought a mist into our nostrils. I am happy to forget everything I can.

The world is bereft of understanding or of expectations that are sane. There is a rainbow around the moon. There are songs that summon ghosts, and songs that send them away. Your flute is made of bone. Your perfume has the bottom tone of rot and the top of apricots and sage. It does not matter what happens in an hour that does not exist. It matters more than anything what happens in an hour that does not exist.

I want us to take laurel and peyote, to touch and see each other just enough to share the hallucination. I want us to look back at the world from the other side and to kiss like it is a ceremony the spirits invented in order to feel mortal.

And if the night is over and my memory has not come back, that hour is all I want to keep.

A city is an aggregate, a statistical ensemble, it does not matter how random I am, there is a graph of how we shop, of when our lights go on. The traffic pulses, orderly, like the signals on a wire, and you stand across from me at the intersection, there, through the gaps between the cars—if they passed at thirty-two gaps per second, I could say you were in a film.

We pass each other ten thousand times a day and learn to never dwell. Next to you on the plane, I fantasized that it would crash, at least that we would think so. I imagined our introductions, your name, telling you I take pictures. If I had my camera out, I would take some then, honest shots the impact would obliterate.

This city burned to the ground. Maybe today the bomb goes off, it has been waiting in a skyscraper’s utility penthouse and the light from it is like ten thousand suns. Our shadows, all our shadows, look like chalk stains flaring out from the intersection where you and I are standing, we are in the fireball, it has caught the air itself on fire, evaporated the city core, sucked glowing embers high into the clouds and turned the two of us invisible.

The radioactive dust begins to settle, it lands on your arms and shoulders and on your head, and it is like the two of us have risen from it, a new species. We make a skin of ash, rubbing it in like charcoal sketches of ourselves.

We are mute, now, but then we always were, and as we wander the landscape after this apocalypse, there is always dust to trace in. You write that our stories are told with light and I write back, what I always wanted, most of all, was to hear you laugh.