Against something humming was always something clanking, and this wasn’t the sound of the bus cutting the terrain into identical halves with the exception being that on one side you had the Hilayli station, and on the other side if you went as far as you could go, just kept moving south, beyond the grasses through the dunes, toward the Fahsah mountains, taking in the changing land shapes (you’d need to track your language as well), if you walked and walked, or took an all-terrain vehicle (Duder Schulda rented tractors) you’d eventually (although this could take weeks) reach the Hilayli station, and it would be the same station as on the other side, but not perceptible from the bus you were on, with the bus moving eastward: the one Hilayli was closer than the other, this was true, but the one and the other were the same. Something was always clanking everywhere where something else was humming; it brought people out into the streets; woke campers abruptly from naps. I was startled out of a dream and looked wistfully from the window, in tune to the grasses brushing against the bus: the grasses brushed the bus and said, “do not enter” and said, “hurry through” while faces appeared from the window. Somebody began to tell a story and his voice was like machinery clanking; he was building a shape, but it wouldn’t go where we were going: it was for another time, events involving people circling their homes (hearing sounds; what is that) and circling for the whole day, the light leaving, the light returning, neighbors bringing food and wine: something clanked below ground. He leaned back, allowing the story to overtake the breathing of those on the bus, everybody bent in repose, a little bit leaning “thank you, that is enough,” but only to suggest he could stop now, never to be so rude as to say stop. We all had a thing we were doing, and at some point, as it goes with this journey, we would all perform our destinations. I eagerly awaited Dis Lokijé’s performance: it surprised me that she was still in space; you would guess her to have hunkered down, grown quiet. The elders lived through the war and told stories all the time; all the while we were growing and our parents grew, we were hearing about the “violent war without violence,” and all the writers, which became everyone, meeting at Dis L’s to compose a history, a compendium of linked stories that documented where each person was during every place and time that concerned the war and all the years and places before and after. Dis Lokijé was a prominent figure from my childhood: she held the salons that everyone’s parents attended and let the children roam her strange hallways—they would take you—and though you might be a child who wanted to stay to hear what the adults were saying it was impossible not to get pulled into the night, said recalling our journeys these many years later to see if anyone would respond, to see who remembered and who left those walks in the past, with all their crannies and disorientations: for these walks there also was the feeling of violence without violence, being pulled along something whose contour you couldn’t discern, where there was always some trace of music (some humming, some clanking) coming from the terrain ahead of you, which was everything outside your body, every possible direction was the hallway you saw: it gave a sense of curving, splitting, of climbing, of bringing you down into caverns, tunnels, climbing out of darkness into a greater deeper dark—all of us kids trying to make a night of it, turning the paragraphs upside down. Everyone knew how space was divided; we’d grown up with the paragraphs, some of which had been revised over even our brief years—the reader coming out every night accounting for space, putting language to change, measuring the climate; we knew the paragraphs like a cycle of songs and recited them as we moved along passages (against a hum); we shouted like machines in perfect order, performing tunnels, recognizing the dark incomprehensible terrain of waiting. The parents went on for hours, talking about war during wartime, talking about writing before and after the war; sometimes, we would hear from the youngest of us, left behind or failing to enter the right door, that they talked about us: who we were going to be so many years hence (in a few years the city would need a new cartographer; who would be the right one); the parents drank coffee, then wine, then coffee, while we stumbled through an area, like bees, bumping against walls, falling through floor boards, all with this incredible flatness, an incredible awareness of flatness that gave our recitations a clanking monotone: our bodies exhausted from Dis L’s dark corridors whose purpose seemed exclusively to keep us, to keep us turning and descending and colliding near the walls of a new place—the newest old place in Ravicka—encrypted in the paragraphs (we didn’t then know what we were saying, our language calling the place out of hiding, for that moment, for the time of our humming); the walls of the unknown startled us with their sudden noise: there was another door (who would enter, send Selma), and we’d stand there, buzzing, reading the first paragraphs: how there were insides and outsides and how what was unfolding above ground often qualified the shape of that space; a certain kind of inside with a large dark above that seemed larger than all the space below it, where you stood, where you began to sweat and yawn, sensing the night coming to an end, that inside was often said “dome” or said “planetarium,” and this would be the library in the house of a woman who ran salons for your parents. They’d call you, through the paragraphs, by your birthdate. It would be time to shut down the factory of our thinking, sensing the city on the other side of the walls, becoming its interior.