Fact Slab

Consider some of the facts. The bed is rectangular, 60 inches by 80 inches. The slab is square, 60 inches to a side, its footprint 8 1/3 square feet less than the bed’s. The room is rectangular, nearly square, 10 feet by 11 feet. Not quite square. Subtracting bed and slab from room leaves 51 2/3 square feet of floor for me to move around on, measuring and scrawling, or to curl up on when sleep darkens my brain. That the bed is not my place makes another fact, long since added to the slab.

These matters of length and width are easy enough to wrangle. When we come to height, our difficulties begin. For instance: the bed. Perhaps in some other world its surface would compose a uniform, horizontal plane 21 inches above the floor, with 9 inches of box spring supporting 12 inches of mattress, and in that less burdened world we could rest in such simplicities, stretch ourselves upon the bed’s smooth surface, possibly even trail our fingertips along each other’s skin in the gentlest, most spectral of caresses. But that world is a dream concerning matters about which I can only speculate, babble, spin out nonsense, a world of no facts, no slab, dream world, drivel world, no world for me, no more my place than the bed is.

In the real world, there is the bed, and there is the slab, and there is the floor and what coats or covers it, barely and unevenly, covers it. But to confine ourselves to the bed, there is the bed, its length and its width, and in this world where difficulty begins with height, there is the bed’s height of 21 inches only along its edges and at its corners. Only in the case of those outermost parts does the bed’s height retain the purity and simplicity of a dream. The height of the other parts, what we might call the bed’s innermost, innermost of its upper surface I mean, the height of those innermost parts engenders difficulty on account of the king, and the queen, and the infanta, and the dauphin, those four on account of whom the bed is not my place. They make my life hard, those four.

To say nothing, so far, of the slab.

Nearly nothing, I should say. Length and width, lacking height. Not quite nothing, so far, of the slab.

To confine ourselves to the bed, we may say that its height is tied to weight, the distribution of weight upon its surface, and this distribution engenders difficulty because it changes. Each change presents new facts.

For instance: the king. At one time, the king measured 75 inches in length, was extended along the bed in such a way that only 5 inches remained between the soles of the feet and the bed’s edge, the head’s crown aligned with the opposite edge, and the king weighed 212 pounds. To this weight, distributed along this length, there corresponds a height of the bed, or rather several heights, measured with difficulty by plumbing the king at several points to determine how many inches into the bed the weight has sunk, and subtracting those inches from the perimeter’s 21. Each height confronts me as a fact to be added to the slab.

Now consider, too, the queen, the infanta, the dauphin. Consider their lengths extended along the bed, more or less covering it, unevenly covering it, and consider their weights distributed along these lengths so as each to require a separate set of plumbings, loathsome and difficult plumbings, to determine the heights to which each has compressed the bed. Consider my labors, my howls and heavings, the substances with which I am spattered. Consider the state of body and mind–polluted body and wretched mind–in which I offer each fact to the slab, and the hardly preferable state in which I pause from my measurements and curl up, sleep-darkened, on the floor’s uneven coating.

Now consider the words, each a fact. The king speaks words, and the queen speaks words, the infanta, even the little dauphin. Each word a fact to be snatched from the air and scrawled, recorded on a notecard, rectangular, 3 inches by 5 inches, each notecard a fact too, so that before long I begin scrawling the word NOTECARD alongside each spoken word, NO NOTECARD, NIGHTMARE NOTECARD, FRINGE NOTECARD, CHRYSOLITE NOTECARD.

And the changes! 75 inches, did I say? 212 pounds? Vanished memories, last year’s snow. Was the queen’s length 66 inches? Did the dauphin weigh 37 pounds? Facts whirling away with the snows of my youth, the snows that wove around me as I burrowed in the blanketed field behind my father’s house, believing myself a rabbit.

“Where have you disappeared to, child?” my father would call from the field’s edge.

“No child! Rabbit!” I’d howl from my burrow, eyes wet with indignation.

“Where have you disappeared to, rabbit?” he’d call, and I’d hide in my burrow until the snow whirled his voice away.

That snow and that voice have gone to the slab, and my little rabbit self, all scrawled on cards and offered. RABBIT NOTECARD. FATHER NOTECARD. The burrow and the disappear, the 66 inches and 37 pounds, now only cards, only slab. Whirling time plumbs and whittles, whittles and plumbs, so that the king whose length one day measures 75 inches might stretch only 74 3/4 inches the next, 74 1/4 the next again, and 212 pounds might sink to 209, 207, falling in a rhythm of its own, 204, 202 1/2, each small declension a fact to be noted and offered.

Consider a day. I rise from the floor, shivering though the room is warm. Outside the room, I think, there is snow, and a rabbit disappears into its burrow. Memories from a dream, and no facts. Even so, granted this is no dream world, the fact of a dream in the world makes a fact to be scrawled with the rest. The fact in the dream, and the fact of the dream. SNOW DREAM NOTECARD, I scrawl and add to the slab. RABBIT DREAM NOTECARD. DISAPPEAR DREAM NOTECARD.

60 inches to a side, the slab confronts me, its height engendering difficulty. At one time, its height was nearly nothing, the width of a single notecard. Not quite nothing. Since then, so many facts have found their home in the slab that in places its height exceeds my own, whatever that may be. I smile, remembering how the rabbit child would measure itself daily with its father’s tape, so desperate the rabbit child’s yearning for height, the silver tongue hooked under a foot and the yellow strip ascending. RABBIT MEMORY NOTECARD. SILVER MEMORY NOTECARD. My height has gone out of my memory and into the slab, scrawled. No dream world, no memory world. Fact world. Slab world.

The slab makes my life hard. Its height varies even more widely than the bed’s, towering above me in one place only to sink down nearly to the floor in another. Further difficulties arise from the materials that compose the slab: notecards and scrawl sustained by a matrix of substances heterogeneous in nature and origin, dust and grease and the substance of which I have forgotten the name and know only that it coats or covers the floor and when I curl up to sleep I draw it across me, its folds barely and unevenly sheltering me from my dreams’ killing snow. SHELTER MEMORY NOTECARD. SNOW DREAM FEAR NOTECARD. Folds of substance drop from my hands as I offer my facts.

I turn from the slab to the bed. Consider the bed: the king and queen and infanta and dauphin, the real world. I wait for words to be spoken, but the king’s tongue is a memory, lost to the slab, and the queen and infanta are sleeping, and time’s whirling has so worked its diminishment that the dauphin is too small for words, too light for thought, nearly nothing but the sheer fact of dauphinity, a fact so bare and raw it cannot be scrawled on a notecard but only taken up and sheltered and offered. I cradle the meager dauphin in my arms. I bend down and lay the tiny essence on the slab. I could swear I see the dauphin burrowing between the notecards, into the greasy dust and forgotten folds, but that’s not a fact or even a dream, only a wish. DISAPPEAR WISH NOTECARD.

I turn again to the bed. Unburdened of any remnant, the space where the dauphin lay has rebounded almost to the perimeter’s height. For a moment, I enter the dream world where the bed is a simple prism, 60 by 80 by 21 inches, and I see us stretched there, fully extended, fingertips trailing along the smoothness of each other’s skin, spectral and beautiful. Then I come back to the real world, where three wretched figures still pollute the bed, and even the dauphin’s empty space is scrawled and scribbled with the spatter of many plumbings.

The king lies, oblivious. The infanta sleeps. But the queen’s eyes have opened. I lean in close. The queen’s mouth squirms. Still half in the other world, I could swear I hear words being born in the queen’s throat, new words more wondrous than any I’ve yet heard. Word wish notecard, I think, too rapt to scrawl it. I make a silent promise to offer the fact later. Word wish notecard promise notecard. The queen’s mouth opens. I lean closer.

“Who are you?” the queen says. “What’s going on? Where am I?”

Common words after all, each scrawled and added long ago. I hope my smile hides my disappointment. “You’re in the room, on the bed,” I say.

The queen’s eyes go dull, roll back in their sockets. The mouth moves, emits a mumble, gummy tongue stumbling on dry lips, hard to understand. My heart leaps as I strain to catch the word. The mouth moves again.

“Nightmare…”

A frustrated sigh burrows out through my lips. A fine word, but scrawled already. No need to offer the same fact twice. However it may dance and entwine with others, each word remains the bare fact of itself, just as constellations are nothing but dreams, though stars are facts for the slab. Foolish little rabbit, always wishing, despite everything.

The queen’s eyes brighten, widen. “Where am I?” The queen’s gaze angles past me to stare at the slab. “What is that?”

“It’s a slab,” I say. “It’s facts.”

“Where am I? How did I get here?”

“You came here to be added. I don’t know where you came from. One day, there you were, the four of you, at my door.” I shake my head. “You’ve made my life hard, you know. Especially the king.”

“King? King?”

The eyes shine with terror and confusion. I realize my mistake, and shame scalds my face. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. King, queen, dauphin, infanta, those are just words I use. I know there’s no real royalty here, believe me. It’s not a fact, and I’d never try to offer it to the slab. It’s just…” My shame flares into indignation. I grit my teeth. “Can’t I pretend, just a little bit? Does everything have to be so real all the time?”

“What? What? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The eyes squeeze shut, open again, stare at the slab. “Could you help me? Could you tell me what that is?”

“It’s a fact slab.” I speak in the slow, patient voice of a father explaining the real world to a stubborn, dreamy child. “I’m sure you’d like to know more, but that’s really all I can say. There aren’t any facts I can tell you about the slab, simply because the slab itself is facts. I could tell you the slab is such-and-such inches long and so-and-so inches wide, consists of which-and-what materials, but those are facts about the space the slab occupies, the matter it lends form to, not facts about the slab itself. Think about it. Facts go to the slab, to increase it. If there were facts about the slab, where would those facts come from? From the slab, of course. But then how could they increase the slab, if they came from the slab? If a fact about the slab came out from the slab, then the slab would be slab minus one, and then if the same fact went back into the slab, the slab would be slab again, so where’s the increase? No, that can’t be. A thing can’t grow by adding itself to itself. Not even the slab can do that. Thermodynamics, right? Conservation of mass and energy? Otherwise, we’d all just be cannibals, eating ourselves, growing larger, each of us as big as the whole world, but that would be crazy. It can’t be. It’s a dream world you’re living in. You have to wake up. You’re dreaming. You’re babbling, spouting drivel, going farther from the slab, don’t you see? Think about it. Use your head! If a rabbit is one step from the slab, and a child wishing to be a rabbit is two steps, and a person dreaming about a child wishing to be a rabbit is three steps, then you’re about fifty steps from the slab right now, and that’s a bad place to be! Why do you have to go so far away? Why do you have to make everything so hard for me? Haven’t I got enough problems? Haven’t I been through enough?”

“I’m sorry,” the queen says. The eyes squeeze shut. Tears running down the queen’s cheeks clean channels through substance. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

I sigh. “No, it’s okay. It’s not your fault. I wish these things were easier to explain. I wish dreams would come true, and everything was simple. But that’s not the world we’re living in. There just aren’t any facts about the slab.”

The tears have ceased running. The queen’s chest rises and falls in the calm, smooth rhythm of sleep. Thank goodness that’s over. Time to take new measurements. The king roars while I plumb, bleats and howls like some tongueless idiot beast, but the queen and the infanta dream through it all, cradled in the shelter of another world.

Between plumbings, I offer facts to the slab. 20 inches high. 19 1/3 inches. 18 1/2. 19 3/4. All so close to the perimeter, the simple 21. The more measurements I take, the more the facts seem to resemble dreams about to come true. I can almost envision the bed smooth and empty, the slab complete. I can almost feel the worlds melding, the burrow opening.

Consider the dreamed and real dissolving into one another, the child becoming rabbit. DREAM WISH DREAM TRUE NOTECARD. Consider the bed clean and pure and ours, us lying there, our fingertips trailing. GHOST SELF LOVE WISH NOTECARD. Consider me as small as the dauphin, reduced to the merest trace of myself, lifted up and laid on the slab. DEATH DREAM SLAB HOPE NOTECARD.

Consider me burrowing into the slab’s matrix, losing myself in the dust and grease and folds of forgotten substance. DISAPPEAR WISH ESCAPE DREAM BURROW SLAB BECOME NOTECARD. Consider the notecards whirling through the room like snow, sheltering me from all staring eyes, all calling voices, a chaos of notecards taking the form of a whirling, shining burrow to the innermost heart of the perfected slab, fact slab, dream slab, drivel slab, bed slab, self slab, my slab, mine. DREAM TRUE LOVE DEATH HOPE SLAB BURROW SLAB SELF BECOME DRIVEL DREAM NOTECARD.

Nearly melding, fact and dream. The burrow darkens. Not quite melding. The notecards flutter around me as I take another measurement.