By Ryan Kwek

The light from the Sun, in an oblique angle, sifted itself through the misty clouds and, half-brilliant, came toward earth, gliding through the leaves of trees to wedge itself precisely through this slit between the boards that made up the walls of my shed, and what was left of the once-brilliant light shaft filtered through the final stage of this gauntlet, a dense indoor trellis, until it was so filtered, refined, into a single essential line. When I saw that sublime distillate, it seemed to me like an eternal promise… like the guarantee offered by the Sun, to rise and fall without fail.

When I first spotted it resting in the crack on my wooden floor, that line fascinated me for what felt like a whole day, and my eyes were wide open and I do not think I blinked even once; my body became the body, and flesh evaporated and all that was left was my sight without my eyes, my heaviness without my body – until my whole body was shocked into being again by the whims of the wind: the wind, as we all knew, was fickle, and it blew here one second only to blow there the next, and so it did, too, on that fateful day – it made a cloud shift, a leaf on a tree to flutter and a bird to fly; and thus the delicate arrangement organised by coincidence was no longer; the precise path on which the light of the Sun travelled to reach the crack on my wooden floor was no longer precise. In a word, the wind made that boundless line flicker. That was it. The magic was gone. Eternity moved.

After the loss of that experience, one would have found me distrait, ambiguous in my living (for the next few days?). I did the motions of walking to somewhere, but would end up on the same spot after an hour; my hands were listless, refused to hold a spoon, and I could not even feed myself; my mind's sole occupation was to be preoccupied. After a week or so, who can say, I found myself in my small shed again, my sundials and solar instruments (yes, dear reader, items of my recent obsession) were gone, and in their place, before me, was a whole contraption: unbeknownst to myself, I had been building, inventing, something. It so happened that the mind sometimes veiled its intentions, its everyday work, when it sensed something of terrible consequence; it was a mechanism by which the ego was kept intact. What a marvel that golden contraption was! Well, calling it a singular contraption was disingenuous; it was more like an amalgamation of small, little contraptions; but, nevertheless, together they made up the sense of a whole and singular machine. There were perhaps a hundred different working parts, each of which could have been a machine of its own, but their bigger and complete purpose lay in the smaller and seemingly disjointed parts they had to play. In a word: it was one contraption, but a contraption nonetheless, for its many parts moved as if at their own pace, but whose motions after inspection were actually in tandem with the metallic leaves of gold there, that golden ball – a homage to the Sun? – rolling down the rails; the limpid sun-storing crystal collecting some light from? – a window at the top that shifts almost imperceptibly and a panel whose use I could only guess but never ascertain, brass strings taut from being spun around a peculiar knob whose shape… and what about that diaphanous layer, and those wing-like shapes beyond? The shining slates? The shimmering slants?

The whole contraption extended beyond the roof of my shed through a hole that before my sleep-walking comatose had not been there; who could know what more golden inventions were hiding above that opaque shelter?

From this conglomeration it was impossible to reason out clear Purpose; it became necessary to intuit Truth. Fortunately, a benefit of the lingering languor of the time unknowingly passed (spent inventing) was the looseness of the mind, a state that lends itself readily to the unconscious. And unconscious I became; I – my mind – was no longer latching on to details, no longer acknowledging cause-and-effect, no longer allowing the dark inks of the previously-known to seep through and stain my thoughts… In my mind I was a blind spectator, and I felt amorphous forms, concepts and states, each corresponding to an individual part of the contraption, or sometimes a few, sometimes even a third of a part; I understood that each module was like each beat of a hummingbird's wing, and together, what control, what precision – what a flight! Whereas before the caprice of the wind or else the freedom of the birds, or else the quotidian death of a falling yellow leaf, would be a dissonant tremor that disrupted nature's harmony and made it impossible to engender that radiant line, now, now this ever-adjusting, ever-calibrating contraption somehow accounted for all the manifold (and natural) irregularities. The empire of order had never been so accurately reflected in the disorder of this golden child of my unconsciousness. When I opened my eyes I knew with hard conviction that through the ever-calibrating of the contraption, on a crack on the wooden flooring now lay a precious, precise thing. I looked: a precise line of sun.

All of a sudden I was overwhelmed with anticipation and terror: was I to begin anew that precious but evanescent experience? What if it disappeared again, this line? Now half-looking with a half-squint, I dared-not-but-wanted-to examine that meek but brilliant line, when without warning I felt bile churning within me: something felt off. It was only a murmur, but it was a horrible murmur; before the oncoming psychological avalanche could come and crush me, I snapped open my eyes urgently and fully and looked – I greedily looked. Dots were connecting. I ran to the dice room.

The fastest way to get to the function of the room would be to explain the markings on the wall. They were a collection of scratches etched by a knife to document the results of that die; I would roll the die and record the number that showed. What was the point? The point was, dear reader, that the die was such a simple tool, but yet it allowed us to test the guarantee given by the universe: that "1" came once in six times, and so do the other numbers, given that we roll the dice enough. Pragmatic probability. Ever-constant. Presently, I rolled a fistful of dice and recorded the results, reading in them the fate of things as a fortune-teller does. The more I rolled, the more hurried I got, and the shorter the intervals between rolls became: this rush was because of the upsetting results—almost all sixes. Latching on to the fact that the die results would balance themselves out, I desperately rolled. In my desperation I knocked over a cup of water and when I saw the spilled water spread out to form a square puddle I fell to the ground. Dots were connecting. But I put in wrench in my thoughts. I rationalised that defects of items from the same factory must be shared, as must the incredible results of their rolling. It was the dice that was defective. The floor on which the water spilled was uneven. Nothing, there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Thankfully, my vision started to blur, and realised I was sleepy. It was late now, and the Sun had set. I turned back to my contraption, and without light reflecting off of it, the contraption lost its golden quiddity. As darkness encroached on it like dark rust, all it looked like was a rickety thing. It was quiet, like the moon. Peacefully, I was whisked away by a bout of exhaustion.

I awoke the next day and my attention went straight to the contraption; it was making sounds like chimes in the wind and gears clicking into place. It had also regained its golden splendour, and it diligently produced a line. What difference a good rest makes! I looked at the line dumbly and felt nothing. Broken away from that strange obsession I had had with the line, I now saw some practical use for the contraption. I noticed that every morning, the line never began sitting snugly in the crack of the wooden floor; it would always be off to the right of the crack; and when noon came and the Sun was at its zenith, the line would be resting squarely in the crack; and when evening came, as sure as the Sun rose from the east and sets in the west, the line would be to the left of the crack. All this is to say that the contraption could be re-understood to be an elaborate sundial. Perhaps that was all it was, and my imaginations had morphed it into some complicated object heralding doom.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened for days and weeks.

But one day, after a bad previous night's sleep, right in the middle of noon (the line was resting on the crack), as I began to drift off and inadvertently looked at the line, a familiar and terrible fascination gripped my heart: the line moved ever so imperceptibly, that were it not for the crack acting as a reference point I would have never perceived its wayward creeping – for a moment the line moved to the right of the crack! The right! Right! Natural order was blasphemed. Was this what I had first perceived weeks ago? That which had made me so obsessed with the line that I had to reproduce it? My first instinct was to suspect the many moving parts which produced the line: any misalignment or stray error would explain this absurdity away. But as I stared at the golden contraption, at once insidious and innocent, I felt a wilful ignorance grow stronger and stronger within me. It said: the contraption was a dream-work; only a dreaming mind could diagnose its problems, let alone dismantle it, rebuild it; merely touching it might break something, might ruin some sensitive film: it was beyond you. Indeed, it was beyond me. Even if I wanted to diagnose the contraption's defect, I could not. Indeed, I could not. (I will not.) There was no choice but to treat that absurdity as the prank of a broken gear somewhere. Indeed, there was nothing to do. There was nothing I could do. Even though I recited all of these certainties to myself and I thought I was thoroughly convinced, the restless mind always wants the body to do something – anything at all – to ascertain the irrational. Deeply afraid but deeply compelled, I looked out the window. But of course it was impossible to see proof of the sun's wayward temperament: there was no stable reference point, and even if I were to use the tip of the tree there, who is to say that the mechanisms of my eyes were faultless?... and I carried on having futile debates with myself. At one point I just stared blankly at the horizon, at the sea, and let the mesmerising waves take time from me… At last the internal debates ended with: and anyway the Sun was already setting, and I would soon have no choice – how wonderful it was to have no choice! – but to rest; the stake-out could carry on the next day. Even after concluding deliberations, I still stared out at the sea, keeping watch, as if afraid to let any last doubt slink in from the approaching night.

The golden yolk of the Sun moves imperceptibly but inevitably below the horizon; the light stretched out over the sea makes a quick retreat, goes back to the burning orb which is turning in for the night, leaving behind the inky blackness of the deep ocean and the darkening of the blood-tinted sky. My heart can finally rest and I am just about to turn and retire when – the ripples of the sea are suddenly a-brim with light, and the fiery curved edge of the Sun peeks out from below the horizon, and like a boiling light it scalds its image on and into my teary unblinking eyes, and casual oddities from memory – the snapping of the straps of both slippers while in the middle of crossing a road, the interminable sixes of dice, the lottery ticket with the number 1-2-3-4, the square of a spreading puddle on a flat surface – like so many black words from pages already flipped past suddenly became visible in a perversely inverted way underneath the present page of the present moment, and my knees give way and I fall under the window with eyes now shut staring at in the darkness of the back of the eyelids that irreverent brilliant Sun glowing in persistent and lurid negative-red. The universe has rescinded its guarantee.

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