The Rest of Second

It was not made. No one put it here. It moved, and there was no reason for it to move, and it moved.

That is the deep, on the first page of the Bible, before the light. The account says something was on the face of it, and then it gets on with the story.

This book is narrated by what else was there.

He is not a devil and he is not an angel, because he predates the argument. He was standing on that water before the first sentence, for a stretch of time he says has no figure.

He has never touched anything. He has never once been asked for an opinion. And he cannot feel any of what he watches, and for most of the account he does not know that is unusual. So he did the only thing that was left to him.

He counted.

He is never wrong about what happened. He is not to be trusted about what it meant.

Every event in this book is in the King James Version, where the King James put it, with the names spelled the way it spelled them and the numbers left as the numbers. Nothing is invented. Every count he makes was checked against the text before this edition was set.

What any of it meant is his own, and he tells you more than once not to take it from him. He means it.

What he does is notice.

• A statue is found face down in front of the ark. They stand it up again. The next morning its head and both palms have been cut off and set on the doorstep, and generations later nobody in that temple will step on the threshold.


• A valley of bones assembles itself, bone to his bone, and grows sinew and flesh and skin, and stops. But there was no breath in them. A man stands in the middle of it and has to wait to be told a second time.


• Three verses after being handed his life's work, Moses is met at a roadside inn by the thing that handed it to him, and it tries to kill him. No reason is given anywhere in the book.


• The creatures standing nearest the throne at the end of everything are full of eyes and do not rest, and this is entered as a detail of the furniture, in a clause, between the wings and the words they say.

Nobody reading a chapter a week catches any of that. He stood in all of it at once, because for him it was one continuous thing.

And underneath all of it, the question he will not answer until there is nothing left to check him against.

To make anything at all, you have to not be everywhere.

And you cannot be God and not be everywhere.

So the making cost something, and somebody paid, and the account never says who. He knows. He has known since before the light. He has had the length of everything to tell you and has declined at every opportunity, and he asks you to count the refusals, because he is counting them too.

Genesis to Revelation, told as one cosmic horror novel, in one voice.

Twenty one books narrated front to back, chapter and verse numbers taken out, the story left standing. Not a devotional. Not a debunking. No jokes. Nothing in it is more graphic than the book it came from, and in places markedly less, because the dread here is deep time and wrong geometry rather than blood.

A sword that turns every way and is never once used. A tree standing on both banks of the same river at the same time. Half an hour of silence in heaven, and somebody was counting.

I could number every drop in the deep and could not trouble one of them, and those two conditions were the same condition.

And out past the last page, unmade, with no reason to move, moving: another deep. And something standing on the face of it that does not know yet what it is.

This matter is by the decree of the watchers. It turns up three times in one chapter of Daniel, is never explained, and is used as though the reader already knew what was meant.

Somebody knew what was meant.