Read Veniss Underground for Free Online

terrible sadness beats at the windows to your heart, and the world opens up and closes and opens up, and you are trapped between, of the world, not of the world.
    You take four hesitant steps into the room, as if you do not truly believe that so little of Nicholas remains in this place. The sensi-carpet has been turned off, the bristles hard, inert—dying. The too-sweet smell of the carpet's putrefaction overwhelms the lingering scent of wet animal fur. The combination makes you sneeze.
    The apartment has no windows, no way to look outside, to escape the emptiness. Every blank and empty centimeter screams out to you of silence, of being silenced. You search the bathroom, find stray hairs from shaving in the sink, dust in the corners, the ever-present dying carpet. On the kitchen floor you find more hairs, although these are long and black and coarse: animal hairs. The kitchen cabinets are bare of glasses, cooking utensils, plates. The sheer spotless, dustless perfection contrasts starkly with the living room, the bathroom. The thought comes to you unbidden:
It happened here. This is where it happened.
    Your gaze glides across the living room, the marks where the couch used to be, the bare spots of the missing holographs—only to discover something white and small in the space behind the door. You walk over to it. A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball, almost hidden by the curling edge of dead carpet.
    You pick it up, slowly uncrumple it. The handwriting is Nicholas's and, in the lower left corner, the white paper is stained rust red, as if with old blood. The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.

    QUIN'S SHANGHAI CIRCUS

    Quin is:

quintessentially—himself:

a child in the dark

who teased

the weave and warp

of flesh into the medium

of our desires.

    Quin is:

the kiss in the dark

from the creature you cannot quite

glimpse from the corner of the eye—

a cyberquick message

sent from the light to the dark.

    Quin is:

the sigh of anticipation

on a lover's lips,

foretaste of pleasure

surcease of pain

the end of the matter.

    Quin is:

the man living

in the belly of a giant fish

who remakes the world

in his own image but is

trapped in its jaws.

    Quin is:

quintessentially . . .

unlike me.

    The slang jockey thing.
Quin is a child in the dark
. This fascination, this worship of Quin leaves you cold. Yet Shadrach had it too, and surely you can understand Quin: that-which-is-idolized, much as Shadrach had idolized you. Quin and Nicola: marble statues in a park, only Quin has more freedom than you.
    You carefully fold the poem and put it in your purse. The apartment has nothing more to give you. Nicholas is not there. The poem contains only traces of him.
    You close the door behind you, step out onto the second-floor landing.
    In the far corner stands one of Nicholas's holograms, in orange and blue and black, an abstract landscape from which faces fade and reemerge: meerkat faces, human faces, the features blurred and melting, then separate again. You stand very still in the quiet of the stairwell. It wasn't there before. Or was it? The hairs on your neck rise and the pulse of a new thing beats inside you: fear. Not for your brother but for yourself.
    You see no one on the stairs, but beyond Nicholas's apartment a row of doors leads down the corridor. Does something wait for you behind a door? When you turn to descend the stairs, will the doors open and the animals rush out of hiding, chasing after you? The musk of fur is very loud in your nostrils. Very bright. Suddenly, you want even the gray autumnal light of the dingy street, not this artificial solace. Somehow, you compose yourself and walk past the holograph (which you cannot, will not, touch, for fear of . . . what?) and down the stairs, alert to every stray sound. In the lobby, you try to seek out the landlord, but he has left. Even the two old people