The Thirty Days of Bellesgrant and Zerxaquarius continued
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Bellesgrant slogged through the marsh. The waters stank, these weeds rank, these swamps permeated through with the discarded waste of every living process and the putrefied remnants of long dead organisms. The matter soaked his clothes, seeped through his open pores, toxified his fluids. He grew ill, and slogged on. He grew cold, and slogged on. He slowed, but on he slogged. Bellesgrant thought about Zerxaquarius.
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There was a rotten board in the house of Zerxaquarius. Occasionally Zerxaquarius thought, I must replace the board. But the board remained in place, for Zerxaquarius always forgot. One day, the board stove in under his weight, and Zerxaquarius fell, dislocating his thumb. After he had shifted the thumb back into its socket Zerxaquarius thought, I will replace the board. Bellesgrant must not know.
----
In his pocket, Bellesgrant carried a silver locket. The locket was important to him, although he did not recall how he had acquired it and he did not recognize the man and the woman whose pictures adorned the interior frames. The day came when Bellesgrant reached into his pocket to touch the smoothness of the locket only to discover in its place a ragged hole. Maddened, Bellesgrant struck his chest and into his own flesh embedded the locket which he had earlier removed from his pocket and draped around his neck. After this, Bellesgrant's attachment to the locket dwindled. When he really did lose it some time later, he did not even notice.
----
Zerxaquarius purchased a brand new deck of playing cards. The first time he shuffled them, he thought, Once is not enough, so he shuffled them again. Zerxaquarius regarded the cards, and thought, If once was not enough then why should twice be? So he shuffled them again. Zerxaquarius continued to shuffle the cards well into the dawn of the next day. His heart pounded, his fingers were numb and stiff, his eyes contained denser orbs within them: and he continued to shuffle. He did not stop until he fainted from exhaustion.
----
Bellesgrant's clothes dissolved in the sandstorm. When the gales abated and the sands settled, Bellesgrant trudged naked through the desert. A scorpion lanced his Achilles tendon. Some parasite invaded his genitals. His eyes crusted shut with a mixture of mucus and sand grains. Eventually he made it to the trading post. He purchased what he needed, for the proprieter accepted his credit. The proprieter mentioned Zerxaquarius, but Bellesgrant made no reply.
----
He lay on the water and raised his arms. He shut both eyes against the sky brightness. He felt weak, yet something was building in his belly. There was a toothglobed entity revolving in there. He moaned with two voices.
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Zerxaquarius lay abed, feverish. He had been thus for a week now. His fever would neither increase nor decrease, but remained exactly as it was. In his brain there was a vision in thirty dimensions, vivid and terrible, accreting detail with every instant that passed. He saw a statue in his garden, one which never had been there before. It was noble, and venerated. It would be remembered, and people would come, passing through the garden, to see it. No one knew whose garden this was, but inscribed in the pedestal which supported the statue was the word Bellesgrant.
----
Bellesgrant hewed down the orchard. His hysteria did not abate. The field next to this one was splendid and beautiful, but there was a fence between the fields. Enraged, Bellesgrant flung himself at this fence, chopped at its posts with the bare blade of his hand. When the fence was razed he felt tired. He noticed that the trees in this new orchard provided shade and lush bedding. He climbed into one and went to sleep in its branches. He never saw the feral girl who came out of hiding when he was finally unconscious and crawled onto his chest to feel him breathe. She bit off the tip of his nose as a souvenir and scampered away, but Bellesgrant did not even wake up.
----
At the theatre, Zerxaquarius fell in love with the actress. He recalled the blaze of his fever, and preferred that to this blaze. He imagined the tortures of the profanest mind, and too preferred them to this torture. He waited in the wings, a shadow in the shadows, until he saw the actress alone. From his wings of hiding, Zerxaquarius watched her in her boudoir. He waited all night until she was dead. In the morning he went home and made breakfast.
----
All the rocks were tumbling around him, but Bellesgrant continued unharmed along his way. Once a stone the size of a pheasant's egg struck him in the back of the head. He touched his fingers periodically to the lump which there developed, but he continued along his way. After a few hours he became woozy and disoriented. There were no rocks anymore, so he lay down in the grass and went to sleep, even though the sun was still high in the sky. He slept for thirty hours.
----
Zerxaquarius knelt at the window which overlooked his garden. He had not moved from this position all day, not since he had noticed a movement down there this morning. He did not dare to move away from the window for fear that the moment he did so the movement down there would resume. I will see it, he thought.
----
Bellesgrant came to the city, having heard the stories. The bustle of the crowds baffled him, though, and as the day wore on he found himself more confused and more flustered than he had ever been. No one stopped to gaze on Bellesgrant. He was carried along on the street tide, only flotsam in a tremendous ocean. The faces he glimpsed (the crests of the waves) were impassive and absorbed: pallid, immobile. But one face in the crowd terrified him, so that he left the city immediately.
----
Feeling not himself, Zerxaquarius paced restlessly through his mansion. He came to the conclusion that he should join a mountain-climbing expedition. He signed on to one immediately. The expedition was preempted halfway up the mountainside when a flaw in the rope claimed three lives. Enraged, Zerxaquarius demanded a refund. Zerxaquarius returned to his mansion feeling not himself, and he paced restlessly through the corridors. (He noticed that every room was very clean.)
----
Bellesgrant moaned and shivered in the dark. There was pain in every element of his flesh. His organs swam within him like lethargic eels. His eyeballs were expanding their size to compete with his brain in the categories of ponderance and sphericity. Sudor crawled across his skin leaving itself behind in chilly traces which he had not the strength nor the will to wipe away. A woman visited him in his dream. She told him of the galactic column. Bellesgrant wept when he heard. The woman told him, That column will never move. Bellesgrant's bile leaped up within him, leaped down without him, stayed spattered on the tattered carpet.
----
Zerxaquarius burned his garden to ashes, but this did not satisfy him, so he burned down his mansion as well. Still, Zerxaquarius perceived within himself the quenchless agony of time, and that was burning madly, so he went in search of cities to burn.
----
Bellesgrant descended through the levels. There was no bottom here, and there were always deeper levels. Bellesgrant devoted all his attention to the procedure by which his legs conveyed him from level to level. The levels were evenly spaced, and each appeared exactly similar to the others. There was no way to know how many levels he had descended, for he did not count them.
----
The world was depopulated. There were only two men left, and they were on opposite sides of the globe. He bellowed their names, but neither heard him. He beat his own head with a planchette he found in one of the deserted towns. He screamed, and screamed, and screamed: until his voice failed. At this point, he went into a deli and made a sandwich. He began to appreciate the silence.
END