Fantastic Metropolis

If it happened to you it can happen to others. All it takes is that moment of recognition, the ability to see language as something alien, something wrong coming between you and life. I, too, have glimpsed that golden web and wondered about life unhindered by it.

I look at you standing by the window, gazing out, and try to imagine what you see and what is in your wordless mind. I try to imagine myself in your place, having given up the whole, named world for love.

For love . . . yet what is love without words, what does it mean if it can’t be described? What is it that I should be giving up?

If language is a virus, then what about love? Love which begins like a one-celled creature and quickly multiplies within the heart, then spreading throughout the body. But a far less successful virus than language, much more easily killed.

Already I can feel the armies drawn up for battle inside me. It’s beyond my choice; the decision has been made on some deep, unconscious level where my very awareness has triggered the Cure. When I wake in the morning, the world will have changed. I will have changed. The long sickness will be over.

Perhaps I will wake in your arms and be with you at last, without any words between us, well and happy. Or perhaps there will be nothing, nothing between us at all.

“The Cure” was originally published in Light Years and Dark (Berkley, 1984), edited by Michael Bishop.