Hannah Unwriting

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In the center of the room is a tall contraption made of dark blocks, slices and panels of wood, of long brass spindles, of shining wires that are tensed around hooks, threaded through metal eyes. There is a large broad central wooden screw, its surface pitted, underneath is a flat bed of stone. To the right-side an iron arm, a protruding crank; to the left-side a silver flywheel. There is a cluster of taut bladders suspended from a stainless-steel drip stand, like the kind one sees in a hospital, each one bloated with a different pigment; cyan, magenta, yellow, black and some other, vaguer color. A shaggy, fleece-like covering cascades over one side, a black-and-white hide over another. A cross-hatching of electrified metal rods covers the ceiling, glowing orange and radiating intense dry heat.

Hannah approaches, tilts the arm, taps the crank, whirls the flywheel, and then shudders the drip stand closer to the contraption before gently squeezing each bladder in turn. She reaches into the fleece and pulls slowly but with some force; a large piece of paper, perhaps half a millimeter thick, falls onto the flat-bed, four long spines descend holding the paper in place tightly under fat circular pads of felt. A smell of scorching hair rises; it is Hannah’s hair.

Hannah pulls down the arm and a cluster of brass nibs appear, spinning in a shifting pattern of ellipses around each other. They stop just above the paper’s surface moving faster and faster, blurring, humming, then whining. There is smoke in the air. Hannah leans on the handle with all her weight; she can feel a juddering through her whole body. There is a rapid unpatterned scratching noise and Hannah releases the handle; the nibs fly upwards, the spines follow them, and she stands back.

Hannah steps forward to examine the paper. The paper is blank. She squats to pull a drawer open and pulls out a large leather folder which she rests on the floor. Hannah leafs through the folder looking briefly, fondly at each sheet until she reaches the first unused page. She lifts the paper from the bed and fixes it into the folder. She removes a pen from its holder at the back of the folder and writes the date at the bottom of the page; the back of her neck turning raw in the heat.

Everything is returned as it was, and Hannah leaves the room. A few moments later she is seated in her armchair looking, blinking into the fire.

Hannah thinks outside herself for a while.

She thinks about tea, and there is tea, on a small table beside her, and some small, brittle biscuits, flavored with almond essence and showered with powdered sugar, which lie on a white plate with a bright golden edge. The plate and its contents are more real than anything else for as long as she describes them. Hannah picks up the last biscuit, revealing a hazel eye patterned into the plate’s surface. Hannah imagines the eye blinking, but the eye does not blink, or look into her, but fixes its unseeing ceramic gaze upwards, on the ceiling.

Hannah takes a black notebook from the canoe-shaped table, selects a pen from a number, bunched neatly into a cylindrical leather holder. She opens the book knowing what she will find—page after page of tiny words in her own fine hand, reams and streams of sentences, neat breaks for paragraphs, which merely accentuate the steady flow of meaning, which carries on to the last page and the far bank of the hard cloth cover.

Hannah opens the book to the beginning and returns to the end, and the final mark that holds in place the last word. She directs the pen precisely to this point and begins to unwrite, the black ink returning to liquid and running back up the nib into the empty chamber within. The last sentence is undone and Hannah pauses. She begins again and the page is returned to its pristine creaminess. Hannah turns back a page and pulls away more senses, descriptions, observations, thoughts, joke, speeches and conversations. She feels lighter, quieter. The pen moves faster, without effort, without the whispering sound that was made when the writing was first committed, without loss. Recto and verso are unmade, leaving each expanse of paper markless, with no trace of pigment or impression.

The room floats around Hannah, warm but not too warm. The armchair is comfortable, and fragrant with the roses that are printed into the fabric of its upholstery. The renewed pages become bright, tranquil, cool-looking, radiating silence through Hannah and her home, and, in her mind, out into her street and town, county and country, and beyond to the sea, which becomes tamed and smoothed. All clamor departs. The world is neither asleep nor awake. Fear and rage and desire are mute.

There is a faint spine crack as Hannah turns to the center of the book. White stitches run down the middle. The shapes of voices and thoughts, of what seemed to be known, lift out of being and she turns over the medial page. Time’s weight shifts, lessens, replaced by a fineness which is only just not nothing.

Hannah’s hand moves ever leftward. The words withdraw. On the way out, the blank page was a mirror, a terror, an ecstasy, the coursing surface of an underworld. On returning to cleanness, all happening has ceased, the cleared page suggests nothing.

She imagines the ink rising up the nib and into the pen. She stops imagining and keeps the pen in motion across the marks; and turns another page. And turns another page until she loses all sense of conscious turning, of chosen movement. She reaches the last word, which was the first word, which was ‘The’, and moves the pen until the word is undone. A page back behind the cover is where she had written her name and the date of commencement. When these are gone the book is blank once more and seemingly lighter, although the weight of ink on a page is imperceptible. The book is empty but not pristine as in the beginning, but, in Hannah’s hands at least, a book of was and yet a book of might be, of possibility.

The eye on the plate closed. There was a slackening and a gathering in, a reversal from completion into possibility, and Hannah returned to herself and her moment, which went on and on until it was time to end.

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