As I came back to my senses, all I could hear were the tones of bells. Not the clanging, the harsh attacks, but the booming decays. This is the sound you hear when you've lost lots of blood or other fluid, and your vision narrows, and concerned faces with knit brows are asking you things that have no words.

Then I realized that it's the whole world that's ringing, that everything's in motion, mid-swing, leaden pendulums and tinny clappers, linked by time into an improbable machine of periodicity. It's a machine one could feel at home in. Could belong in. Could nest in, could feel enticed to take a precision part in.

With that, the memory returns to me of how the silence had preceded as well as followed the tolling. The overtones resound like they had always been, a cosmic background, a subtext, the sparsest of atmospheres, but now I remember: there had been a concordance, a collision of bells, as all the cycles coincided. In the leading time, the tones had all but died, attenuated down to thought, as if the silence were as permanent as the sound seems now. The moment then came--the colossal "NOW"--when every chime and key was stuck at once, and I opened my mouth to scream and scream, but only one of us was heard, by me, by anyone.

Now I'm here marveling at the motion and the concerned faces, and my voice is hoarse.