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In Roberto Ning’s novel, The Mexican Sleigh-bell Trilogy, it’s suggested that nothing occurs. The novel is composed of three complicated motifs, each built of elaborate expansions of shadow, sounds, color, geometry, smells, fallacies, natural reactions, and lists. However, the author by choice and ingenuity refrained from introducing plot, character, and significant events. Instead, Ning interspersed blank pages in the novel so that readers and writers could supply these requirements on their own terms or imaginings.

In addition, book sellers in Mexico City and Manchester, UK were ordered by the publisher to purchase each novel back and put each completed return on sale once again. In this way, Ning’s novel would become several novels, each volume reflecting the mind of individual experimentalists, and the new work made available to ignorant readers.

As added incentive, the three parts of the trilogy contained,  in their beautiful and inspiring passages, several keys or codes,  such that given a proper combination of narrative relationships in single or several volumes studied as episodic or compilational inevitable patterns would arise to reveal the identities of men and women who might prevent the feared and predicted invasion from the North.

El Mundo declared Ning a savior, while several critics announced the novelist as a media hungry madman, his publisher criminal.

“We don’t even know if this novel exists, we don’t even know if such a machine is possible,” Fernando Gris said in an interview.

The air, whatever the reactions, was heavy with fear and sorrow as readers and generals waited for the novel and the invading armies to appear. People anticipated the powerful prose. They crowded at the windows of their homes, horrified at the possibility of the loss of the lives of their children due to war. They wondered at the methods of the novelist and they prepared their pens and pencils and reread the great classics of literature to improve their ability to write stunning plots, while writers of all types anticipated the contents from three filmic examples of the novel’s promise and generated stories swiftly, publishing them in magazines and newspapers for the perusal of code decipherers, military experts, and game designers.

Strangely enough, the day before the novel’s expected appearance, a headline ran in El Mundo claiming that Ning had passed on ten years ago and that the invasion so predicted in its universe of press materials must already have occurred and had indeed occurred and that the novel itself had never been written and that the publication house responsible was really a bank or a school or a place where the young congregated to smoke, drink wine, and tell stories.

My mother, who’s a willy-wag, wore European airs. She’d correct our applications.

“Call it the loo,” she said, as she stirred syrup in her coffee.

It got bad outside the house as our friends had difficulties understanding what we believed or knew.

“Bring the carriage around,” she said, by which she meant what my father, who passed on two years ago, called the Devil’s heap.

“That thing’s tires are about as bald as a turnip,” my brother said.  “In what country would that hunk qualify as a carriage?”

“Or even a car,” I said. But we let her keep the ideas. We’d bring her the carriage.

Of course, the reason I say European airs is because she began her change from car to carriage after the town had a visit from a gentleman who went by the name Gregory. Some said he was from Spain, others Sweden, and yet others just chalked him as a common Yankee.

His visit coincided with my father’s illness, which coincided with Gregory’s use of words like carriage and loo and “fascinating” in his spoken acts at planning meetings, as his job was chief surveyor for the state and some bridge needed building nearby or somewhere.

You could often see my mother on walks with Gregory, she in a sun hat, he in his evening suit, my mother perhaps finding comfort from the coming horror of a husband’s death.

“Let her alone,” my father told us, pointing more dramatic at my brother who’d already promised to pound the Yankee to pig shit for horning in or playing the inappropriate comfort card.

“You let her be and let him be too. I told her to move on, to think about what’s best for you furking dandylions. “

We watched from a distance. There my father died. There my mother soon took up with the Spaniard or the Swede or the Yankee. There by the big oak they buried him. There on the town green we watched our mother and Gregory hold hands and share intimate words. There we saw our mother box our father’s suits and send them to charity. There we saw but were unable to hear Gregory tell our mother that the job was over and that he must go.

We agreed not to “Tell her so.” We’d already taken to words like fascinating and aspiration and lovely and for some reason hadn’t the stomach to make her regret more than she might already.

“Gregory says it’s fascinating work, and that the bridge will clear way for all kinds of commerce,” she said.

“You mean like so everyone around here could start buying fancy cookware and say shit like wondrus?” my brother said.

My mother smiled at him.  It was one of her newer, more sophisticated smiles, one that disclosed a broader sense of the possibilities of this world, Gregory or no Gregory, a look that was dangerous, sincere, and potentially ruthless if chuckled after or outwardly funned with.

“Okay, I mean say things like wondrous,” my brother corrected.

“That’s right, you little twig, and don’t you forget it.”

Imagine three people at a table. Outside the light dims. The moon rises.  Somewhere far doors are locking.

There are three people at the table. Two men and a woman. The sun breaks over the trees. It looks like a bowl of new lemons. It looks like a thin smile after a break in heavy, cold rain.

Three people at the table waiting.  One man says to himself: when will this table let us go? The woman says: when will the sun come back, and this table, when will it release us?

Three people in the dark, in the dim, in the quiet, glowing by screen light, by the lumen of time and passing stars, these three.

When will the table release us? a man says but this time he speaks openly in repeated whispers. 

In years you haven’t spoken, the other man says but to himself. Your face like a bowl of water.

Three at the table as the night calls like a faraway dog, and the rain comes and goes and Mars plunges and flowers open.

The table says nothing. What difference sun, dusk, or screen light, what difference tense or the ugly ticking of the day to the table? I see you, it says.  You’re going nowhere. See the night and the still and the passing day and the passing dim and ask nothing of me more.

The comatose patient knew he was in a coma.  When he opened his eyes, he saw sky, clouds drifting across, he saw what might in the future become a painting or a photograph or a film.

He heard his wife say “Rocks.”  He heard his son say “It would be painful to fall from such a high place and hit the water, you know.”

To the comatose patient the son’s voice sounded like the blur behind a rushing bird.  His wife’s voice sound like things being born slowly and repeatedly and in the dark no less.

But his son wasn’t in the sky.  He sensed his wife and son somewhere behind the clouds, above them, behind all that blueness.  But how did the comatose patient have eyes and why did he feel as if his pockets were full of rocks?

It was like travel but without physical movement.  He saw the clouds in the sky.  He heard water, the gentle buffeting of one form against another.  His eyes moved from the clouds to a distant shoreline where people must live.  He couldn’t feel his back.

It wasn’t traveling for the comatose patient. He hadn’t moved. These images, he thought, must be the result of the earth turning under him.  He hadn’t moved.  Rather, it was the earth turning beneath him. He, the water, the stones in his pocket were moving with it. He wondered where they were going and when the turning would stop.

Billy Joe, Marshall, and Alba found hundreds of puddles on the surface of the school blacktop. The rain had come and gone quickly. The children had been eager to meet and play at the school. Water had collected in the subtle irregularities. Some of the puddles were perfectly round. All of them reflected the sky and some piece of the surrounding school buildings.

“Man it’s like a million damned schools,” Billy Joe said.

“It’s like eyes,” Alba said.

“It’s like my bed,” Marshall said.

This is fairly ripe. What happens next depends on the writer and their particular approach to a type of story. Maybe you like horror stories. Maybe you like putting children into jeopardy and pulling them out of it. Maybe you like putting children into jeopardy and leaving them there. Some writers, for example, would have asked that at least one of the children in Jurassic Park become taste on the buds of a Velociraptor. Maybe this is a hypertext of a science fiction flavor waiting to happen: each child falls into a different puddle, entering a new reality, and the children meet up with their alter egos and as adults Alba says, “The human body is like a machine,” and Billy Joe says, “More like a divine being,” and Marshall says, “I don’t know. I’d say it’s more like a chair.”

One version of the story may involve fantasy. Alba hears a voice. The children follow the sound to a particular puddle and see a woman in a reflected school window. She’s wearing a robe and she’s pretty, reminding the children of the Good Witch. They find the structural source of the reflection but see no woman in that “real” window. The woman trapped in the puddle yells something like “Find the puddle, find the key.”

Adventure proceeds.

Maybe the puddle image becomes an anchor or a prop. The children proceed through life and every event is related to the multiple puddles on the schoolyard blacktop and so the puddles become a significant antecedent in their plot lines. On a plane to Bagdad, for example, Alba in her fatigues thinks back to the peaceful puddle image, wishing that things had turned out differently. Marshall does the same. Maybe he’s on a train. He’s lost his means of identification and the border and its murderous guards are soon to appear. He remembers Alba and Billy Joe and the amazing phenomenon of all the puddles. He doesn’t want to return to his childhood. He’s simply scared shitless. When he’s scared, he remembers the puddles because he was scared shitless of being sucked into them or he was scared shitless of something crawling out of them, as he was scared shitless of what boney-hand creature might be living under his bed at night (or in his closet). And now the border is fast approaching, his means of escape now placed in Jeopardy. Of course, you know what he’s thinking.

Billy Joe’s brother used to tell Billy Joe that there were times when you mustn’t ever close your eyes. Never ever open your eyes on a mirror, so don’t close them when you go to the bathroom at midnight. Never close your eyes when you drive. Never close your eyes during sex. If you close your eyes, you’ll forget what you were about to say on the phone. Never ever close your eyes in prison.

Billy Joe always remembered Alba’s metaphor.

Of course, since the blacktop is all wet and puddled over, the children go home. Marshall’s mother makes them a snack. They eat the snack at the kitchen table.

“So, how did it go at the playground?” Marshall’s mother asks.

Alba says, “It was too wet. We couldn’t do anything.”

“Wet?” the mother says.

“From the rain,” Marshall says.

“What rain?” the mother says. “And by the way, where’s your little sister?”

Adventure proceeds.

How space can trick us, thought Ruiz, how its echoes might transform. Ruiz would soon be on the train home after his visit to the gallery in the city. Soon he would think about how certain interior spaces make the voice echo. How they augment the voice and, depending on the design, reshape it. They take a whisper and compound the frequency. They take a private question to the woman beside you and deliver it to everyone present and so Ruiz rapidly learned to take care with his voice in chambers that echoed.

“It was a representation of an ancient murder,” Ruiz would tell his friends back home. “The artist, working from documents several thousand years old, recreated the crime scene in as perfect detail as possible. The artists claimed that part of her motivation was archeological, another emotional. She claimed to have a fascination for the moment before death. She claimed also that part of her motivation was to remove the bodies and reconstruct only the patterns and shapes of the incredible violence that had taken their lives.

“The questions the artist answered from the audience were common at first: why blood stains on marble; in what state were the bodies of the murdered; why this grade and color of stone; why a small bench there; how long did it take; how much time did she spend on research; what books had she read and were they non-fiction or fiction? Each question and answer would echo down the chamber and back; voices would rise to the ceiling and fall; the words of the questions and the words of the answers would often have shifted inflection or emphasis; words like ‘did’ or ‘pain’ would appear to our ears to take longer to travel than works like ‘weapon,’ ‘torture,’ and ‘decapitation.’

“Sometimes the words of one question would mix with the words of a previous question so that they reformulated and since the artist appeared intent on leaving, as they say, ‘no stone unturned,’ she would answer the question that had been recast or re-mixed by the walls of the chamber. And so the questions became uncommon and the artist provided information the audience neither asked for and perhaps regretted hearing or found insulting, corrupting their image of the artist. Soon the artist became disarranged, overwhelmed by the swirl of words, taken back by the angry reactions of certain men and women, and the disorienting nature of the echoes. Soon she appeared unable to identify legitimate questions and so she persisted in asking if she had answered the question asked by the audience member but by this time I and a few other people, an old woman and a young man, who might have been a student, remained.

“Then it was time for us to depart as well. I remember looking back. The artist remained where she’d been standing, but now she was observing the gray and black blood stains on the marble floor perhaps with new eyes, as they say, she and her creation surrounded by the dimmest remnants of those tricks of space and those uncanny tricks of the ear.”

“It was simply the nature of the chamber, the materials of the walls and ceiling, and the artist’s inexperience before an aggressive crowd,” Ruiz would tell his friends back home.