The Ot and the Opeck

The following manuscript was found Tibetan monastery contained within a polished, gold cylinder. I have translated it from Drauteck to English. Conceptually, this was difficult. Drauteck is a planet without days or years. It does not rotate and its orbit takes 3,163,600,00 Earth years. Hence, time, which is often understood by astrological phenomena, is difficult for a Drauteckian to express accurately – but this is only a minor translational difficultly, for Drauteckian consciousness lives in past, present and future. So, at any one point in time, they observe the present, while looking towards it from the past and back on it from the future (which is also the past). Obviously, it is hard for this to be understood by beings with linear consciousness. Luckily, the narrative is arranged in a linear fashion, although ‘recently’ ‘remembered’ and any other markers of time are my own and used only to simplify. We can also presume that because this note is written down, the writer did not see a solution in his own future. I preserve it here because it has a certain, eerie resonance:

Recently, a number of strange occurrences have taken place at the library. While I was reading, a book disappeared from my desk. I searched for it in draws and on shelves, only to find it had returned to its spot, but in a different language – one I did not recognise. I remember, also, the movement of a pencil from one desk to another, a loud, guttural sneeze and then, finally, a note addressed to me. The situation can be read one of three ways: I am being tricked, there is a poltergeist, or there is some crossover, contained within the library, between my reality and another’s. I am convinced it is this final hypothesis.

I know the book from my childhood. It is a small selection of abstract tales, and, as far as I know, it is unknown outside of our small, mountainous country. When it returned to my desk, it was translated into Temah. I have very little knowledge Temah, but I know that it is rare and spoken not on our planet, but another. I possess a Drauteck/Temah dictionary (Unfortunately, the origins of the dictionary are unknown), which enabled me to comprehend the returned book, but, that said, I do not recognise it. It is, at points, completely alien to me. Take, for example, the opening line, in Drauteck: ‘I am Russian, I think, later I may be different, but currently I am Russian.’[1] And then, in Temah: ‘I am Russian, I think, although, tomorrow, I will shift, but today I am Russian.’[2] The difficulty arises with the words tomorrow and today, I have no conception of what they mean and the entries within the dictionary are meagre and only create more confusion. Most concerning, this is only a minor issue, what, for example, is a paragraph?

But it is the note that is the strangest component of this story; it is written in nervous, inaccurate Temah. It contains a short account of the writer Kilik, who has recently received ‘out of thin air’ a book. He knows the book, but not the language. The strangeness occurs here, for the language is my own: Drauteck. His account runs parallel to mine, he finds after translating the book that he cannot recognise the work. He too discovers a strange note, which I presume is this one. Yet, today (is that the correct use of the term Kilik?) I returned to the Drauteckian version of the book, the one I knew from childhood and keep as a memento in my resting place, only to find, on the inside cover, a signature from Kilik. I know that he has experienced this event as well, with my name, Sabas, on his orginial copy. It appears that both of our books are translations, both written by the other, and then shifted, somehow, to before our existence. For the other phenomena, I can only suggest that we exist entirely side by side, separated only by a vast, intraversible gap in reality. There must be a fracture of some sorts, which allows the book and this note to move from one reality to the next and this fracture must be flawed as it sometimes alters the linear sequencing of events. But, for me, a single question remains, who is the orginial writer of the book, I or Kilik?