Free Fences in Breathing by Nicole Brossard

distance halfway to the half-tremor of dreams. I am everywhere I say I am even though I forget I am waiting comfortably coiled in the roiling of words and of my muscles of silence I am waiting for the centuries to pass. I am everywhere I am.
    Now there is sand, watches, human time and sidereal time in each one of the sentences walking along the lakeshore with me at cocktail hour.
    Laure Ravin moved into the Hôtel Metropole hoping, once and for all, to finish with her analysis of the Patriot Act. She has barely slept in the last forty-eight hours, checking, cross-checking the meaning of each word, the consequences of each omission, the word associations that could easily compromise a paragraph, a chapter or a destiny. Her entire body is filled with a kind of anger that seems like a dead end. As though every line of the Patriot Act has fuelled in her a relentless shudder, an indignation, a wild malaise, the precocious intuition that this legislative anomaly will result in her North American humanity plunging into dizzying chaos. The pages of the Patriot Act scroll through her mind with their threatening details, limitations, prescribed sentences, obligations, fines. Every word counts. It can split in two, spill over on itself, provoke a bloodbath. Later on in the evening she will phone home, talk with her mother for a long time, try to reach a civil servant at the Department of Homeland Security to check a few facts. Then, with a glass of white wine in front of her, she will try to convince herself that she is wrong about the extent of this future law’s disastrous consequences.
    The Patriot Act has become a kind of obsession, a matter of life and death. There is venom in it, programming that threatens certainties fought for long ago. ‘And yet my life remains the same,’ she thinks to herself. How much time for a looming calamity to materialize? Howdoes our brain reorganize the future so as to erase the mathematics of calamity? How do the voices of the women and men of a country, of a whole continent, harmonize in such a way that it accelerates their sense of being resigned to disaster? The man with the bended knee in the photos flashes by her. He is falling like a mythical statue against a dark backdrop filled with words upon which she had been leaning before she herself fell into the infinite number of physical laws that lighten consciousness.
    The room looks over the Jardin anglais and its fountain. Farther on, like a stage setting, are the harbour, the little white lighthouse, the towering water jet. Depending on whether she is sitting at her desk working or standing by the window looking out, she can glimpse either the lake’s sky-high jet of water or the garden’s tall trees. She has to choose. Impossible to see both simultaneously. Perhaps it’s the same with laws. They exist simultaneously, each adding to the others, while we see only one at a time, easy to outwit, or so we believe, and unable to reach out and crush us.
    It was darkness that incited Laure Ravin’s interest in the law. As a teenager she spent hours in her room reading
The Atrids
, silently and out loud. In the college auditorium, dressed in a white tunic, hair anointed with henna, lips bright blood red, she had been afraid of drowning in a time so remote as to preclude any further imagining of life. A time of chaos, fear and night. She was terrified at theidea of finding herself alone, on the edge of animal madness in the great cosmos of life. She could remain thus for a long time, surrounded by pre-human silence, then the violence of the noises of civilization would grab hold of her again and she had to deal with murders, the blood of sacrifices and massacres, the blood of rapes and births. No corruption. Nothing but blood, clean and clear like life, death, with the sea as background. The sea windless or raging, smashing time itself, so frightening with its Möbius strips spiralling over chasms. The law was a response to this time of chaos. The