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Entroponetics is the scientific study of the pale. The pale does not have a perceivable appearance. It is achromatic, odourless, and featureless, the "enemy of matter and life".
The pale is difficult to describe and measure, as it is something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical – numbers stop working.
The exact origins of the pale are unclear. Logical positivists claim the pale exists as pockets of anti-matter, capable of damaging and confusing the mind through extreme sensory deprivation. Dialectical materialists, on the other hand, say that it is composed of manifested information, or manifested past, capable of degrading memories into itself.
The Pitiful Pit is usually empty on Wednesdays. If you come here on a Friday—walking past the shabby dormitory building of Revachol University—you can smell tobacco, cheap beer, and ‘Commodore Red’ (a syrupy, alcoholic concoction that vaguely resembles wine), and hear the piercing wail of guitars from bands like the Downward Dogs or Mazov’s Thirty-Three Guardsmen before you even arrive.
But on Wednesdays, it’s quiet.
Mike walks across the sticky floor—it looks as though no one even bothers to wipe up spilled drinks—toward the bar. He scans the patrons: a sleepy-looking guy, seemingly from the docklands (God knows how he ended up here), is posturing in front of a girl in a short skirt. Her red hair is uneven, hacked off as if with sewing scissors. She’s no hooker—hookers have no business here—just a student coming down off a high.
Mike remembers what that’s like: a couple of days on speed before an exam, then heading to the Pit to try and wash away that viscous, wretched sense of emptiness, to celebrate passing or drown a failing grade in swill.
The girl nods distractedly at the guy’s words and glances at Mike, as if hoping he’ll rescue her from the unwanted attention. Mike pretends not to notice.
He sits—or rather, collapses—at the scarred bar counter, immediately planting his elbow in something sticky. His jacket is old and battered enough; it’s not Mike’s first time in the Pit, so he calmly peels his sleeve free and looks at the lone bartender. A young man in his late twenties—the same age as Mike—is watching the listless conversation between the girl and the guy. Without shifting his gaze away from the patrons, the bartender clamps a cigarette between his teeth and wipes the counter with a rag of questionable cleanliness. The counter certainly doesn't get any cleaner because of it.
“Beer,” Mike says. “Pilsner. And a shot of something strong.”
“Been watching them for an hour already,” the bartender says—shifting the cigarette in his mouth without acknowledging the order—“can’t tell if the girl needs help or not. She seems fine, though. Hungover but fine.”
Mike shrugs; the young man stubs out his cigarette in a surprisingly clean, almost gleaming ashtray and draws the beer from the tap.
The bartender’s shirt is too bright for this place, with dark buttons whose color is impossible to make out in the gloom. Mike can't recall if he’s ever seen this guy before. But then again, there’s a lot Mike can’t recall.
When you work in entroponetics, you get used to everyday life feeling tenuous and unreal—indistinguishable from a dream aboard a research aerostatic. It feels as though, at any moment, you might snap your eyes open in your cabin—amidst the equipment, the logs, and the thick “nothingness” outside—wondering whether the past, present, or future you just experienced was real, or merely a vision. Whether it was yours, or someone else’s.
Mike grabs the glass—topped with a featherlight head of foam—the moment the bartender sets it on the counter. He takes a couple of sips, watching as the bartender picks up a small bottle, coated in a silvery, frosty haze, and pours a cloudy liquid into a tiny shot glass.
“Vodka?” Mike asks. “Looks like you dumped ash into it.”
The young man looks at him with an expression that seems a mix of sympathy and judgment—Mike can’t really tell.
“Pale,” the bartender replies.
Mike downs the shot; it tastes bland yet bitter. Wake up, he thinks—wake up, wake up, wake up. You work in the pale. You live in the pale. You drink the pale.
Why is he here? To remember something he isn’t even sure he ever knew? To forget something he never knew at all? Just to drink himself into oblivion?
Mike isn’t twenty anymore, and he can afford to go to Rosa Isola or Fat Tom’s, where the wine tastes like wine and there’s decent cognac from Oranje... Yet his feet carry him into the filth and haze of the Pit.
Mike pulls a cigarette from his pack of Red Astra and sets the pack down in front of him. The bartender silently places an ashtray before him and lights Mike’s cigarette with a match. The smell of sulfur dioxide briefly overpowers a faint aroma—of what? The young man didn’t seem to light Mike’s cigarette out of politeness, but rather to swipe one from his pack. When the match smoke clears, the bartender pulls back, and Mike can’t identify his scent.
Mike studies his profile: a slightly upturned nose, lips set in a crooked grimace—half-displeased, half-mocking, you can’t tell. Short chestnut-colored hair. He’s solidly built—he’s clearly gotten the hang of hauling beer crates and tossing out patrons who’ve had too much—yet not bulky, just fit. He has slender, refined fingers. He deftly opens the tap and pours two glasses of beer for the girl and the guy. She shakes her head and laughs when he asks her something.
Tobacco haze drowns out everything. Gray clouds rise toward the neon-orange light. In that glow, the mold and soot on the yellowish-brown ceiling are barely visible. The bartender turns back to Mike, seems to ponder for a moment, then pulls out the bottle and a couple of shot glasses. He pours the gray swill—for himself and for Mike. They drink without clinking glasses.
“You don’t remember?” the bartender says, setting down his glass. “You came up with this rotgut. About a month ago. Nobody else drinks it. You told me to always keep it in the fridge—said you’d pay double for the shot.”
Mike silently takes out his wallet and places a banknote on the counter.
“You don’t remember anything,” the young man says, seemingly to himself, and turns away, taking a drag on his cigarette.
He is right—Mike doesn’t. It’s so easy not to remember when you work as an entroponaut.
Mike was around twenty-three when he came to the Pit once again—drawn there by his own feet. He hadn’t wanted to go there, hadn’t wanted to drink, yet there he stood in front of a bar counter—painfully familiar—whispering to Someone, so quietly he couldn't hear himself, that he didn't remember where his home was. The Commodore Red that had somehow ended up in his hand tasted as if someone had drunk from it and then spat it back into the glass. Nauseating, in short. Mike’s tie was choking him.
It was his first flight to the pale, Mike remembers. Three days amidst absolute nothingness.
“Do I even have a home?” Mike whispered. “Do I even have me?”
And Someone—Someone who caught his voice, dissolved as it was by the pale—gently took him by the elbow, led him outside into the cold October haze, and cupped his face in their hands. They smelled of menthol and bitter herbs and whispered about entroponetics, about Mike’s home, about how at dawn they would reach it and go to sleep.
“It’s all right,” Someone repeated. “It’s okay; I’m here, you’re here, it’s all right. Volta do Mar, do you remember its words—Nulla sarà cambiato della luce, colori come grigio e marrone?”
And Mike’s memory snagged on those lines, and his lips began shaping the words—Tutti stampati uno sull’altro, trovai un vuoto, una macchia bianca—and it seemed as though the pale stopped tearing at his lungs and heart from the inside, and color returned to the world. Someone held him close, stroking his head while he sobbed, overwhelmed by emotions flooding a soul that had been so empty just a minute before.
That Someone has no face; their voice has no color; their touch holds no warmth.
Mike isn't sure that this person ever existed at all. Perhaps they are yet to exist. Perhaps they died many years ago. He finishes his beer and pulls a few more reál from his wallet.
“What did she tell you?” Mike asks, nodding toward the couple.
“She doesn’t mind as long as he pays for the drinks,” the bartender answers. “She added that she would prefer to spend the night with me. But… I’m not interested.”
The cigarette in his fingers has burned almost all the way down; any moment now, it’ll scorch his skin. He adds:
“Told her that the motel a couple of blocks over is pretty decent for its price, in case she decides to give the guy a chance.”
Mike doesn’t remember the name of that motel.
But he remembers the walls, thin as cardboard, through which you could hear moans and sighs; the sagging mattress on the creaky bed; the sticky, sweet, crimson puddle on the floor beneath a wine bottle. Mike’s head was spinning, whether from arousal or the amount he’d drunk. He remembers Someone’s breath against his ear, the feel of Someone’s soft skin under his fingers as he touched their back.
Dawn was breaking beyond the murky, grime-streaked window with a crack patched with newspaper. Someone whispered in his ear about how beautiful Mike looked in the gray-pink light; the whispers drifted to his neck and lower, tickling his ribs and stomach, before fading beneath Mike’s moans.
Mike remembers lying there afterward on the rumpled, thin sheets, fingers tracing circles over a still-flushed body, lips brushing against a lightly tanned shoulder. They laughed softly about something. Could a night like that really be worth just a few dozen reál for wine and a room? “Memories and emotions are priceless,” Someone had answered, kissing Mike on the temple.
By that measure, Mike is the most wretched pauper in all of Revachol.
His feet probably carry him here, into this filthy place, where the air is thick with smoke and other people’s breath, because that Someone used to be a regular at the Pit, too.
Someone with whom Mike had shared a glass of beer, a bottle of wine, a bed, dreams of getting a dog, strong coffee in the morning, a draft chilling their bare feet, a cigarette between the two of them, newspaper headlines, and gossip about colleagues.
Someone who knew where Mike’s home was. Someone who knew they could be forgotten at any moment.
“What exactly is mixed in there?” Mike asks, pointing at the shot glass of Pale.
“That’s for you to tell me,” the bartender answers with a soft smile. Mike can’t make out if it's sympathy or politeness before the smile fades.
“Better not. I’m a lousy storyteller. I’m an entroponaut. I…”—he waves his hand over the bar counter—“might not exist. Maybe you don't exist. Didn't exist. Won't exist.”
“I know,” the bartender says, waiting until Mike has downed the shot. “You told me.”
“What else did I tell you?”
Mike dumps another handful of reál onto the counter and gestures to the bartender to pour himself a drink, too.
“About the aerostatics,” the bartender answers. “About the pale. About non-existence. About how you released birds out there—and then tried to remember what kind of birds they were. You concluded that maybe you hadn't released any at all, because of the Dolorian Paradox, or something like that.”
“Sounds like me.”
The bartender nods and lights a cigarette.
“We keep logs at work,” Mike says. “We document everything during expeditions and afterward. We wrote about those birds, too. But it doesn’t do a damn bit of good. The records vanish. People get erased from memory. You don’t remember a person, and they don’t remember you, and there’s no mention of either of you in your diaries. Someday I’ll show up for work—and they won’t let me into the lab because they have no record of me ever having been on the payroll. And I’ll be left jobless, stripped of memories—just a shadow who never existed in anyone’s life. A fragment of a dream, an overheard conversation, an unremarkable day long since lived.”
“That sucks,” the young man agrees. “Why did you decide to do this in the first place?”
Now it’s Mike’s turn to shrug and offer a sheepish smile:
“I don’t remember.”
The bartender looks at him now with undisguised pity. As if Mike were a cripple. At least that’s how Mike reads it.
“Maybe,” he adds, “I thought it was interesting. Maybe I was drawn to aerostatics but couldn't get accepted as a pilot. Maybe I liked the concept of the pale—its alluring, inexplicable nature—and hoped to become the great scientist who would unlock its mystery? I don’t know.”
The bartender breaks the silence hanging in the clouds of smoke:
“Mix vodka with Graad Twilight herbal tincture; infuse everything with tobacco smoke from a Red Astra cigarette.”
It takes Mike a moment to realize this is the recipe for Pale drink.
“I can’t imagine how you arrived at that,” the bartender continues. “I never infused mine with smoke, though I suppose you can just have a cigarette while drinking it. I’d ask how you came up with it, but I can guess your answer: another ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘I don’t know.’”
While Mike sits there, at a loss for how to answer the bartender—who guessed with such uncanny precision what he was thinking—the man turns away to pour a beer for the girl who has noticeably perked up.
Mike actually remembers something, though. Remembers Someone. Maybe that Someone is looking for him, too—only their paths never cross; maybe if they did catch a glimpse of each other, the memories would come flooding back. Like in those stupid, cheap romance novels.
Mike gets up from the bar and heads for the restroom. A grimy, bare lightbulb dangling from a long wire flickers annoyingly. Mike feels too sober for this wretchedly sluggish, viscous evening. The restroom’s tiled walls and once-white partitions are covered in graffiti and drawings made with markers and paint of every color. “Kras was right.” “Laura is a whore.” “M & W” inside a crudely drawn heart. “I fucked the pale”—and a tiny addendum in a different hand underneath: “Is your dick even smaller now?”
Mike remembers Someone unceremoniously shoving through the crowd, backing toward the restroom without breaking a kiss. He remembers hungrily biting soft lips; he remembers a girl in army boots—screaming that she had to piss—trying to kick down the door to the women’s restroom, from behind which unmistakable moans could be heard.
Here in the narrow hallway, those sounds drowned out the strained, frenzied blues drifting in from the main room. Someone smirked against Mike’s lips, and Mike couldn't help but smile too as he was shoved into the farthest stall of the men’s room—its crooked door barely latching. As he was pressed against a wall he wouldn't have dared touch even with gloves on under normal circumstances. As the kisses rained down on his cheekbones and neck.
Someone whispered against his collarbone, “You’re so fucking beautiful,” as Mike, his hands trembling with arousal, undid Someone's belt and pulled their shirt free.
Choking on passion, Mike whispered back, “No more beautiful than you are,” pressing his hips against Someone’s—ferally, fiercely alive. “I could have died yesterday, you know; the aerostatic almost crashed.”
“Shut up, don't you dare say th—” Mike obediently fell silent, pressing his mouth against Someone's. They didn't mind; their fingernails raked across Mike’s back beneath his shirt. Their hands descended to pull Mike’s trousers down; aerostatics have always descended—and will always descend—successfully.
They emerged from the cubicle fully dressed but disheveled. Someone called out to the girl who was still fruitlessly trying to enter the ladies' room; they gestured toward the back—“the men's room is free now.” She gave Mike and Someone the finger. Their laughter was drowned out by their kisses.
When Mike returns, another glass of beer and a full shot glass are waiting for him at the bar. He lights a cigarette and looks at the bubbles in his glass. At the smoldering tip of his cigarette—that streak of white between nicotine-stained fingers, ending in a glowing red ember.
“I’m looking for someone,” Mike admits—addressing either the half-empty glass or the bartender. “Maybe they’re looking for me, too.”
“Who?” the young man asks, shaking a handful of clinking coins into the register. “Actually, never mind. You don't have to answer.”
“I remember something,” Mike says, swallowing another ‘I don't know.’ “Like fragments of a dream. A faceless figure. A touch without the sensation of skin beneath my fingers. A scent that vanishes the moment it hits my nose. A voice without timbre—like an inner voice: you hear it, but you can't describe it. I try to grasp these fragments of memory, but they slip away through my fingers like mist. Maybe I dreamed them up. Maybe I’m appearing in their dreams right now.”
The bartender shakes his head.
“Want me to make you some coffee?”
Mike wearily leans against the counter, resting on his elbow.
“If coffee could cure the aftereffects of the pale, life would be a hell of a lot easier. But yeah, go ahead. I’ve got the day off tomorrow, and I have absolutely no desire to sleep.”
Mike’s been having nightmares for the past few years. He could easily shake off bad dreams—the way a stray dog shakes off water—if they were ordinary ones: dreams featuring the monsters from the books and comic books of his childhood, or the darkness, or the desperate flight from the unknown. Even the banal nightmares his colleagues regularly have—about exams or public speaking—would be preferable to that void, a place devoid of sound, color, thought, or physical sensation. There was only Mike—and his consciousness—amidst a gray nothingness. He did not thrash about, for he had no body; he did not scream, for he had no voice; he simply tried to wake up—for minutes, or hours, or years, or centuries.
Upon waking, Mike instinctively reaches out for the other side of the bed, harboring some dim hope of pressing against Someone, feeling a chest rise and fall rhythmically with each breath, sensing that warmth. Dim hope of hearing a sleepy voice—“Had a nightmare again? Come here”—and the steady melody of Volta do Mar, which had turned into their lullaby.
Every night, Mike encounters only emptiness, a cold mattress, and silence. He buries his face in the pillow because the scent of clean linens—while certainly no match for the smell of skin and minty aftershave—is still better than the absence of any scent at all. Mike whispers the words, barely moving his lips: che bella giornata, che bel tempo… Ma sentii la rotativa.
Mike masks his misery behind the scalding heat of the coffee. The bartender unceremoniously pulls another cigarette from the pack that’s running low.
“I probably met that person here. Most likely. You might have even seen them, if you’ve worked here a long time—or if they still come to the Pit. I’d describe them to you if I could remember. Maybe we’ve crossed paths recently—but they could have forgotten me, too. Or chosen not to recognize me.”
Mike lights his cigarette from the match the bartender obligingly holds out.
“There was an incident six months ago,” Mike admits. “A problem with the aerostatic’s navigation system. We drifted off course and wandered in the pale for two days longer than scheduled. It was a miracle we made it back. One guy—I can’t remember his name—lost his mind. It was awful; he didn’t recognize anyone, didn’t speak—he’d just stare at a single point and whisper things. And we can’t remember him either. I don’t know what happened to him. So I got off easy.”
“In the pale, you don’t just forget—you get forgotten too?” the bartender asks, as if latching onto an interesting topic for the first time all evening.
“The pale destroys information. Inside you and about you,” Mike replies.
He winces, remembering how the pale had slithered through his nostrils and throat into his lungs like an incorporeal snake; how it filled his stomach and flowed through his capillaries. Neither cold nor hot, neither bitter nor salty, neither light nor heavy. Mike remembers lying on the cabin floor, trying to hum Volta do Mar while the words slipped away from his memory. People were screaming nearby.
Then he realized he was in the lab’s medical bay, and he was the one screaming—as images, colors, the taste of blood from his bitten tongue, and the sensation of Someone’s hands flooded his brain. A cold catheter in Mike’s vein. Warm, salty tears—his own, or perhaps Someone’s. Their voice said, “I waited for you; I thought you wouldn't come back; I thought you were gone.”
“When one of the aerostatic’s engines failed and we had to make an emergency landing—that was scarier,” Mike says aloud.
He seems to have said the exact same thing to Someone while lying in that medical bay.
Both times, he was lying.
“And here I thought scientists had boring jobs,” the bartender remarks.
“My job is very interesting. And dangerous. That is, if it really is my job and my memory of it.”
The young man gives him a surprised look.
“The pale is capable of that, too?”
“I saw other people's lives during some of the flights. I spoke with someone from the past—from the time of the Civil War—and heard the sounds of the shells exploding in Martinaise. I dreamt I was married and had a daughter, and worked at a fish cannery—and I would have believed it if I weren’t so certain that I couldn’t get married because, well…”
The bartender nods.
“You don’t look like the kind of guy who would marry a woman.”
Mike is drunk and tired enough not to take offense.
“And sometimes I wonder,” he continues, “maybe a long time ago I just accidentally stepped into the pale and came up with my whole life. There’s no family left to ask, either. The only proof is the paperwork at the lab. But even that can’t be trusted.”
“You should have gone into philosophy instead of entroponetics.”
“I’ll take it up when I retire,” Mike agrees, barely trying to hide his doubt. He doesn’t add the phrase that was begging to be said: if I live that long.
“Pour us some more Pale, would you?” he says instead.
“For non-existence and total nothingness, this filth actually has too vivid a taste,” the bartender remarks, setting his shot glass aside. He takes a sip of coffee from his own cup.
“Believe me, you don’t want to know what it’s like to experience the real pale.”
“I suppose I’ll experience it someday. If I want to die,” the bartender admits—and for the first time all evening, Mike sees the mask of indifference slip from his face, revealing something sincere. “I’ll go into the pale. Just to vanish, without pain or suffering. To cease to exist. I read that some animals do that. I think I had an old dog once—I don’t remember its name, I don’t even remember the color. It just disappeared one day.”
“See?” Mike stares intently at him. “You have your own ‘I don’t remember’ and ‘I don’t know’ moments, too. The pale swallowed your dog. If you lose yourself in it, no one will remember you.”
“As if there were anyone to remember me,” the young man replies barely audibly, turning away.
Mike looks away too and finishes the last few sips of his beer.
After that first flight, Someone actually walked Mike home—which meant they had already been together for a while. He remembers unbuttoning Someone’s shirt—not because they were planning to have sex, but just to give his hands something to do. To make sure he still remembered how to take off a shirt. Red buttons on a light-colored shirt—like blood on snow.
By the end of the night, Someone’s clothes smelled not of mint and bitter herbs, but of cigarettes and sweat. That didn’t bother Mike. Someone was holding him—“You have a home; everything’s fine. You have me”—and Mike clung to those words like a lifeline.
Yet, even when settled in bed within a warm embrace, eyes closed, Mike saw only a gray void.
“There’s nothing there,” he would repeat. “There’s everything there.”
Warm, slender arms would pull him tighter.
“I forgot I had a home. What if I forget I have you?”
A quiet “You won’t” in response.
Mike didn’t forget, but he can’t remember either. A lump rises in his throat, not from the drink, but from a sudden surge of emotion. He doesn’t want to pour it all out on the bartender for a second time, so Mike leaves a banknote and a pack of Red Astra—with the last couple of cigarettes still inside—on the counter as a tip, then heads for the exit.
Mike remembers where his empty home and cold bed are. He remembers how to open the door with a key. He remembers how to undo the buttons on his shirt.
He remembers that there was Someone—only Mike can’t remember who.
***
The Pitiful Pit is empty on Tuesdays, but Mike isn’t looking for music, noise, or conversation anyway. His current salary, boosted by hazard pay and compensation for work-related psychological trauma, would be enough to afford a drink in a more decent place, yet his feet keep bringing him back here: to this tiny student dive, a spot caked in grime and soaked in alcohol over the years.
The day before yesterday, Mike had to fly out to the pale again—to fill in for a colleague, just for a day, but still. After making contact with the pale, he feels a craving to drown the lingering emptiness inside him with cheap swill.
Behind the bar stands a bartender, about his own age. Mike doesn’t recall seeing him here before. His shirt—featuring dark buttons whose color is impossible to make out in the dim light—is too clean for this lousy joint.
“Beer,” Mike says. “Pilsner. And a shot of something strong.”
He places a banknote and a pack of cigarettes on the counter, which is coated in a layer of sticky grime that hasn't been scrubbed off in years. He studies the bartender as the young man draws the beer: chestnut hair, soft lips, neat fingers turning the tap handle. He pours a smoky-gray liquid into a couple of shot glasses.
“Vodka?” Mike asks, eyeing the cloudy sediment.
“Pale. A couple of months ago, you came up with the idea of mixing vodka and ‘Graad Twilight’ herbal tincture. You’re supposed to infuse it with the smoke from a ‘Red Astra’ cigarette, though you can just smoke one alongside it.”
“I don't remember,” Mike admits with an apologetic smile. “I’m an entroponaut. I study the pale. I just got back from another expedition—a short one, but still long enough to mess with my memory.”
They drink without clinking glasses. Mike pulls a cigarette from the pack of Red Astra; the bartender leans toward him with a match in his hand. It’s not a gesture of courtesy—he’s unceremoniously taking one of Mike’s cigarettes.
As the young man lights their cigarettes from the bright yellow flame—before the smell of sulfur dioxide fills the air—Mike catches a faint scent of something bitter and fresh.
Mint and bitter herbs, to be precise. This combination seems familiar to Mike, but he can't for the life of him remember why.
_________________
The song in the text is one of the Volta do Mar mantras repeated on the voyage through the pale that led to the discovery of the Insulindian isola.
"Nulla sarà cambiato della luce! / Colori come grigio e marrone Tutti stampati uno sull’altro / Trovai un vuoto / Una macchia Bianca / Gli altri guardarono / “Che bella giornata! Che bel tempo!” / Ma sentii la rotativa."
And the words mean: “Nothing will be changed about the light! / Colours like grey and brown / All printed on top of each other / I found a blank white spot / All the others looked up: / ‘What a beautiful day! What beautiful weather!’ / But all I heard was the printing machine."