NEGUSTOLONOW

We make up places, then make the clothes people wear there.

Two drawn figures in ink on cream paper, seen from behind, their faces hidden by the turn of their heads. She on the left in lace that pours away to the left; he on the right, a dark shape whose train pours right. Thin rings behind each of them, overlapping where they meet.
The room · Mercy Room

World 001

Ossel

A dark sea-worn stone, drilled once near the top, lying on a pale ground with a waxed cord running through it and off both edges of the frame.
· worn at the breastbone · Km 286
A long straight coat over a plain kitchen chair, nobody in it, the two sleeves hanging outside the chair back. It has fallen open at one side vent near the hem, where a narrow wedge of the lining shows. A concealed placket runs down the front, the blank tape is just visible inside the collar, and one doubled pick crosses the cloth at two fifths of the height. Two thirds of the plate is limewashed wall.
The sitting coat · Km 286 / P4

She found it in about a minute. She . Then she made tea.

A notebook, Km 233, YR 58

Two knocks.

A familiar standing at full height, its whole body twill, the hem to the floor over bare feet and one raised doubled weft across the chest like a crease out of a drawer. Over it an old issue jacket whose sleeves stop two inches short of the wrist, the weave running crosswise where they end. Its weight is on one hip and the head is turned a little toward a hand loom at the right edge with its warp still on it.

A familiar: one of them that has crossed the road and taken to a particular person.

A familiar · Km 596 · YR 54 · Next door

World 002

Mercy Room

An ivory crew sweatshirt laid flat from behind, one line of type printed across the width of the back in a dark aubergine, with a rule above it and a small mark below.
The Kneel Crew · the outside

We deserve our pleasure, Ned, and I’ll not be sorry for mine.

Said at a door at Km 598, at nine at night, and entered in the docket.

Enter Mercy Room

World 003

Unknown

Not everyone here agrees there is one.

The step

Door 4 · outside the worlds

The Window

Makkah, at Maghrib. For anyone who cannot travel.

Stand there

Door 6 · outside the worlds

Psychedelic Music Therapy

Everyone the house has drawn, at their full height, dancing. It is loud, and the light flashes.

Go in

The Counter

Pattern Office Taken apart
  • The ring held apart: the grey outer band, the amber liner, and the word LOOK that sits inside the liner.
    Docket ring · the band, the liner, LOOK inside
  • The cuff held apart: the pale shell, the amber lining, the raised stitches in a line, and the horn pin that closes it.
    Hours cuff · forty-three stitches, thirty-one in different hands and twelve in one
  • The stone lifted off its cord, the cord lying in two lengths with a horn pin between them.
    Diffuser · the cord is the part that wears

The ten objects The ledger Worn under the shirt

The name is three words run together: a king, a star, and now. What we take them to mean is on its own page. What the name means

Colophon The name

Three words run together. Negus is a royal title out of Ge’ez and Amharic — ንጉሥ, a king — and we say it wrong: NEG-oos, with the stress where an English mouth puts it. Tolo is the ordinary word for a star in the Dogon languages of Mali. Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen wrote it down in the 1930s and ’40s, their record has been argued over by their own discipline ever since, and what we have taken is the common noun. We are not telling anybody’s story with it. Reading the same four letters as to only love one is ours, and recent, and we would rather admit to inventing it than pretend to have found it. Now is now.

Run together we take them to mean that your leader is your servant. That idea is not Ethiopian and we do not claim it is; it turns up in the gospels, in the Tao Te Ching, in Akan practice where a chief who misrules is destooled by the people who put him there, and in the pope’s own title. The reading arrived after the name.

Said aloud: NEG-oos-toh-loh-NOW.