I’d been busy, writing the documents that were part of my account, when the buzzer sounded. I wasn’t expecting anyone.

Looking down, I saw three strangers – well-dressed men in green business suits. One carried a briefcase. I don’t remember if they were wearing hats, but I do recall they seemed very formal.

As I opened the door, they were quite solicitous, and they told me they’d been given the task of getting this message to me.

“It is a gift from Hassan, who informed us that it has been suspended undelivered for many years. Finally able to track you down, we have come to celebrate the opening of your Shamcher Studio by giving you this long-ago gift. It wasn’t created specially for you, but it has been passed on from one recipient to another.”

When I asked them in, they politely declined. I was glad actually because I didn’t know what I would do with them, and what if they didn’t ever leave? So outside my door, one snapped open the briefcase, and took out a wrapped item with my name on it, and my address.

He shook my hand. “Congratulations,” he said with a very wide smile, as he handed me the wrapped object. “We don’t know what this is, or why Hassan has sent this to you those long years ago. He has moved on and we are delivering his gifts to all he had tried to send to while he was here. Since the time you met him, he’s gone back to Egypt, and we rarely hear from him.”

I thanked them as they left, closed the door and in the hall I dropped the package on the side table. For some reason I was shaking. It wasn’t emotional – in fact my feelings were flat, equal. No fear or excitement or even curiosity. Just shaking and disorientation. Something about them had completely disrupted my equilibrium. The contact with them awakened a sort of inner howling in my cells – an electrical storm as all the ions recalibrated or something. I couldn’t think, or focus to see. Dizzy, I sat on the couch in a state of unfamiliar confusion.

“I’d better pull myself together,” I thought as over and over my fingers combed through my hair from the forehead to the back of my head. Standing unsteadily I went toward the unknown package. Wrapped in brown tissue paper. My name and address. Small. Ordinary. The response I was feeling wasn’t from the package. It was the contact that it represented.

So I picked it up, went back to the couch and slowly opened it. Inside the layers of tissue was a shining twig made of copper. No, more than that…. An antique fan of green. Folded it was fashioned like a twig, when opened ribs of thin copper held the shining silk taut, a colour more green than green radiated. A darker mossy ribbon laced with copper shone in the half-circle arc of the wide-open fan.

On each panel a miniature painting at the base depicted mythic romantic versions of the gods of Greece encountering humans in natural settings, under trees and near waterfalls.

The base of the fan where it was held had the usual dangling tassel-ended ribbons, matching the top trim. At the top of each copper rib was a semi-precious pink stone. When the fan was held open so the light passed through, a watermark was visible on the silk. Mysterious unknown glyphs, one on each panel, seemed to spell out a magical word, or a coded message of some sort.

This is just the kind of mysterious thing I’d love to find in an antique shop. But it had found me. You might think I would put this right into my Wunderkabinett, but something had stopped me from doing that. I felt if I kept it out for a time it could reveal some of its meaning to me. I wasn’t just collecting weird objects, vaguely esoteric or mysterious. The cabinet was a work in progress in harmony with my inner processes. This gift from afar was the first to arrive and I didn’t know how to approach it.

The fan came from someone else, a magician I’d met once. I’d made contact, and shaken his hand. He’d talked to me about the gifts he’d mailed to me, somehow they had been “lifted” before I’d received them. In the midst of this conversation, suddenly I was standing before him, agreeing to something I didn’t understand, and shaking his hand in an unknown bargain. I never saw him again, often wondering where he’d ended up. Now this. The green silk antique fan.

The more I looked at it, the more it seemed not to be a French fan as I’d originally thought. The drawings of the figures and nature gods looked crude, like imitations, as if they were copies. Perhaps the silk is not that old after all… and the copper was all new, shiny, not at all oxidized. Was it a fake antique, recently made? I had doubt. But then I couldn’t ever doubt the feeling I had received along with this gift. A reorienting dizzying electron dance of momentary suspension. I saw a face then, a glimpse of a photo, black and white. Did the eyes flash? What were they telling me?

At that instant there was an upheaval in another country, far away – I saw the news later that day, another terrorist bombing. The world in unfathomable shock. And so the next day I more carefully examined the fan. Rested, able to simply sit and observe it, I looked closely at each panel. The god Pan was in each one, standing on rocks with his pipes, or peeking in the side to see lovers embracing. In one he was prancing near the waterfall, in another he was sleeping near a beautiful lady who looked out full-face toward me. I couldn’t make sense of these drawings, but each one had an opened book in the scene. With a magnifying glass I still couldn’t see what was written in the book – just nonsense marks to look like writing, I supposed.

The clues must be in the watermarks, I thought, but they were unreadable to me as well. They weren’t in any language I’d seen – not arabic, chinese, cyrillic, sanskrit, runic. They must be elvish or imaginary – or from another people long ago, or in the future. Perhaps a scientific code?

I photographed the glyphs with the sun behind them, then took a full photo of the opened fan itself, from both sides. One side had the copper ribs with the stones on top, and the visible watermarks, the other side showed the hand-painted mythological scenes. The side facing out to others showed the paintings and the stunning green silk, with the moss-green trim on the top. The side facing in, toward me, showed the glyphs, the copper ribs, and then I noticed, the images painted on the outside showed a shadow effect on the inside. Each painting was in a shape or form, and its meaning was shown in reverse in the silhouette, visible only when the opened fan was held out and seen with light coming through the fan from outside. Here I saw slightly grotesque faces in silhouette, human yet almost animal. Did the glyph represent the name or attribute of the person or being shown on this side of the fan?

For example, take the image of Pan by the waterfall, prancing and dancing with a lady whose flowing dress was moving all around her. On the other side this shows as a caricature of a solemn figure with a bulbous nose, a witchy chin and protruding eyebrows.

I still didn’t know what to make of these images. Then I became aware of the copper ribbing’s decorative sides. Under the magnifying glass, these ribs showed markings that looked almost linguistic, lining the sides of the copper. I photographed them, and when the image was enlarged, I thought I might be able to make out words, if only I understood that language. The more I moved my attention around the fan, the more it showed me, either of workmanship or of secret code. It made the object all the more significant, but still I couldn’t decipher its meaning. Nor could I find out how this object related to my experience on receiving it, and the connection to the explosion and the appearance of the face.