Part 3 (2/2)

I no longer recall what I read, exactly, or even the general outline of the theory. There was some talk, I remember-very interesting at the time-about ”virtual time and s.p.a.ce” in music and painting, and something ... you must forgive my haste ... about ”organic forms.” My wife-this much I remember distinctly-was working in the kitchen, banging the cooking utensils around, turning the water on and off with a violent suddenness I could only interpret as critical of my sitting in the livingroom, reading while she worked. All her acquaintances have maids, and she feels, she has told me, that a man as well off as I am could surely afford that small luxury. It wasn't so bad when my father was still at liberty, dropping by every night or so and helping with her ch.o.r.es. But my father has been put where he belongs-no fault of mine-so now she talks about having at least a maid. I've explained to her many times why a stranger in the house would be, to a man like myself, anything but a luxury. Even a stranger near the house is deeply upsetting to me, so that, inconvenient as it may be, I walk wherever I go (I seldom go out except for my rare official visits to the bank), since to own an automobile would inevitably involve me with a mechanic for the engine, a chauffeur, and heaven knows what else. But I am straying from my point.

I had been hearing for several days and nights now strange noises from the library. (It took me some time to pinpoint the noises as coming from the library, but I must hurry past all that; my time, as you will see, is limited.) Now, at the sound of a particularly loud crash, I jumped up from my chair, closed the book of philosophy on my finger to keep my place, and moved carefully-I was wearing my slippers-to the library door. With my hand on the k.n.o.b and my ear against the panel, my body bent over like an old man's-like my father's, for example-trying with all my might to make out what it was that was happening inside, I suddenly found myself-suddenly and surprisingly, as when a man wakes up in a different room from the one he went to sleep in-staring with ferocious concentration at the t.i.tle on the book: The Problems of Art. It came to me with a jolt, such a jolt that I found my knees were trembling, that all this while, when I'd thought I'd been listening with all my wits, I'd been mulling over those ideas I'd just encountered, ideas I at that time recalled with the greatest exact.i.tude.

The philosopher wrote-this much I can still make out-of how in paintings, as in mirrors, we see ”virtual s.p.a.ce,” that is, s.p.a.ce that seems as real as any other until the moment we try to enter it, at which time it proves an apparition. In the same way, reading novels, we move through virtual landscapes watching virtual human beings, people who speak and act as do real human beings until they vanish, or, rather, snap magically into words on a page. The implications, I hardly need tell you, are staggering!

Perhaps, though time is short, I should try to dredge up one or two more details of the argument, to make the larger implications a little clearer. These ”apparitions” that come to us in music or, say, fiction are not at all mere imitations, like the figures in a mirror. On the contrary, they are created expressions of life itself. They function in the same ways as do other living things; that is to say, they are pushed and pulled by the same laws that push and pull me or, for instance, my wife, Greer. I speak only, of course, of such works as we call successful, works that have ”vitality” or ”autonomous life.” It was of course this idea-this fact, I should have said, for so it seems to me-that made my knees tremble.

Heaven knows what force it was that caused me to act. I myself was amazed, watching my hand as, with a will of its own, it closed more firmly on the large bra.s.s doork.n.o.b and turned it. Then, in the pocket of my jacket, the same hand closed around my gold-plated penknife and drew it toward the light. With my shoulder-hardly knowing what I was doing, abandoning my senses-I pushed open the huge old door and stepped in.

The world is aclutter with mysteries, as everyone knows. The sane Newtonian universe has proved more illusory than your face in the mirror or the ”solid” oak floor. We must somehow imagine, it seems, black holes and white holes, worm-holes through which Time makes astounding jumps, even some subatomic particle, I read, which is approximately the weight of an electron and two light-years broad! We're stuck, if you believe our more outlandish physicists, with the real possibility of dying of asphyxiation because the oxygen has all piled up in a corner of the room where we happen not to be.

We take these things for granted, or at any rate for probably true, and though we glance left then right before crossing a street, as if Newton's universe were still in operation, or even Moses' universe (”I know I have sinned, therefore it is likely that I'll be hit by a car”), we know we have no choice but to make do with the universe we're caught in. I could say more on this subject-I'm a voracious reader and, as you'll see, no fool-but as I've said, my time is limited.

My library-our library, for the house is in my wife's name as well as my own-gives at first the impression of being nothing but books: books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, more books on the five free-standing stacks, three feet apart, which stretch from the east wall of the room to the west with only a four-foot-wide pa.s.sageway tunneling through them, like a series of entrances to a crypt. These shelves too rise from floor to ceiling. One ducks one's head, moving to the heart of the library; above the eighth shelf-the roof of the tunnel through the stacks-the shelves run straight across the room. One feels, in our library, buried in books, entombed. It is partly for this reason that I avoid the place.

Yet the impression from the doorway that the room contains nothing but books is an illusion. Beyond the low pa.s.sage through the free-standing stacks one sees-or, rather, I saw as I came in-that the heart of the library is flooded with moonlight, so that there must be large windows or (as happens to be the fact) French doors. Then one notices a glow in a part of that light, and one deduces (or knows) that in the heart of the library there is a fireplace where not long since there was a roaring fire. Every night around dusk I make a fire in the library fireplace. I never read there-the place makes me uneasy, all that gloomy weight of learning, ton upon ton of contradictory opinion, as if right to the center of things reality is moot-but the truth, I'm afraid, is that if I didn't make a fire there my wife would complain that we need servants. For the same reason I work frantically in the garden, trim the hedges, pick up the droppings from our high enclosing walls of blue spruce.... But enough.

There was not a sound now. I groped for the lightswitch to the right of the door and flicked it three times until finally, as if grudgingly, slightly arcing, it turned the lights on. The room was hardly lighter than before; in fact, it was only the quality of the light that changed. Cautiously, I moved my right slipper forward, then my left, soundlessly heading toward the hearth-lit center of the library. I opened the penknife as I went.

Well, no point making high drama of it. Suddenly, there in front of me-leaping out so quickly from behind the third bookshelf that I hardly knew at first where he'd come from-stood a man with an axe. He was a small man, no more than four feet tall. Why this should be I have no idea, but small he was, a perfectly formed midget with terrified, rolling, somewhat slanted eyes, more terrified of me than I had time to be of him, a ferocious little Russian-a student, I imagined-crazily muttering to himself. Dim as the room was I saw everything with dreadful clarity, like a man about to die. His eyes were sunken, his lips wildly trembled, his coat came almost to his ankles. On the blunt side of the axe there was blood and what might have been gray hair. I tried to speak, but it was as if all the air had gone out of me. My knees banged crazily together. He drew back the axe, blunt side forward, to strike me, but that very instant a young woman in English Victorian dress appeared behind him and cried out, ”Lord in heaven! Have you gone loopy?” He turned his head, or, rather, threw it around, to look at her, and his axe waggled downward a little. She too was a midget, though now it was less obvious; something was beginning to happen to my sense of the scale of things. The books on the shelves had grown larger, and the people the same. He looked at the girl with a terrified fixity, as if-in the word's profoundest sense-he'd never seen anyone like her.

With a part of my mind I was so afraid of the little man I could think nothing at all, but with another part, or so it seems to me now, I sensed what he was thinking. Raskolnikov-for of course it was he-had never seen an English schoolgirl and had no way of knowing she was, so to speak, an ”outlaw” English schoolgirl; but he knew, it seemed to me, that she was somehow an outlaw, as he was, theoretically; and what had shocked him so badly that he had lowered his axe was philosophical: this girl in dark ringlets, with the slightly puffy eye-sacs, the petulant mouth, the stance he could not judge as obscene or un.o.bscene, not knowing her culture, but knew to be somehow or another defiant and by the standards of her own time and place almost certainly unacceptable, this girl was, like him, a moral outcast, but outcast from a morality so different from his own world's as to cast the idea of ”universal human nature” into the trash-heap of ancient pseudodoxia. As he dropped the axe and crazily stared at her, she paid attention. He was astonished by this and reached for the axe again but merely touched it with the tips of his fingers then changed his mind and let it lie. It seems pointless to a.n.a.lyze, but it comes to this: his standards of good and evil-the standards by which he defended and condemned himself-were so different from hers, or her society's, that he abandoned all sense and followed her, like a s.e.xually aroused animal, into the dimness beyond the fourth shelf.

I can hardly bear to tell you the trivia that followed. It seemed to me at the time astonis.h.i.+ng, even wonderfully interesting, but on reflection I see that it was neither. I could recreate my state of mind for you perhaps, by trickery and rhetoric, but I refuse to descend to such foolishness. Suffice it to say that I saw Ahab, split by lightning from head to toe, who argued with Boswell's Dr. Johnson, boringly-sometimes threatening to hit Dr. Johnson ”a good one, right smack in thy face,” to the latter's dismay, of course-about immanence and transcendence; saw Scrooge and Bunyan's Pilgrim, who sounded to my ears remarkably alike; talked with Jane Austen's Emma, who was not at all as pretty as I'd imagined her to be and seemed oddly bigoted on almost everything we touched ... etc.

I will leap to the heart of the matter, which is this: when I had been in my library for several hours, arguing with these dreams or apparitions or realities, my wife came to me dressed in her nightgown-she is generally said to be quite beautiful-and said, ”Winfred, are you coming to bed?” I knew this was a threat and a proposal. ”Soon,” I said, twisting my head around to look at her, ”I'm not quite finished.” She stood waiting. By now the beauty of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and flanks, well defined under the nightgown, had become, I thought, slightly comic. If one sits looking long enough at mere actuality it becomes, well, obvious. She pivoted away, swinging her rear end in a way that an actress might call cliche, and disappeared through the low-slung entrances or, in this case, exits. From the door she called back, ”Remember, tomorrow is visitors' day at the asylum. I know you're busy, of course....”

At this moment, as if summoned by her words, something came charging from the books, terribly shrieking. It came straight toward me. I couldn't make out what it was, at first. It was brighter than the light from a bursting star, coming straight at me with a clatter and roar like a lightning-ball. At the last instant, I saw the apparition with absolute clarity: the hero of my youth-I was sixteen when I first read a version of his story-Achilles! Without a word, without an instant's hesitation, he raised his sword and struck. In amazement, I watched blood rush down my chest from the deep wound in my neck. I stared at him in horror-more horror than disbelief. It was incredible! He was the hero of absolute justice, G.o.d-sent doom, terrible purgation, and I was-I screamed with all my might-”Not guilty!” He stared at me, baffled. Perhaps he spoke no English; or perhaps he was amazed that, wounded as I was, I could still speak. He raised his huge sword to strike again.

My wife cried, from somewhere far away, ”Winfred!” And then again, from somewhere nearer, ”Winfred!”

He turned, listening, more baffled than before. Slowly, carefully, eyes somewhat confused, he raised that huge, gleaming knife.

Now she was behind me. ”You were screaming! Have you gone crazy?” she demanded. He stood teetering the knife, as if he imagined I was moving, like a chicken who nervously twists its neck on the block.

”Winfred,” she whispered, ”what's come over you?”

Achilles, lover of justice and truth, glanced past his shoulder as if for invisible support, then swung again, this time softly, uncertainly, though his blade nonetheless cut the tendon that held my neck to my right shoulder.

”Winfred!” cried my wife. ”Say something! What's the matter with you?”

I sat hunched forward, hiding my condition as well as possible. Abruptly, seeing that I would not speak or turn, she left me, furiously whispering to herself.

Not to make too much of it, I knew then and there that I was dying.

Though time is running out-each word I write is more shaky than the last-let me pause to discuss this peculiar situation. If my sentence ends in the middle, so it ends. Goodbye, G.o.d bless you. So I pray while I still have the strength.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I'm not dying but going mad. (I'm obviously rational, but no one's more rational than a maniac, this I know. My wife, you may say, does not seem to see Achilles; but my wife is no test of reality. She too comes from a long line of lunatics, all people of substance in their day, like myself.) Very well, let us say, for argument's sake, that I am mad. Here sits character x, a madman, struck a mortal blow by character y, a fiction. What can x do, mad as he is, but struggle to maintain justice, normality?

Perhaps my father is unjustly accused. The judge who committed him is afraid of black cats. Even the testimony I myself gave may not have been quite fair, though to the best of my knowledge it was true. My wife also may be unjustly accused, insofar as I accuse her of imbalance. But this much, at least, seems certainly true: if a fictional character, namely Achilles, can make blood run down my chest (if it is indeed running down my chest), then a living character, or two such characters-my father and my wife-can be made to live forever, simply by being put in a fiction.

For this reason-though possibly it makes no sense, possibly I'm making some outlandish mistake-I sit at my desk in this library, writing while the blood runs out of me, the moon hides in clouds, and the fire in the fireplace burns down to ash-Achilles, five feet tall, rather larger than the others, hacking and chopping at my shoulders and spine, while Tom Jones, Gulliver, Hamlet, and many others stand cheering, booing, or complaining in the shadows, taking note of my demise or ignoring it, involved in their own huge affairs. For this reason I construct the following, which I'll pursue as time allows.

”Ah, Greer, what a good, gentle woman you are,” says my father.

She shakes her head, gloomy, and with her long fingers turns the cup handle north. The table runs east and west. ”You're babbling,” says my wife.

Her irritation surprises him, and he glances up at her, then down again at his knees. ”That's not what I meant,” he says.

She rises suddenly, goes over and opens the icebox door, and, like a child, stands looking inside. ”Christ,” she says.

”No cheese?” he asks. He has no idea why he thinks she's looking for cheese.

”Cheese?” she asks, more irritable than before. She looks at him. He can see that she thinks he's crazy. He could make a fire in the sink, she wouldn't think it more crazy than his a.s.sumption that she's looking for cheese. She comes back to the table with the milk pitcher and a gla.s.s.

My father feels pain, a light ticking exactly in the center of his chest. Once, years ago, riding with my mother, he had to stop the car-she'd been bawling him out about his failure to press charges against someone who had robbed him-he had to stop the car and run down the road pell-mell to keep from having a heart attack.

”All I meant ...” says my father, and lets it trail off. With enormous effort, he reaches across the table and takes her hand.

Tears burst into my wife's eyes and spill down her cheeks. ”Never mind,” she says. ”I'm sorry.” She thinks about it, then slowly lowers her head to the tabletop. My father, after carefully thinking about it, raises his crooked, calloused hand and lowers it to touch her soft hair.

”Dear G.o.d, if I were Winfred's age,” my father complains. He moves the stiff hand to the side of her face and brushes the barely perceptible fuzz on her cheek. He does not touch the tears.

”You're crazy,” she says, and laughs, half crying. ”Has it ever struck you that if you and I were normal people, like Winfred, for instance, in there turning the pages, one, two, three-”

”Now now,” says my father. ”When you're my age you've thought about everything, more or less.” His hand moves slowly, gently, over her hair. He's eighty-two. She's thirty. No one would think him insane except that he once backed his truck through the plate-gla.s.s window of my bank.

The hair p.r.i.c.kles on the back of my neck, as if an ice-cold wind has touched it. Achilles, Lord of Justice, is standing in the doorway, dressed in a drab, neat suit, like a Jehovah's Witness. I see that he has grasped the situation between my wife and my father.

I s.n.a.t.c.h at his elbow. ”No justice,” I plead, ”enough of justice!”

None of this is possible, I realize. My father is in the asylum, Achilles does not exist. I focus hard, trying to read what I have written. The desk is all blood.

My head is filled with planets and stars. Achilles moves slowly toward my father, raising his knife.

”Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might, for any good fiction will serve in hard times-I clench my eyes against the tumbling of the planets-”Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might.

THE JOY.

OF THE JUST.

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