To hear these words from a mere machine was humiliating in the extreme. It was annoying, how quickly a premise was hardening around me. I took thought, but not very far. I considered changing identities. But it was difficult with this thing clinging to me.
And then I found myself in the streets of the city. They twisted like writhing snakes. Some of them twisted like snakes trying to go straight. It was one of those sights the cosmos sends your way from time to time, but not often.
There were little shops on the ground level. I looked them over with some concern. What were they selling in those shops? Food, for example? Sex? There had to be something here I could buy and sell. You see, I was looking for a purpose.
After a while I came across a purposes store with a gaudy sign in front. Purposes of all Kinds. I didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed a dire imposition, being forced to think of it at all. So I put down other words, covered my trail with another trail, put cross trails across the trails that showed the way I had gone. Just taking precautions.
After a while I came to a government office. Observe fear all you who enter here. That was written on the door. I observed it, and I couldn’t help but smile, because that was so like them, the Phocians, diving into the heavy direness of statement, when all along they knew not what.
But who was I to talk? I had to laugh aloud, because the whole situation was crazy and desperate and unworkable, and it had started out so well, and I knew it and could do nothing about it except continue: foul quitter doesn’t win fair adventure.
It happened while I was standing there trying to shift mental gears. The moth-shaped clue went round and round and then dove into confusion, taking me along with it. I see the stars and the stars see me. Great haste makes great waste. Great wastes spread out on all sides of me. Where in hell did they put the city? Someone seems to have misplaced it and it wasn’t me. Goddamn them anyhow, the ones who spoil everything. And I had been so looking forward to this, to finding some nice discrete and reasonable proposition in which to hide himself. I wanted a girl to love and a sandwich to eat. I wanted a way out of the mysteries and uncertainties. And here I was in a space that refused delineation.
What can I say about it? Narration has its limits. I tell you there was literally nothing there. From that small beginning, nothingness spread out on all sides, and as I looked, my vision increased in acuity, and I saw deeper and deeper into the nothingness. My eye ached for some little object to grab ahold of. Even the weight of the knapsack would have been a relief at this point. So this is death, I told myself, and I have reached it too soon.
“Welcome to the kingdom of death,” someone said to me.
I could of course see nothing. Pretty soon I was going to see plenty, but right now I couldn’t see a thing. And that was just too bad for me. Yet I had heard a voice. It welcomed me to death, the place I had long suspected I was heading for. It brought a certain relief, but with it the necessity of reply.
“Hello,” I said. That seemed neutral enough.
“Hello yourself,” the voice replied.
So there I was in the midst of nothingness with a voice doing schtick with me. It was insupportable. But there was nothing to do but support it. I tried to conjure up a vision. Surely any something would be better than this nothingness. But the vision wouldn’t come. Instead, a smell came. It smelled like aging mouse-droppings. I didn’t like that at all, and its implications even less. What was that to do with me? I was in this place, and a voice was saying hello.
“Now look,” the voice said, “we can’t go on like this. We need to find a way, a modus operandi. Can’t you hear me, Caroline? Can’t you hear me singing to you? Can’t you find a place in your heart for the embarrassed as well as the ones who didn’t give a damn, to say nothing of the ones who aren’t even there any more? Now I ask you, isn’t there a way we can get it on together?”
“Perhaps if you’d show yourself!” I suggested, for the person whoever it was had failed to perform even that rudimentary act of civility.
“Hah! That’s rich! The mud asking the pot to crow! That’s not what we want here at all. What we want is for something to happen. Isn’t that so?”
“Perhaps enough has happened already?” I suggested. It seemed right that I should go easy, try not to be careless, or try to be careless, but in a purposeful manner, I wasn’t sure which was the right tack to take. If only this damned incoherence would clear up! But no such luck, it went on, and I was going on, too.
Then Sicelle was there. She looked as lovely as ever, her hair in a long wave down her front, her small heart-shaped face looking at me with what I thought was concern but might have been no more than dyspepsia.
“Ogden,” she said, a name which I accepted at the time but later found more than a little unlikely, given what I remember of my circumstances, which I mean to get into later. But for now, look, do I look like an Ogden?
“You look as if you’ve been ill.”
That was a laugh. What else does one do, lying in bed this way, the overhead fan going and the heat rising, except to be ill, very ill, as ill as possible? That seemed to be the setup. But I wasn’t sure, that was the damnable thing.
Patience. Cunning. Don’t give anything away.
“Have I been here long?” I asked her.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t speak just now,” Sicelle said. “Here, have some soup.”
She lifted my head with one hand and poured soup into my mouth through a long hollow spoon. It was good soup, chicken soup, though I wasn’t sure what I was eating it for. Were the objects of life still to be maintained in some other place reserved for me, and would that place simply go on? Or was that asking too much? Despite my brave front, I wasn’t at all sure.
“Now then, Ogden,” she said, “you just get hold of yourself. The confusion will lift. This is what they call the circle of confusion. I know you aren’t hearing me quite correctly. But try to make some sense out of these words.”
Sicelle had always been a nice person, even when she was dating Edgar. I remembered those days of squalor, the little flat in the West Village, the coffee shops, the songs of the strolling minstrels, some from as far away as 12th century France. Those had been good days, though it hadn’t seemed so at the time. I wished I were there now, wherever there was.
But then I remembered that these memories, although perfectly genuine, might not be my memories at all. It was not unknown for a traveler such as myself, before leaving the safe shores of iterative self-reference, where all you can do is think about yourself, and so keep yourself in existence, to borrow or rent or even buy one or more of someone else’s memories when he’s going on a trip to strange places, so he could have some people to look up when he gets there, since remembering a person is tantamount to knowing that person even if you’ve never actually met.
I looked up. There was a light flashing overhead. A recorded voice said, “Visiting hours are over.”
And then Sicelle began to fade.
“Don’t leave yet!” I cried. “You are my last oasis of sanity here in a world I never made.”
But she continued to fade, smiling her small smile. The walls were suddenly there, a yellow stucco, and I decided that ignorance was better than bliss, better than this, better than a kiss.
When I looked up again, I was in a different place. That’s how it works sometimes.
“Hello out there!” I called. But there was no reply. All was confusion. It was the circle of confusion that I have mentioned before. I didn’t know what to say about it. But you have to talk your way out of it, and after a while the survival instinct took over and words pressed and jumbled at the back of my throat. One sentence rose, and then another. I couldn’t find a way to express them. I knew I was having a relapse. But to what? What was the dim meaning of all this? Where was I going?
It was time to decide on a course of action. I imagined a staff of ironwood, strong, natural, a goodly substance that I could work with.
Immediately I
was out of the hospital room. Perhaps I had never been there in the first place. Or, rotten thought, perhaps I was still there. But in that case what was I doing going to a new place?
Home was never like this, a sentence colliding in my head. Yet so it is, Ananda. The big old house, the walk-in closet fragrant with cedar paneling, the big tree outside with the spreading branches, “secret closets of lone desire,” as Sidney Lanier calls them, and superimposed on that, several apartments in several cities, brought here together to view the last of me, a dying remnant. No, sorry, didn’t mean that last. It takes a lot to tell about it. It seems to you blotchy, does it? Yet the intent to confuse is not there. All these templates of home crowding in on each other like transparent pages of a calendar whipping madly in the winds of time in which we sail.
And so I reached the spot where I made one. “Hello, everybody, I’m home!”
A stirring in the kitchen. Smell of apple pie, euphonious, unanimous.
“Why, hello, Ogden,” said Mom.
I had fallen into a page in the dark book. But it’s nice you can go back again, and again and again. I had a sudden desire to visit the chamber of ancestors. They were all there, even some we didn’t remember, facsimiles of those, who took place before reattribution could begin its work of making whole the torn pages of memory. There was Uncle Seth, Uncle Dan, Uncle George, Uncle Charles, there were all the aunts, ranged neatly on one side of the chamber, each doing a characteristic thing, pasting stamps into a collection, polishing silver, dusting a collection of old American glass.
“What are you doing here?” Uncle Seymour asked. “I thought you were going on a trip.”
“Why so I was,” I told him, “and I still am. But the unexpected turns and twists of this our life have brought me here again.”
He smiled at me fondly; the fact that he wasn’t living confined him to this single chamber, and I believe he resented it very much. But we must have some differentiation between the quick and the dead, else what’s a heaven for?
My mother called from the other room, would I take coffee with her? I hastened to join her in the yellow-wallpapered room, where the unremarkable trees of New Jersey cast their ever lovin’ light on thee. I never could figure out about mother, you’d think with this opportunity to find out certain hidden happenings from what they tell me was my childhood, I’d take advantage. But it doesn’t always work that way. There’s a certain reticence at work. Our family, the family of man, has spread so enormously since the anti-Platonic doctrines received general dissemination, that you’d expect . . .
Oh I don’t know what you’d expect. This enormously extended family spread throughout space and time, all there, all waiting for you, and you for them. My own children coming for to carry me home. And yet it didn’t help, there was no happiness in it, only confusion, actually not a confusion in my own life, that went on as these things usually do, but a confusion in reporting what was taking place.
For how am I to explain that through a loop, unexpected but inevitable, I had doubled back in my attempt to get into Phocis, returned to my own childhood, and was passing now through those caverns of time and memory?
Well, I’ve said it, but it’s not convincing, the hypothetical man from Mars wouldn’t know what to make of it. I was there in the kitchen taking coffee with my mother, and at the edge of my vision I could see the pathway that led back to where I had intended to go in the first place. Should I avail myself of it? There’s always a moment of upset when you take your departure from the simulacra of your past. They are surprised—sorry, Mom, I have to mount yonder rainbow and ride away. The next time you come all is forgotten, or at least not spoken about. No one mentions the fact that you simply climbed invisible steps in your own kitchen and disappeared into the god knows where. But it seems to hang there like a chrome-plated fart, a bit of nastiness, a bit out of character.
And yet I was not ready to go as quickly as all that. I had been a long time away from the home place. It’s surprising how seldom it comes up on the round of possibilities, born again into the round of revisitations, where nothing happens for the first time and there is no end. Or so I believe. No end!
I looked around at those scenes of my childhood and wondered to whom they belonged. It seemed strange and unbelievable to me that I could ever have swung in that swing, that I had played croquet with that scratched and dirty mallet with the orange band. It meant as little to me as the flamingoes of a previous time. Yet there was nothing more to say about it. Not only can you not come home again, you don’t even want to, because you can’t even recognize the place except from the newspaper clippings.
In a blink of the eye the scene had shifted. I don’t suppose I really had to blink my eye to make it happen. Sicelle had warned me about that sort of thing. A slip of the lip can smear the lipstick, she told me. I was there with her again, this time in a pleasant little pub in London. This hadn’t actually happened yet, of course, but it was bound to take place in the eternal recurrence of things.
I ordered a bottled beer, a Mexican one, just to be devilish. Sycelle ordered one of those colorful drinks with creme de menthe in it. We settled back in the pleasant fug and tobacco-colored smoke of the place with its glints of light off the brass and its rich red of mahogany bars. I was enjoying myself. This was as close as I’d ever get to the first time. We create a new first time by forgetting the other first time.
“So where are you going?” Sicelle asked.
“To Phocis,” I replied.
“Again?”
I had never been there before, but I nodded. It’s a mistake to think in terms of novelty here in the world of crowded images and endlessly long shiny curving corridors in which everything is cycled and recycled, displayed and destroyed and displayed again.
Nevertheless, I persevered. “I’m going to Phocis,” I said.
“Take me with you,” she said.
I shook my head. Novelty was what I was after, still and forever. Sicelle was nice, Glynnis was nice, but I was not prepared to settle down, to put my memories of past and future into the bank, to live my life with blinkers, blinders, glanders, salamanders.
“You’re making a mistake,” Sicelle said, brushing back her bright, tightly kinked hair. I finished my beer and ordered another one. I vaguely noticed that this was a time before my operation. I felt quite fit and was happy to notice it. You have to give some credit to the cosmos that I suppose directs all this nonsense.
And then I was in a different place, this one with gleaming chrome surfaces and big animated portraits on the wall of beings I couldn’t remember having seen before but of course I could be mistaken. Llew was with me again. He was holding my knapsack.
“You almost forgot this,” he said. “The authorities want you to have it back. Nothing illegal in it, I hope?”
“I hope not, too,” I told him, because you can never tell what a knapsack will pick up when it’s not in your hands.
“Now then,” Llew said, “it’s time we saw the burgomeister or whatever they call him here. He will regularize your position. I’m afraid it’s a black mark against you that you entered by the wrong door.”
“But how was I to know?” I asked him.
Llew shrugged. “Don’t tell me about it, old boy. I know the impossibility of avoiding egregious error. Who knows better?” And here Llew rolled his eyes, alluding to some misfired adventure in the past that he thought I was aware of. As a matter of fact, I had neglected to rent Llew’s second-rank memories, contenting myself with just a couple of the really ripe ones.
I said, “I had no indications as to the correct path.”
“And that excuses you from error, it really does, but only in my eyes. The authorities here take no excuses, or at least none that I’ve been able to offer so far in your behalf, and they are fairly ticked off about it, silly buggers that they are. You went to the prison without paying your entry, by the way.”
“I didn’t even know I was going there.”
“Tel
l that to the cops.” Llew shook his head and rolled a cigarette.
I wondered if he was using dope. It goes in and out of legality so rapidly, you scarcely know whether you’re breaking a law. One man has said that no matter what you do, you’re always breaking a law somewhere.
And then we ate lunch. Bloody well about time, that was my estimation of it. It was one of those oriental deals, everything cut up and unrecognizable and laced with a heavy sauce. I put it down without difficulty. Llew was toying with his food, drinking cup after cup of strong coffee. He seemed unhappy about something.
After a while he said, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
I waited. He didn’t speak.
I said, “Well, come on, out with it. Is there something else wrong I’ve done?”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, old boy.”
“Try just saying it.”
“It seems you’ve been marked for death.”
At first I just looked at him. And then I said, “And you tell it to me like that?”
“My dear fellow!” Llew said. “There’s no good way.”
Explosions in the grass. The moves of the rinderpest beast. What useless images flock to the mind in times of stress! What can you say when they say to you, “You’ve been marked for death?” What can I say after I say I’m sorry? You think to yourself, I always knew it was coming. Looks like this is the night the old continuity burns down.
You say, “In what form does it come, then, this thing you call death?”
“You may not recognize it when it comes,” Llew said.
“Then why do you tell me about it?”
“Forewarned, forearmed, old boy. Or so they say.”
But was I forearmed? I had a lawyer’s writ absolutely barring death from coming within 30 feet of me without having previously obtained my written consent. I was afraid he would not abide by that. What could they do to him if he overstepped his bounds, and came to serve me here in the land of eternal youth? They could shout and grumble all they wanted, Death pretty well did as he pleased. But of course, there was always the possibility of making a deal.
Various Fiction Page 395