by Joy Williams
He’d gone on to refine his gift, selling partial zero-emission vehicles at high cost to those who purported to give a damn. Stuff coming out of the pipe is cleaner than the air outside…You can suck on it as if you were in two places at once, that is, in the driver’s seat and not in the driver’s seat…
That was long ago. He’d sold a lot of cars. There’d once been a rumor someone wanted to assassinate him for God’s sake. But he’d made it through. And now he was addressed as mayor and life was about as gratifying as could be expected under the circumstances.
Though lately he’d had a most unpleasant vision that they were all living in an open grave and that any welcome order that had been reestablished depended rather overmuch on sweeping the sides, the many walls of the grave.
This notion had been difficult to quash and he’d only been moderately successful. Then came these horrid physical sensations when he was trying to nap. He felt he was being stretched on a rack, quartered like a lamb, thrown down and dragged by a galloping horse. He was left understandably exhausted. He needed a sabbatical though he worried what a sabbatical might mean at his age. Still, he could trim his schedule somewhat. There was no need to take down that goddamned tree right now just so a ribbon could be cut for another goddamned soccer field. He’d postpone the event.
* * *
—
Jeffrey’s tata had read Kafka to him before bedtime as a special treat. The fellow’s work was not unknown to him. He liked the story about the doctor and the boy, the boy whose gaping wound the doctor had not noticed on his first examination. That was a good one. He’d always rather—what do they say—identified with the boy, though he’d never been sick himself. He’d never even been to the dentist. He had remarkably good teeth. He could concur completely with everything Kafka wrote about the endless courts and trials, the innumerable hordes and refused petitions (that nevertheless being rejected granted the petitioner a kind of relief), even the very gruesomeness of the living present that Kafka so fancied. But, as he had reflected previously, Kafka could do only so much. Gracchus had been given his wearying sentence because of his guilt. He had roamed the fruitful earth and had taken from it in a contented stupor and when he died his death was as incomplete as his life had been.
Jeffrey felt indisposed, grumpy. He went to the window and looked down at the square. She was not there. Had that place once been a cemetery? Cemetery—from the Greek koimeterion, sleeping chamber, akin to the Latin, cunae, cradle.
Things used to add up, not so much anymore.
When she returned, he, Enoch—Enoch! He had to get into the habit—would ask her to write something, a fragment. The Hunter Gracchus: Fragment Two. She could do whatever she wanted within the general outline. She could have the mayor say something intelligent for a change, put in dogs, alter the picture in the cabin, even give Gracchus a companion who ever accompanied him. Why not? Kafka’s story was so heavy, so masculine. Gracchus was so crude, so filled with thoughtless violent happiness as he lay in ambush, as he slayed the innocent. Everything was masculine, stubborn, ponderous, heavy, even the wine was heavy.
His companion’s name could be Galena.
Even better, Galena would become Gracchus. There would be no Gracchus. The green Galena, the name of a promising stone in alchemical circles. The green Galena…
How would she be received, this initiator, meditator, healer, this green Galena?
The false masculine considerations, the sly maneuvering, would not be proffered. The absurd diplomacies, the evasions, the ignorance both feigned and real…all would be set aside. Yet would the inhabitants of the town, the world, be capable of accepting and assisting her? They might be even less capable of comprehending her than they had the coarse, impatient Gracchus. He was a curiosity but not terribly unfamiliar, for he was hardly more dead than they were, as they went about in their semblance of living.
Jeffrey munched thoughtfully on his nails. Just outside his chambers’ door, uncomfortably close, someone was demanding a labyrinth. “Give us the labyrinth to walk while we wait!”
He was neglecting them and they were desperately tolerating all manner of gambits. But it was too late now, too late. Were ever sadder words to speak than those?
Daughter, Mother, Companion, Presence, the Green Galena. He should not have dismissed her but yesterday had been too soon. Too soon! But of course it had not been too soon. He’d been temporalizing, he’d behaved as though he hadn’t been prepared.
The door was rattling in its sockets. “Give us the labyrinth to walk! And don’t try to pass off that seven-ring one, we want the full eleven paths with lunations!” There were screams and approving howls. They had cleared the courtroom of themselves and were at his very threshold.
He allowed himself a chuckle. Of course they wanted their paths supersized, as geometrically concise as the labyrinth at Chartres which his tata had once seen and said that the experience had knocked any budding sense of the numinous right out of him. The thing was littered with folding chairs for the cathedral’s innumerable interminable services and the only time you could see it the way it was supposed to be seen was just after it was mopped.
Jeffrey placed his mouth close to the door and suggested softly to the keening mob that they draw the labyrinth on the palm of their hands and finger-walk it. This seemed to mollify them somewhat and they quieted. “I’ll be with you soon,” he whispered.
Outside, massive lights were triggered, splashing his chambers with glare. Each dusk they made it official that night was no longer permitted. Erebus be gone! The owls lay fuddled and miserably starving in their hollows—their home, darkness had been taken from them. The very earth had been pressed to chalk, to clay, as through a mangle. The wolves, the bears, the great fish (which he had never seen) gone, even the harmless snakes and frogs of his childhood. If someone claimed he’d seen an eagle, he would not be taken seriously. The possibility of seeing an angel or a witch on a broomstick would be treated with more polite agnosticism. The fouling of the nest was all but complete, the birthright smashed.
He detested this most recent display of technological supremacy. Bouncing back from such historical earth-caused losses, humankind had become more frightened and ruthless than ever. Nature had been deemed sociopathic and if you found this position debatable you were deemed sociopathic as well and there were novel and increasingly effective ways of dealing with you. Half the fribbles who ended up in his courtroom had some need to atone, however stunted and unacknowledged. The other half believed they could still negotiate an outcome acceptable to them. It was discouraging. But discouragement was inadmissible…he would not be discouraged. He would be the destrier, charging through the icey towering waves of doubt and despair. But he was anxious, he had to admit, for hers would be a test case, his first. His first and last, for after this finding, there’d be no need for further precedents. He’d been fooling around up until now. It had all been childish stuff. He’d listened to them patiently for the most part. He had! But nothing was interested in them anymore, didn’t they get it…Perhaps once but no longer.
Jeffrey—Enoch—swirled his robes around him. In a moment he’d venture a peek into his courtroom. He hoped they’d all be seated and staring at their hands as though they’d never noticed them before, dazed, but not suspicious. For woe if they suspected that they were no more than prisoners, with no place on earth to nurture them now and only the space they momentarily occupied to call their own.
* * *
—
I passed through the crowded court where people’s heads were bowed in perplexed study and approached the bench but the chair on its swiveled wheels was empty. There was a flutter to my right and I saw a small smudged eye addressing me behind a slightly opened door. The door opened further and Jeffrey’s pale gnawed hand beckoned.
We went up a few steps to his chambers, which was snug as a ship’s cabin.
&nbs
p; “I was concerned when I looked out and didn’t see you,” he said. “Are you familiar with the tree?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Yes yes, you’re at a loss for words. Quite understandable,” he said happily. “Where were we, where were we…”
“We were discussing the story about Gracchus. The fragment.”
He smiled, his teeth white as a young dog’s. “I thought we might compose something more,” he said. “Less of a fragment. It could be within the parameters of what came before, though parameters are an arbitrary constant at best. The names will be different, the sexes will be less determined, standing of beings altered, appearances changed, the conversations, the methods of understanding, the inquiries most certainly, the dilemma posed.”
“Another fiction,” I said.
“It need not be fiction,” he assured me. “And words might very well not suffice. They seldom have. The names which have been given to worldly things are the occasion of great error. Let’s not speak of them. They have led us astray.”
He turned and the robes spun around him in dark tortrix. “That’s a nice sound, isn’t it.”
I closed my eyes. I recognized it but could not remember it, having never heard that sound of hundreds of beating wings, not even with my father as he rowed from our larger vessel and its anchorage far from shore. Silently he had rowed with us beside him on the thwart, looking upward into what had once been the great migration flyways.
In the captivating depths of the child judge’s robes, I saw figures from my infancy, pondering me, not knowing my name, a window at twilight, the whorls of glass partitioned into nines above and below the sash, the world beyond to receive me and make its demands with semblances. I saw my mother and father as two piers and myself the slip between them, a berth prepared. Then all drifted away, dissolving, and the figure, too, that I had thought myself to be.
“Words,” he said, “have enabled us to get no nearer to…” He trailed off. “As an instance, the law…” He sighed and turned again, the robes gyring around him, creating the same wondrous sound of enraptured life in passage, an inhuman sound.
There was a violent crack as of a great breaking.
No dawn would reveal that the tree had been removed, trunk and branches, stump and roots. The rumored pages of books deep within the earth would not allow themselves to be recovered, though the sexton beetles and their consumption of all things dead, even dead words, might have devoured them over time. Human or animal remains would not be found as is occasionally the case when such an operation is executed.
“The court finds…” Jeffrey began.
But his heart wasn’t in it. He blinked in the roaring, engulfing dark. Enoch and Galena, he thought without saying. That would have been a pairing. That would have been ideal.
A Note About the Author
Joy Williams is the author of four previous novels—including The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and five collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008.
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