by Alan Deniro
At last, restless from the stalling, I asked Kristin if she would read the remaining files for me. I often had a problem reading an email or letter that I knew would contain bad or unpleasant news, which I tried to avoid more often than not. She knew this about me and said she was waiting for me to ask her. But she would only do that for the second file—I would have to buck up with the third. I agreed. It was a Saturday morning when she started reading the second file. I took a walk around the neighborhood with the dogs—it was a May day that felt like July. When I came back, I asked her whether she had finished the second file and she said yes and that I wouldn’t like it. But she also thought it was best for me to read it myself and make up my own mind.
I stalled for another hour or so, the panic rising, but I ended up sitting down and reading it, scanning it once and then forcing myself to read it more thoroughly.
In this continuation of the story, the passenger retrieved his luggage, picked up a rental car and drove to his hotel—a sequence the same as my own recounting in all but cosmetic differences (which made me shudder). The next morning he gave his presentation and returned to the hotel.
From there, the passenger took a different path. He didn’t go out of his way at all to find out what happened with the crash or to confirm that it even happened. He just did things, performed tasks. He ate lunch, went back to corporate headquarters to lead a follow-up Q&A session regarding his presentation—which was very well-received—and then had dinner with several of his clients in the hotel restaurant, a steakhouse with a steak that was a bit too tough. He was satisfied by the day, although there were several times when he had to push down qualms about not trying to find anything about the accident. But he managed to quash guilt effectively, and concentrate on the matters at hand: steak, purchase orders, shots of Jaeger, and baseball.
At this point, I let my guard down a bit. I was expecting something far worse than a mere twist in the tale. I told this to Kristin and she told me to keep reading. She was beginning to look upset herself.
I kept reading. The passenger, now tipsy, stumbled to the elevator and to his hotel room. It was good he wasn’t driving; he thought briefly of the accident again, that maybe the driver who had triggered the awful chain of events was drunk on a dark road. When he was lying on his bed, trying to think of nothing, a manila envelope was slipped under the door. The passenger sat up, and then ran toward the door. Opening it, he looked both ways in the carpeted corridor. No one was there. The envelope was unmarked. He sat at his desk and opened it up. Inside the bubble-wrapped interior was a text-heavy document printed out on dot-matrix paper. The paper smelled like the spray used in bowling alley shoes. The passenger began reading the text, which was a story called “The Philip Sidney Game” by Alan DeNiro.
I scraped my chair back and stared at the story from a middle distance, as if moving a few feet away from that page would cause my name to transmutate into someone else’s, or disappear altogether. Kristin grabbed my hand, and said that the story wasn’t done. I moved closer to the screen, though not as close as I had been before, and kept reading.
The passenger read with dismay, and then with terror, about his plane ride, his descent into the Twin Cities, his witnessing of the accident, his ensconcement in the minutiae of his business meetings. And while he read, he wondered just who this writer was who had known so much about him. Since there were many pages, he skipped ahead to the end of the voluminous story, in which he found that he, in this particular story, was locked inside a cavernous warehouse. There was also a grievously ill horse in the warehouse with him (though it wasn’t clear what the nature of the sickness was), which was pacing the warehouse floor but did not panic. There were also loud bells clanging in a slow 4/4 time, and blue spotlights that turned off and on in time with the bells, and satin drapes that floated through the warehouse of their own accord.
This character’s reading habits were extremely disappointing for me, needless to say, because the passenger was impatient and only interested in the big finish of his story, and had no inclination to find out what mysterious forces had led him to that end. No matter what would end up happening, those gaps would disturb me. And it was as if the author of this story knew this.
The passenger then took the local phone book out of the hotel room’s desk drawer, and started looking for my name. That was how the second story ended.
I put my laptop on hibernate, and then turned off my cell phone. It was an instinct that took hold of me. I wasn’t sure about what to think about the disk anymore, and the stories on it. I tried to convince myself that they were just stories, and bore no real meaning to my everyday reality. After all, if someone had gone to the trouble to send me this disk in the first place, they must have at some point uncovered my name. In the perverted logic of what had already taken place, this story within a story in which I was a character was perfectly normal.
Of course, I went to bed that night with no feelings of normalcy. As I drifted into sleep, I hoped that in the morning I would have a clearer sense of what should be done.
I didn’t remember dreaming that night, but had a sense after I woke up that I had been put through the ringer. I couldn’t trust what I couldn’t remember. My suspicions were confirmed when Kristin told me that I was mumbling something about “devolutionaries” as I slept. I would often have night terrors that I would never remember. Although the severity of them had lessened after I started taking anti-anxiety medication, every so often I would sit up in bed and try to push away some monster (such as a vicious dog, or crocodile) that I thought was in the covers with me. Or I’d wake up on the verge of drowning, clutching my throat.
Devolutionaries, then. Exasperated, and not feeling rested at all, I took it upon myself to take a walk with the dogs in the early morning light. Kristin was already at work. I needed to clear my head and think about the genesis of the matter: where I was in my life when I had first written the story fragment. To retrace and exhaust every possible step.
As I walked with the dogs through the neighborhood, I ruminated about my life twelve years ago. I had just moved to Minnesota from Virginia to be with Kristin. I was still trying to find my way around the Twin Cities. It occurred to me then that I had begun this story thinking of my own descent into the Twin Cities for the first time, on my first visit, a few months before I had driven up with all the belongings I could fit in a Toyota Corolla. Did I actually witness a car crash from above? I had no memory of such a thing. I had just started writing the premise in my notebook . . .
The notebook. I had transcribed the story from my longhand scribbles into my computer originally.
When I got back, I tore through my old closet. I had saved all of my all notebooks since college, all of them, even though I rarely looked at them. I was afraid to throw away what might have been considered a part of me. I scoured through the various cheap, spiral notebooks I had at that time in my life until I found the story. Flipping through the pages, I was brought back to that time in the story’s creation: my first bitterly cold winter in years, holed up in a city I didn’t know at all, aching for spring. The story fragment had indeed started in the exact place as the computer document I had originally created.
It didn’t end there, however.
At the end, when the passenger stepped off the plane into the airport, still shaken up from what he saw, he received a call on his cell phone. He didn’t recognize the number. He answered it.
The line was full of static. Then a low voice on the other end told him that the devolutionaries were watching him, and he was not to recite The Words, warning him not to be a fool. Then he hung up.
That was how I wrote it. The Words.
I might not have thought this ending worth transcribing, a dead end, too cloying and conspiratorial. I had no idea what I was thinking with the devolutionaries. Who were they? Did I really write that? It seemed so. I couldn’t help t
hinking that this warning was meant for me instead of the passenger.
Then I poured myself a bourbon on the rocks and sipped it as I sat at my desk, Googling and bookmarking everything I could find on Philip Sidney, to try to immerse myself in the world of this story. I felt like I had a bomb of metal fragments sitting at my desk, and that the only instructions to diffuse it without tearing me to shreds were encrypted in a PhD dissertation on Elizabethan literature. I did in fact try to cull what I could from centuries-old books that were digitally scanned and online. But I wasn’t finding anything that threaded the needle between my original story, the files on the disk I received, and the bridging section that I had orphaned in the notebook. Nothing fit all of this.
I went to his poetry:
For me, alas! I am full resolved
Those bands, alas! shall not be dissolved;
Nor break my word, though reward come late;
Nor fail my faith in my failing fate;
Nor change in change, though change change my state . . .
I went to his “Apology for Poesy,” his manifesto (before there were manifestos) on how poetry’s value came from the interplay of moral teaching and heavenly delight. Then I Googled “Philip Sidney” and “devolutionaries” together, which I should have done long before. There was the usual Internet detritus of nonsensical spam pages that crammed together both words along with thousands of other randomly generated ones. Philip Sidney cologne for elk $199.99—free shipping, viagara are you feeling your urges devolutionaries? But on the second page of results, I found a page called “Philip Sidney and the Secret Societys of Aeropagus,” which contained a poorly scanned monograph from 1839 in JPEG format on a Belgian server. My hands were trembling as I clicked to the page and started reading the monograph by James Rosemount-Ettiene. In the monograph, James claimed that one of Sidney’s secret diplomatic missions on the continent, when he was governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, was to form a secret society called Aeropagus. Aeropagus I had heard of, albeit only in my recent Googling—a rumoured literary society that included Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Sidney’s boyhood friends and poets-in-arms Edward Dyer and Gabriel Harvey, and a few other minor figures. The goal of the Aeropagus (one of them, at least) was to “classicize” English verse by using Greek and Roman syllabic forms, rather than Anglo-Saxon and Norman rhyming schemes. It was thought in this circle of poets that this form of verse hearkened back to a purer, almost priestly form of poetry, in which the Greek and Romans used verse accompanied with music to predict the future, proclaim terrible truths, and so on.
However, the concrete existence of Aeropagus had been disputed for centuries—many scholars have thought that Spenser’s one reference to Aeropagus in his correspondence was meant to be a joke. And at any rate, this form of verse was only one of Sidney’s interests; he wrote plenty with “conventional” rhyme and meter, cribbing at will from Italian sonnet forms, for example.
In this monograph, though, James claimed that there was another Aeropagus, a secret society within the secret society. There was always a mystical bent to Sidney and the poets in his circle; after all, one of Sidney’s mentors was John Dee, the notorious English magus and favorite of Queen Elizabeth who regularly asserted that he could summon angels. But this inner circle of Aeropagus was a commission by Queen Elizabeth herself, to establish a beach-head of “scientifick philosophy” on the continent. In the guise of a diplomat and governor, Sidney could gather onto him all of the arcane learnings that were flourishing on the mainland of Europe, particularly in Holland, Italy, and the German principalities. In this way, Sidney could fine-tune the metaphysics of poetry, in the manner of incantations, in order to fully utilize knowledge of voice, rhetoric, and musical diction to (piously, of course) access the conduits of heavenly wisdom for magical aims.
This was the passage where James had mentioned the “devolutionaries”:
“Sir Philip Sidney had found no small measure of success in his experiments in vatic verse—that purely by metrical speech and on occasion musical accompaniment, a poet could not only speak to the future, but also enter a state of terrible apprehension and, through chant, ‘project’ oneself, theosophically, into past events, and even into the thoughts of others, with physical distance being no impediment whatsoever.”
I read that again, and once more, and tried to wrestle with what James was proposing, or whether he was even being serious. But I had to trust that he, at least, believed it—or if the connection was there, that whoever sent me the package believed it as well.
I kept reading:
“Sidney thought these experiments to be both divinely inspired and verifiable by careful observation and study.
“Truth be told, his coterie of German alchemists, disaffected Jesuits who had stolen away monastic tomes from the time of Charlemagne, and troubadours from Toulouse all looked to Sidney for moral guidance and an extended patronage from his Queen. There was a sense, for Sidney, that he could heal the divisions between Papists and Protestants that had ravaged Europe, finding a common religious experience based on celestial song.
“However, these experiments could not be kept from prying enemies forever. A rival secret society who called themselves Devolutionaries—mostly from those under the employ of Hapsburg Spain and Austria, but also the French, who were greatly angered by Sidney’s presence in Holland and were fearful that the English meddling could spread—began to plot a thwarting of Aeropagus. Their sigil was the bear, one of the few natural enemies of the porcupine, which happened to be prominent in the coat of arms of the Sidneys.
“The battle at Zutphen, which caused Sidney’s death, then, was orchestrated purely to slay Sidney and to crush English advancements in magical poetics. A murder by poison or knife would have been too conspicuous. Spanish armies, then, had to be set into motion. With bitter irony, the Devolutionaries knew full well that Sidney was gallant and also foolhardy, and would not hesitate to rush into battle to save a lost cause. His English forces vastly outnumbered, he charged forward. However, the Devolutionaries had paid a Dutch squire three Spanish florin to steal Philip’s armour. He was able to steal the leggings. Had it not been for this theft, Sir Philip Sidney might have survived. It was easy for the English to spread the rumour that Philip had spurned his leggings in order to rush into the battle in all haste. Thus after his long, agonising death, the Aeropagus society was doomed. He had written one final, secret poem on his deathbed, but it has been lost to time.”
I had no way to verify any of these claims, but it was the one true thread I could find, and I held onto it for dear life.
When I was finished with reading the monograph, and dawn was breaking, I decided to bite the bullet with the third file on the disk. I should have slept. Instead I read.
The third file didn’t begin with the passenger at all, but with me. This story began with me driving down a narrow state highway. I was squinting ahead. On the seat next to me was a manila envelope with a Minneapolis postmark and a return address that said “Aeropagus Storage” with an address. I noted to myself that I was desperate to try to finish the story about the passenger (which was only paraphrased in this version). I was in dire straits. It was becoming all too much for a story. I recalled the shock and thrill I had received when I had received the envelope, and I looked down at my seat at it. The envelope didn’t have my address, only my name.
I found myself going to one of the suburbs around the outskirts of the airport. It was noted in the story that it was late at night, an hour or two before midnight. I drove on winding roads, until I made a gentle turn down a hill. Warehouses were on either side of me. This was the place. As I was about to pull into the parking lot of the warehouse to my left, I saw a horse hobble across the road right in front of my car. I swerved. The horse disappeared into the scrawny woods on the other side of the warehouse.
There was a car coming toward me in the other
lane, which I tried to avoid. In the story, I had a feeling of both emotional distance and stoic certainty regarding what was happening. I felt the shock of the vibration of steel, the desperate turning of the steering wheel. I stepped on the brakes. The instants were elongating but, in the end, they were just instants, and it was too late. I had no control. The car slid forward—I couldn’t tell if I clipped the other car, or the other way around. But I was the one who stopped the car, and the other kept moving, sidewinding down the road. My Corolla was only grazed, but I had a sharp stiffness in my neck. I opened the door and hobbled out to inspect the damage.
Then I saw the third car coming toward mine, fast.
This car did not slam the brakes as it hit my car. The Corolla was pushed over the side of the embankment. My trunk popped open, and hundreds of sheets of dot-matrix paper spilled out.
The other car put itself in reverse, and skidded backward from the berm.
When it stopped, I ran toward it, waving my hands, hysterical, cursing. The windows were tinted black. I moved to knock on the windows, but something stopped me. The car was silent except for its own engine.
I took a few steps back, and then the car revved and was soon out of sight.
I picked up a few of the stray pieces of paper that had scattered onto the road. They all had different versions of the same story. My story. I read patches:
“The passenger was looking for stories to resuscitate . . .”
“He drove away, not sure whether his family would be able to forgive him . . .”
“The passenger drove his car into the reinforced steel partition of the warehouse, desperate to get inside . . .”