The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

  It is conceivable that the Reader, shattered from his initial brush with Part II, became overwhelmed with dread by the grave warning at the beginning of this addendum and slipped into a delirium. I implored him to attempt Part II again when his mind was at its zenith. In the course of a day, this period usually corresponds to a time subsequent to the consumption of a caffeinated beverage. Apparently some men do not differentiate between one such drink and twelve. Consequently, no distinction is drawn between a state of enhanced cognitive agility and a pathologic condition where the mind paces a cage like a tiger. Students, far from being an exception to this tendency, are more likely to succumb to it. I insist the Reader again attempt the glorious summit tomorrow with a clear head, having consumed only one. He should perform his next reading standing. During the more intense passages, pacing is advised: book in one hand, chin in the other.

  • • •

  At this point the Reader might accuse me of avoiding the singular thrust of his objection. Patience is advised. I have been limbering up before entering the ring with Aristotle. My philosophic muscles supple, I am prepared to grapple with him. Now, as both he and Thomas Aquinas conceived of the concept, a particular posterior is distinct from —

  A bitter and melancholy dagger pierces my heart. The Reader used his prima facie intelligent question to stage a crude burlesque, hoping that I, entangled in nets of logic, would remain oblivious to the coming pratfall. And where had he hoped to go with this? To Sandy, no doubt. Fast approaching was some utterly craven punch line about how “he’d love to penetrate that particular posterior.” The poor girl has been free of her terminal disfigurement for all of a few pages and the Reader cannot abstain? If such was his intention he has succeeded magnificently — in making a particular posterior of himself. Metaphysical jokes work on many levels, dear Reader, many levels.

  • • •

  After hours of skeptical brooding, a vigorous walk with Zeus, and several fermented elixirs, I have reluctantly come to recognize the necessity of bestowing the gracious benefit of the doubt to the Reader’s intentions. With this unpleasantness behind us, we shall turn to the auxiliary question.

  “Scholar, regarding the brevity of your mother’s appearance in the text: Are we to assume her role is peripheral?”

  Gorged on sci-fi trilogies, vampire novels, and worse, the Reader expects another FBI profile, that lazy contrivance of modern scribblers. Does he perchance want to subject me to the obtuse instruments of Freudian analysis? And now, absent any details regarding my mother, his analysis is arrested? Dear Reader, your reverence for Freud is most disconcerting. His plagiarism from Schopenhauer is opprobrious. The following comparison has the dual virtues of putting their relationship in its correct perspective and being easily accessible to the common man. The Reader is urged to underline or highlight this illuminating passage and, as soon as he is able, make use of his internet to confirm and study it.

  Freud’s “originality” compared to Schopenhauer is analogous to Burger King’s “originality” compared to McDonald’s.

  An even darker crime can be laid at the clay feet of Freud. He and mystical doodlers like Jung distracted generations of earnest students from the work of men who deserve emulation. Instead of revering the rigorous scientific approach of Emil Kraepelin and his noble quest to help those truly ill, they have been wheedled by debauched ravings concerning archetypes, anuses, incest, and complexes.

  I do not mean to scold, but I simply will not be the subject of any Freudian butchering. My mother’s significance vis-à-vis my annals can be summarized — nay, exhausted — thus:

  My mother came outside.

  She wore a housecoat and slippers.

  She asked me several questions and made a suggestion.

  She informed me that dinner would soon be ready.

  She returned to the house.

  She informed Sandy of my intentions and shared a misgiving regarding them.

  And that is all there is to it. There is nothing to analyze, deconstruct, read into, or fathom here. Intellectual flavors-of-the-day need not apply. A logical mind, instinctively recognizing that no deductions or inferences are possible, moves on.

  This is one of the cardinal virtues of an Objective narrative. Given its timeless nature, there is no need to assemble it with rackets and ruses. With the envy of eunuchs and ingenuity fanned by resentment, men incapable of profound insights deny the Objective nature of the written word in the despairing hope of dissuading those who know the Truth and have the courage to write it.

  After I make it official, we shall proceed.

  I, Petronius Jablonski, hereby forbid any and all Freudian, structural, post-structural, post-post-structural, post-colonial, post-anything analysis or deconstruction of my annals and condemn any and all such enterprises. All theorizing based on class, gender, and ethnicity is strictly prohibited.

  An Objective narrative is not a Rorschach blot for one to project his pathologies and sundry whines. If the Reader insists on “reading into” the narrative, he should fill the margins with sketches of penises, vaginas, and stick-figures engaged in coitus.

  III:

  The Journey to the Light at the End of the Tunnel

  “Are you hungry, friends?” said the gas station attendant.

  Sandy poured a coffee while I examined a pack of Night Light glow-in-the-dark condoms for warnings or liability waivers.

  “What do you think, Petronius? Let’s eat.”

  The attendant gazed at the harsh fluorescent lights without blinking or squinting. “Friends, there’s a restaurant down the street. It’s wonderful. But you’ll have to walk to it. There is no other way.”

  “Permit me to make a conjecture,” I said. “Your family owns it.”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “How do we get there?” said Sandy.

  “There’s a road behind this station,” he said, his gentle voice tinged with enthusiasm. “It’s closed to traffic but you can walk on it. Keep going until you come to an intersection.”

  “We cannot drive to it?” I said.

  “No. You must take the road. There is no other way.” He smiled. “It has everything you need.”

  “Should we?” said Sandy.

  With a nod of my head I permitted my ever-scheming stomach to dethrone Reason.

  “You can park your car on the side over there under the light,” he said, somehow sensing my reservations. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

  Had any other stranger suggested that I abandon my car for him to watch I would have laughed in his presumptuous face, but the attendant radiated sincerity and benevolence. The discovery of an altruist, a living counterexample to the truism that men are wolves with manicured claws, disarmed me no less than an encounter with a griffon would have.

  Sandy thanked him and I moved my car. Walking past the station, we basked in the warmth of his eyes. At the bottom of a steep hill, a winding snake of flashing lights marked the closed road. The orange serpent slithered into the fog, its precise length unknown.

  “He said nothing about a hill,” I said.

  “He probably forgot. At least the road’s lit up. It’s probably a little bit past where the barricades come to an end. Let’s go. I’m starving.”

  With arms outstretched for balance, we determined the topography of the ground lurking beneath the soggy grass before committing our feet. At the bottom we hopped over a drainage ditch and onto the freshly paved road, which was safe to walk on but not ready for traffic.

  After passing each barricade we quickened our pace, awaiting the next throbbing splash of orange to appear in the static. In hazy increments they became distinct, joining reality as we approached.

  We walked until our feet rebelled. I could not remember the attendant discussing a specific distance — indeed, his endorsement was altogether free of circumstantiates — but I did not recall him dispatching us on an odyssey. What manner of eatery would be on a road such as this? I wondered. Must all of its
clientele abandon their cars and make a pilgrimage?

  We peered through veils of gauze for our next beacon as the fog extinguished the last light behind us. We approached something big and dark.

  “He said nothing about a tunnel,” I said, expecting Sandy to share my conviction that something was fishy.

  “So he forgot. When you give someone directions you don’t mention every little thing they’ll see along the way. You just tell them as much as they’ll need to get there, the important stuff. That’s probably the light from the restaurant on the other side. C’mon.”

  I often marveled at how her tiny stature could harbor such grandiose authority. Dissuading her, though not impossible, frequently represented the path of greatest resistance. My acquiescence to her in matters of irrelevance was therefore no sign of weakness but merely pragmatism.

  “Perhaps we can walk around it,” I said, appalled at her immoderate indulgence of a stranger’s testimony. I wondered if he had been to the restaurant himself. Maybe he was parroting what his enthusiastic manager had said. Maybe both men were links in some rapturous Chinese whisper.

  Far steeper than the one we descended earlier, the hill the tunnel bisected would have been impossible to safely traverse. In all likelihood it shielded traffic from falling rocks. “Their coffee better be good,” I muttered as Sandy pulled me in and darkness consumed us.

  The tunnel’s length mocked my initial estimate. The light at the other end looked like a pinprick on a black sheet covering a window. I wondered why the air seemed unnaturally thin and odorless until the inability to inhale smothered my reflections and forced me to gasp for breath. “Let’s get out of here,” was on the tip of my tongue with nothing to discharge it.

  Faced with an imminent collapse, I became cognizant of a structural problem. The tunnel’s circumference, initially generous, began to shrink. I could not see the walls, but I felt them constricting while the light at the other end darted away like a firefly. I tried to grab Sandy’s hand but nothing below my neck heeded my requests.

  My bowels turned to ice as I realized that even if we could turn and run we would never make it out in time. With the tunnel’s increase in length proportionate to its decrease in width, we would need to run several times as far to leave. I envisioned the gruesome folly of an escape attempt: scrambling like monkeys, one behind the other with hands pressed against the encroaching sides, then crawling like moles until the concrete crushed our shoulders and the pipe stretched out into a thin tube.

  Soon, my forehead will scrape the ceiling, I thought, accepting with noble indifference the asinine role Fate assigned me. Fate, that blue-haired dingbat running a crooked Bingo game. Is there greater outrage than the recognition that the world will continue in your absence just as it did before your birth?

  Numb from a lack of oxygen, prepared for an encounter with those remorseful and incompetent creators who erase their work so soon after it is finished, I felt the walls recede until we were crossing a bridge above a black sea beneath a starless sky. The air became so rich that more than a tiny breath induced the delightful giddiness of nitrous oxide.

  One might suspect that the terror of being buried alive would promptly be replaced by a new but contrary horror: agoraphobia from the sudden and complete exposure. Such was not the case. Soothing warmth surrounded me as though we were floating through dark water to the light above the surface. A clanking sound, faint at first, became pronounced as we approached.

  Unlike the sun, it did not hurt to look upon this light. It felt good in a curious fashion: the way a man feels after reconciling differences with an old friend, or how he feels when he is lost and discovers a sign. Brighter than anything I had seen before, it was of a different genus of illumination. Bereft of adequate descriptions for this extraordinary phenomenon, I can only say it was white, almost clear, and I could feel it as much as I could see it.

  Like a lucid dreamer discovering his powers, I clasped Sandy’s hand and marveled at the wonderful electricity conducted through her skin. With an understanding bypassing my senses, this simple union communicated more than we ever could with the primitive tools of language. The formidable barriers that make complete communication impossible melted away, dissolved in the purifying bath of the light.

  I could not tell if we were running or flying and I did not care. The space in the tunnel rushed past us, increasing to a roar, and the clanking noise thumped like a heartbeat. Everything throbbed in unison and it pulsated through me, sustaining all existence from instant to instant, something I normally took for granted.

  An almost lustful yearning to be with the light made even our breakneck speed too slow. It seemed we were no longer moving at all, that it was coming to us, accepting us. I felt consoled, as though returning to my home after a troublesome voyage. The heartbeat changed back to a clanking sound and the light absorbed us. The crude and arbitrary boundaries of words could not map its nature. And there was clanking, clanking, clanking …

  The light went out.

  Our eyes adjusted to the exiguous glow cast by a lantern in the middle of the road. A decrepit old spotlight stood before us, the kind commonly used for the grand openings of bowling alleys. A spiderweb crack filled the glass and rust grew over the frame like moss covering a trellis. Something stirred behind it. I dropped Sandy’s hand and we approached. The air felt cool against my sweaty palm.

  A man hoary with age and wretched like some deposed king pounded on a little metal box with a wrench. Wires of many colors sprouted from it, some going into the base of the light, others remaining unattached. He mumbled profanities, completely engrossed in his toil. On the ground behind him stood a bottle of wine, its purple surface quivering with each furious pound. When he finally looked up, our presence took a few moments to register.

  “You kids in the tunnel? See the light? Pretty bright, huh?” He smelled like stale milk and the curls in his gray main, sodden with grease, hung limply against his head. “Sellin’ it to the contractors fixin’ the road. Gotta fix it first. Damn thing goes on but she don’t stay on.”

  He picked up his bottle and took a sip. The lines across his grizzled face looked like greasepaint but they persisted after he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the tattered sleeve of a flannel shirt. His glazed eyes staggered up and down Sandy. With considerable difficulty they found their way to me. He grinned. There were slimy almonds where his teeth should have been. “I know what you were doin’ in there. Can I sniff your finger?” He began wheezing and cackling. Sandy stepped back and stood behind me.

  I would not normally have bestowed mercy upon such a scurrilous inquisitor, but given the infirmities of this hideous thing I decided to remove Sandy from its noxious presence rather than beat it senseless. As we walked away, an explosive hiccup interrupted the creature’s chortling. We listened as it shared its wine with the earth.

  Instructed to be on the lookout for visions and to interpret them carefully, I scarcely expected something so crass, so shallow.

  “What an awful man,” said Sandy.

  “Just a mammal like us, ravaged by age and drink,” I told her, extending my Stoic tolerance to even the lowliest organism.

  “Hmmm, ravaged by drink. Maybe there’s a lesson.”

  Maybe you should shut your damn mouth, I thought. (This baffling, irksome phenomenon — the universal proclivity of the fair sex to deprive man of life’s simplest, most decent pleasure — will be enlarged upon and analyzed in Parts IV and V of my annals.)

  “That light made me dizzy,” she said.

  “It was disorienting.”

  We approached a distant streetlight and I begged the restaurant to be nearby. A barricade blocked the road at an intersection. Nothing loomed from every direction.

  “It’s not here,” she said. “This is where he said it would be and there’s nothing. He lied to us.”

  “I think he was sincere but mistaken,” I said, recalling his demeanor.

  “Perhaps that is a species of lying,�
� said Reason. “Is there no little dishonesty involved when giving directions to a place you have never been?”

  I sat on the immaculate concrete and sighed. “All this way for nothing. It is enough to make you sick.”

  Part III:

  An Appurtenance

  When assessing a portion of a text, even the finest student, entranced with the wondrous realms his reading transports him to, can drop his compass and forget that the best questions are not always the obvious ones. And (depending how “obvious” is defined) that the obvious questions are not always obvious.

  How should the Reader excavate practical gems from the theoretical diamond mine in the prior paragraph? Before making an inquiry, digest what you have read. This process does not occur of its own dynamism. One needs to be actively involved. To aid the digestion of great writing one must, in addition to reflection and repeated readings, turn to the time-proven methods that facilitate the digestion of great cuisine: fermented beverages and fine tobacco, fugues by Bach, a brisk walk with a hearty dog, an aimless drive in a rectangular sedan. The birth of a penetrating question requires the services of a midwife.

  Once the Reader has fortified himself he must ask: What is it I most need to know? Do I need any additional information, or is what I have read so complete unto itself, so self-contained that no further details are required? Was my reading a sumptuous feast, more than sufficient to nourish the tendons and muscles of my mind, or is an additional serving required?

  A student plagued with indigestion, one who has failed to recognize the full course of Part III, might fire off a series of “obvious” but needless questions.

  “And what occurred on your way back through the tunnel? Did you again encounter the unpleasant spotlight owner? Were words exchanged? How did you find your way through the tunnel in the dark? How did you locate the point where you had to mount the hill to find the station? And regarding the attendant: surely Sandy reprimanded him for his deception. If not, how did you restrain her?”