Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  If it is a matter of the outcome, Alden says, I can assure you—it makes no difference to me. I am prepared simply to recount—so help me—the whole truth, and nothing but, and have the ax fall, so to speak, as it may!

  The analyst clears his throat. He has already closed his file, and now has begun to rise.

  This is not, he says, leaning over the table and extending his hand, about what you would feel prepared to do or not, but about what is advisable— and permissible—in the court of law. And now, if you’ll excuse me, he continues—then pauses. He drops his hand, which Alden has not taken in his own, and shakes it a little, as though he has touched something soiled.

  But he has touched nothing.

  Alden stares ahead—remaining as calm and still as he possibly can. He tries not even to blink.

  Our time is up, the analyst says.

  —

  DESPITE THE ANALYST’S EFFORTS, HOWEVER—WHICH, ALL ALONG, AS Alden could not fail to realize, have been thinly disguised as Sutton’s own (it is she, in any case, who pays the hourly rate, and who, as Alden reflects to himself, can say what the cost is to take official leave of your senses these days?)—the trial is set to go forward as previously arranged. He can’t help but feel a little smug when Sutton delivers the news.

  So I’m “fit,” after all, he says. If not yet, perhaps, enough to have actually committed the crimes to which I’ve confessed, at least enough to account for the ones I have not.

  There is—Sutton insists—still a fair chance; you must not think, she says, there is not. With the help of the analyst’s recommendation we might manage (she pauses) to significantly … lighten the sentence. Yes, she tells him, still a reasonable chance.

  He repeats this silently to himself. A reasonable chance. That he might, after all, live—like his mother—to a respectable middle age, gazing out on the Potomac River from a comfortable private room at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital …

  In as indifferent a tone as he can muster, he begs her not to press the issue.

  And indeed, as the days and then the weeks begin to pass, Sutton mentions chance—along with almost everything else—less and less. It is now, as she also must be beginning to see, only a matter of time.

  MEAN WHILE, OUT OF IDLE curiosity sometimes, Alden wonders what sort of price has been put on his head—but he has never inquired. He is grateful to be allowed to remain at home, and supposes, in any case, their father must have left Sutton quite a sizable sum. It is some solace, at any rate, to think so. To have the assurance, at least, that after all of this is done, she, at least, can stay on at the house. Never have to marry, if she does not wish to. Even give up the “women’s pages.” (Now that the men have returned, it is, as she often laments, the only thing open to her—just as it was before the war.) There is something pleasurable in the thought of it, though he feels a little guilty to go so far as to think it. To keep her—if only in his imagination—in this way separate, apart; to suppose that, after he is gone, she, too, may abstract herself from the world of other living women and men; that she, too, may desist, finally, in any attempt to stall the flow of time, and the changes it inevitably brings. May instead absorb herself—or be absorbed—only in its continuous flow.

  YOU KNOW, SHE SAYS —it is the evening before the trial. She is paused, in her usual way, with a dinner tray, by the door. I tried—I tried very hard—

  This is not the usual, rehearsed script they perform nightly with each other. Alden does not want a scene—now, or the next day—but, still, he is interested in what she will say.

  She continues. To find him, she says.

  Who? he asks.

  Arthur, she says.

  Of course. Alden knows all of this—he does not feel as though they have to go over all of it again.

  Listen—he says. Listen, Sutton. The thing is out of our hands.

  She shakes her head. No, but you see—and now there is something in her voice that catches him. He trembles for a moment with it. What is it, he wonders, that she—that anyone—could have left to say?

  I did manage—she continues—some time ago. To locate Douglas. I didn’t tell you, I’m sorry. I don’t know why.

  Douglas, he says.

  Yes, she says. And then she tells him all about how he survived the war. He was even made corporal, she says, after the Battle of Overloon. About how he lives in St. Louis now, married to a nurse whom he met overseas—a student at the university. About how he had been working out in Arizona when he first heard the news, back in ’36, that the Bonus Bill had finally passed. That he took his father’s bonus, which he had kept all those years folded inside his shirt pocket, down to the local Veterans’ Bureau, and filled out the form so that he might finally make good on it.

  The clerk stopped him.

  Well, what’s that, sonny? he said. You don’t look hardly old enough to have fought in the war, how old are you now—fourteen?

  He was not much more—sixteen that September.

  No, sir, Douglas said. This is my daddy’s bonus. I was given it for safekeeping, and wherever he is, if he’s still among the living, and even, or especially, if he ain’t, I know for certain he’d want nothing more in this world than for me to cash it in and bring whatever it’s worth to my momma—and that is what I’m planning to do.

  Well, son, the clerk told him—unable to resist a smile. Now, see, it doesn’t quite work like that. If’n this is your daddy’s bonus, it’s going to have to be him to cash it. When’s the last time you saw your daddy, now—and how did it happen he left you his ticket?

  So Douglas told the clerk at the Veterans’ Bureau all about how he had lost his father in the summer of 1932, and how ever since he had followed the Bonus Army, returning to Washington every year, three years running, each time expecting to find his father there. Or otherwise somewhere on the road. He knew his daddy would not have given up and gone home until he got his bonus, as he had made a solemn promise to that effect, and so had Douglas himself.

  He told the clerk about how he had traveled up and down the eastern coast he didn’t know how many times, and how he had had countless adventures, and met a great many men, some of them good and some of them bad, and finally how he had nearly been drowned just that previous fall out on Windley Key during the Labor Day hurricane. He had only afterward made his way west, he said—where he was lucky enough to find work on the Corps project where he was currently employed.

  The clerk took all this in, nodded solemnly, and said, son, I would sure like to see you and your momma get what you’re due. I don’t mean to upset you none by what I’m about to say, but you see, now, if’n there is the possibility your daddy is no longer among the living, you know that money would go straight to your momma and you. If you can’t find where your daddy is currently residing, might be a chance you can find out where he died—sometimes, as strange as it sounds, it’s a lot harder to track down a living man than it is to track down the dead.

  So Douglas Sinclair thanked the clerk and, once more, went in search of his father. But his efforts looking for a dead man proved no more fruitful than his previous efforts looking for a living one, and after a while the war came, and he transferred his father’s bonus into the inside shirt pocket of his uniform, and he would, he told Sutton later, be amiss not to grant that it served to protect him there, because on many occasions he believed by rights he should have died. That there was no reason over any other that he did not become, in the great deserts of North Africa, for example, even before he was shipped north to Holland to the Battle of Overloon, particular again—just one more grain of sand that had no knowledge of the way that it was, or might still be, connected to the rest of all the things that there were in the world. But he did not, and still to this day, he told Sutton, he believes that some promise had, indeed, been kept. That same promise he himself had kept for so many years nearest to his heart had proved—though it now had nothing to measure itself against, and had become, even for him, only the greatest of abstractions—
to be a thing of value nonetheless.

  It was, he further reported to Sutton, by peculiar coincidence that just before he was to ship out he met his father’s old friend Chet Oke once again—in Newport News, Virginia. Chet was at that time preparing to be shipped out, too—an officer, this time; his second war. I believe he was bound once again for France, Douglas said, but at that time, as now, every place and every mission sounded the same to me, and I do not recall any of the details that might now make it easier for me to place him, or to discover what sort of a time he had there, and what the chances are that he would still be living today.

  It was during that brief encounter that Chet informed Douglas of the last occasion he had seen his father. It was just before he was set to be transferred from the city jail to Lorton Reformatory, in Fairfax County, Virginia: February 6, 1933—the only recorded date that anyone had yet been able to find. There had been no reference, alongside this date, of Arthur’s having been transferred to another facility—Lorton Reformatory or any other—or indeed any further record of him at all. But it is certain that Chet did indeed see Arthur one more time, because it was during this visit that he was entrusted with the letter he carried back to Douglas’s mother, which she undoubtedly received.

  It was, Chet told Douglas—by way of apology—Arthur’s specific request on that last occasion he saw him that—if Chet was bound back to Kansas with a letter to his wife, as he pledged he was—he should not seek Douglas out, or ask him to follow. It was your father’s wish, Chet said, that you might make your own way in the world and not be bound to the same fate he himself had been. Chet shook his head slowly, and said he was sorry—but, he said, he supposed now Douglas’s father had been right. He looked at Douglas in his uniform and said that he looked all right, and that made Douglas feel proud, but also strange. He had spent so many years in the company of soldiers and he had not been one of them himself, and now he was.

  After that, neither man had much to say. Chet said that if Douglas didn’t get himself killed he would do right for himself in the end, and after Douglas returned the compliment, the two parted company, and it was just in time that they did, because Douglas had felt a pressure growing in his chest all the time they spoke, and when he had turned a corner, and Chet was no longer in sight, he had to lean his hands against his knees and rest there like that for a while, in order that he might catch his breath.

  —

  NOW, WITH SUTTON DEPARTED —WITHOUT LIGHTING THE LAMP THIS time; simply excusing herself, then retreating quietly down the hall— Alden is left quite alone. The light off, the book overturned on the table. It is, indeed, dark. Perhaps, he thinks, it will calm his nerves to smoke a little, though he has never made a particular habit of it. He shuffles about for a book of matches, but finds none. There must be some, though— somewhere. He jiggles the handle of the desk’s top drawer. It sticks a little; then slides open.

  Inside, he finds nothing but his father’s old riding whip. It surprises him, at first. He almost jumps to touch it—as though he’s touched something live. Funny. He’d almost forgotten it. The whip his father used to swish about in order to soothe his nerves, maddening everyone else in the house. It helped him to think, he had said.

  Imagine, Alden thinks now. It’s remained, all this time. Coiled in darkness.

  HE TAKES IT OUT; feels the cool, soft leather against his hand. It’s as thick as a cat’s tail at the butt of it, then narrow at the end—as thin as a single blade of grass. Perhaps it will do, he thinks, in lieu of a cigarette, if he can’t, in any case, light it. He gives it a try; flicking his wrist so the whip cuts up sharply. It stops short, though, and a moment later lands in a heap.

  It’s clumsy like that at first, but after a while he gets the hang of it, and there begins the familiar swish swish, which he remembers echoing from his father’s end of the house—from the very same spot, come to think of it, where he now sits, attempting, just as his father once had, to calm his nerves; to sustain in his mind a single—

  Yes, it does help some, he finds. His hand relaxes, adjusts to the motion—which steadies itself as if it, too, were a physical thing in his hand—and, just as it does so, the strangest sensation begins to flood through him. It is as if—the analyst is right—all his memories, regardless of their chronology or progression, return to him at once—and from all directions. Indeed, he is no longer certain if, as he sits in his father’s chair and listens to the steady rhythm of the ancient riding whip as it cuts against the air, the memories are his own or someone else’s; or if, indeed, they are the fantasies of some future man who takes his likeness and form and who, out of some perverse desire to repeat all of this from the beginning, takes up his life at the very point where he is obliged—

  The poet Maurice Bonheur flashes suddenly to mind. The great composer to whom the poet—he’d once said—owed his life.

  Imagine, if you will, that the universe comprised a single beat.

  He had heard that, recently, even he—the illustrious composer— had come under some scrutiny for his actions (or lack thereof) during the war. It had not yet come, so far as he knew, to the point of outright accusation, but there were uncomfortable rumors afloat. Did you hear? people asked in hushed voices. That the comfortable conservatory position the composer won shortly after his return to Paris had been made available only months before by a Jew, in permanent exile now—in Poland, or beyond? So the composer himself had been a prisoner for a brief time; but had he not also been released—due to his connections, and in various capacities, collaborations, with the enemy?

  Music, the composer had always insisted—like light refracted through the stained-glass windows at Chartres or Sainte-Chapelle— had nothing to do with questions of war, or even of men. It was his faith that this was true that had sustained him, after all—just as it later had the poet Maurice Bonheur—and Alden himself. Was it not according to this same faith, that … ?

  But he cannot bring himself to finish the thought.

  The whip slices the air.

  The creation of a second beat. This (the composer had said) is the beginning of rhythm, which, arising not from any division, exists instead as extension … duration. In which all things, utterly free—

  Yes. His father was right. It does—the steady rhythm of the thing— help a man think. He feels quite calm now, quite—altogether—unafraid. There is, after all, very little to be frightened of—if all exists, as it seems to him now very certainly that it must, all at once, in this—

  Yes, he will tell the analyst if he should see him again. (Oh, he’ll be there tomorrow, no doubt: to argue over the relative dimensions of time; to defend Alden’s inability, under current circumstances, to measure himself—or anything else, therefore—against it.)

  Yes, he will say. There may in fact be, in the flickering flashes that stream now like magic-lantern images before his eyes, an impulse to repeat what has already passed, in order to escape the inevitable moment in which—

  Another low swish, like the sound of water underground.

  Quite right, yes. It does help a man—and it is only natural it does.

  Having afforded him some measure along which, at least for a short while, he might be permitted to string his thoughts, only natural that there should also begin to appear to him some sort of end; according to which—

  —An instinct, he will say. Inherent, perhaps, to all organic life. An attempt to retrieve an earlier state of things. Not from the consciously remembered past, but from some deeper and more remote realm. An instinct to plumb the depths, to regain what has been lost—what might still, what must, be inscribed within our every cell—

  But here he falters—only very slightly:

  What to hang it on? What to hang it on?

  Ah. Yes.

  —A state prior to all life; indeed, to all time. Yes, he will tell him. Yes. Accordingly. We shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death,” but we will also be compelled to say: Not for long. Not always. Because
—just as diligently as we press toward it—we resist—and in doing so succeed in winning, indeed, what we can only regard as potential immortality—! And though we continue to submit ourselves—he will say—to the remorseless laws of nature, it is only because by doing so it is easier to bear our own deaths, and for that matter our own lives— or to consider that either one was or is not integral to itself but instead a chance that might have been escaped.

  It may well be—yes—he will say—that this persistent belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions that we have created “um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen.” To bear the burden of existence.

  Yes.

  Death may indeed be only a matter of expediency. A manifestation of the external conditions of life. Merely, that is—an adaptation. A foray into territory that has already been charted—as salmon spawn in pools they have never themselves frequented, but their ancestors once did, or birds migrate in perfect V’s to unknown destinations, guided by the intuition of previous generations; by a will to regain what is still sensed in the blood, or whatever it is that whistles through hollow bones.

  Steady, now. One foot, the next. As always. Nothing to it.

  Ha! Precisely!

  Nothing at all to it, in the end.

  And, ah—

  Yes. From this perspective he can see more clearly still. Though the past—or is it, as was once suggested, the future?—still streams, and perhaps even more rapidly now before his eyes. It is easy enough to distract oneself; to forget that, even now, there are, as in all practical matters, still steps to be taken—few enough and simple—before, at last, the thing is arranged.

  He tries, on account of it, to clear his mind; to—just for a moment, a single moment—clear it of everything but a single, empty frame. But each moment closes on itself as quickly as it comes. There is no time in which to enter—and yet, there is still the last, the final step. The faux pas. He must not—he will not falter; no, that is not a possibility now. There is no return—no. No earlier state of things. Everything exists at once—only now, and again now—so that even his own thoughts become suddenly unfamiliar to him. His own words—though he is certain enough he has heard them before; that he has even spoken them himself, perhaps even many times—yes, strange. Their syllables incoherent, suddenly, as though pronounced at increasing distances to one another—so that now the meaning begins to escape, and all is awash in a low, unconsonanted moan.