by Neil Gaiman
“Again you speak in riddles! Majesty, this business is driving me mad.
I beg of you, for this once, speak to me plain and simply, even as if I were but a child.”
The king sighed. “You know what books are?”
“Yes, of course.”
“When was the last time you read one?”
“Why, I—”
“Exactly. Or that anybody you know read one?”
“I have been in the company of rough-and-tumble soldiers, whose response to coming upon a library might typically be to use its contents to start their campfires, so this is not terribly surprising.”
“You must have read books in your youth. Can you tell me the plot of any of them?”
Jack fell silent.
“You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters the room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they’d rather not confront. But they do not read them. Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible method of discovering on which side of the page you lie—have you read a book this year?” The king arched an eyebrow and waited.
After a very long silence, Jack said, “No. I have not.”
“Then there you are.”
“But…how can this be? How can we possibly…?”
“It is the simplest thing imaginable,” replied the king. “I, for example, dwell within chapters eleven through seventeen of book five of something called Simplicissimus. It is, I assure you, a good life. So what if the walls of my palace are as thin as paper, the windows simply drawn on by pen, and my actions circumscribed by the whimsy of the artist? I neither age nor die, and when you, taking a brief rest from your romantic gymnastics with my daughter, care to visit me, I always find our little conversations diverting.”
Glumly, Jack stared out through a window paned with nacre polished so smooth as to be transparent. “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to realize that one is not actually real.” Then, after a long moment’s thought, “But this makes no sense. Granted that my current surroundings and condition are hardly to be improved upon. Yet I have seen things in the war that…Well, it doesn’t bears thinking upon. Who on earth would create such a world as ours? Who could possibly find amusement in such cruelties as, I grant you, I have sometimes been a part of?”
“Sir,” said the king, “I am not the artist, and he, I suspect, is nobody of any great esteem in his unimaginably larger world. He might pass you on the street unnoticed. In conversation, it is entirely possible, he would not impress you favorably. Why, then, should you expect more from him than he—or, as it may be, she—might reasonably expect from his or her vastly more potent creator?”
“Are you saying that our author’s world is no better than our own?”
“It is possible it is worse. From his work we can infer certain things about the world in which he lives. Our architecture is ornate and romantic. His therefore is plain and dull—sheets of gray concrete, perhaps, with each window the exact twin of all the others—or he would not have bothered to imagine ours in such delightful detail.”
“Then, since our world is so crude and violent, it stands to reason that his must be a paragon of peace and gentility?”
“Say rather that ours has an earthy vigor while his is mired down in easy hypocrisy.”
Shaking his head slowly, Jack said, “How is it that you know so much about the world we live in, and yet I know so little?”
“There are two types of characters, my son. Yours is forever sailing out of windows with his trousers in his hand, impersonating foreign dignitaries with an eye to defrauding uncharitable bishops, being ambushed in lightless alleys by knife-wielding ruffians, and coming home early to discover his newlywed bride in bed with his mistress’s husband.”
“It is as if you had been reading my diary,” Jack said wonderingly. “Had I a diary to read.”
“That is because you are the active sort of character, whose chief purpose is to move the plot along. I am, however, more the reflective sort of character, whose purpose it is to expound upon and thus reveal the inner meaning of the narrative. But I see you are confused—let us step briefly out of my story.”
And, as simply as one might turn a page, Jack found himself standing in a pleasant garden, awash in the golden light of a late-afternoon sun. The king of the Mummelsee was seated in a chair which, though plain and simple, suggested a throne—indeed, such a throne as a philosopher-king might inhabit.
“That is very well observed of you,” the king said in response to Jack’s unspoken observation. “It is possible that, with encouragement, you could be converted to a reflective character yet.”
“Where are we?”
“This is my dear friend Dr. Vandermast’s garden in Zayana, where it is eternally afternoon. Here, he and I have had many a long discussion of entelechy and epistemology and other such unimportant and ephemeral nothings. The good doctor has discreetly made himself absent that we may talk in private. He himself resides in a book called—but what matters that? This is one of those magical places where we may with equanimity discuss the nature of the world. Indeed, its aspect is such that we could scarce do otherwise if we tried.”
A hummingbird abruptly appeared before Jack, hanging in the air like a frantic feathered jewel. He extended a finger and the bird hovered just above it, so that he could feel the delicate push of air from its madly pumping wings upon his skin. “What marvel is this?” he asked.
“It is just my daughter. Though she does not appear in this scene, still she desires to make her wishes known—and so she expresses herself in imagery. Thank you, dear, you may leave now.” The king clapped his hands and the hummingbird vanished. “She will be heartbroken if you depart from our fictive realm. But doubtless another hero will come along and, being fictional, Poseidonia neither learns from her experiences nor lets them embitter her against their perpetrator’s gender. She will greet him as openly and enthusiastically as she did you.”
Jack felt a perfectly understandable twinge of jealousy. But he set it aside. Hewing to the gist of the discussion, he said, “Is this an academic argument, sir? Or is there a practical side to it?”
“Dr. Vandermast’s garden is not like other places. If you were to wish to leave our world entirely, then I have no doubt it could be easily arranged.”
“Could I then come back?”
“Alas, no,” the king said regretfully. “One miracle is enough for any life. And more than either of us, strictly speaking, deserves, I might add.”
Jack picked up a stick and strode back and forth along the flower beds, lashing at the heads of the taller blossoms. “Must I then decide based on no information at all? Leap blindly into the abyss or remain doubtful at its lip forever? This is, as you say, a delightful existence. But can I be content with this life, knowing there is another and yet being ignorant of what it might entail?”
“Calm yourself. If that is all it takes, then let us see what the alternative might be.” The king of the Mummelsee reached down into his lap and turned the page of a leather-bound folio that Jack had not noticed before.
“ARE YOU GOING TO be sitting there forever, woolgathering, when there are chores to be done? I swear, you must be the single laziest man in the world.”
Jack’s fat wife came out of the kitchen, absently scratching her behind. Gretchen’s face was round where once it had been slender, and there was a slight hitch in her gait, where formerly her every movement had been a dance to music only she could hear. Yet Jack’s heart softened within him at the sight of her, as it always did.
He put down his goose quill and sprinkled sand over what he had written so far. “You are doubtless right, my dear,” he said mildly. “You always are.”
As he was stumping outdoors to chop wood, draw water, a
nd feed the hog they were fattening for Fastnacht, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung by the back door. An old and haggard man with a beard so thin it looked moth eaten glared back at him in horror. “Eh, sir,” he murmured to himself, “you are not the fine young soldier who tumbled Gretchen in the hayloft only minutes after meeting her, so many years ago.”
A cold wind blew flecks of ice in his face when he stepped outside, and the sticks in the woodpile were frozen together so that he had to bang them with the blunt end of the axe to separate them so that they might be split. When he went to the well, the ice was so thick that breaking it raised a sweat. Then, after he’d removed the rock from the lid covering the bucket of kitchen slops and started down toward the sty, he slipped on a patch of ice and upended the slops over the front of his clothing. Which meant not only that he would have to wash those clothes weeks ahead of schedule—which in wintertime was an ugly chore—but that he had to gather up the slops from the ground with his bare hands and ladle them back into the bucket, for come what may the pig still needed to be fed.
So, muttering and complaining to himself, old Jack clomped back into the house, where he washed his hands and changed into clean clothing and sat back down to his writing again. After a few minutes, his wife entered the room and exclaimed, “It is so cold in here!” She busied herself building up the fire, though it was so much work carrying wood up to his office that Jack would rather have endured the cold to save himself the extra labor later on. Then she came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you writing a letter to Wilhelm again?”
“Who else?” Jack growled. “We work our fingers to the bone to send him money, and he never writes! And when he does, his letters are so brief! He spends all his time drinking and running up debts with tailors and chasing after—” He caught himself in time, and coughed. “Chasing after inappropriate young women.”
“Well, after all, when you were his age—”
“When I was his age, I never did any such thing,” Jack said indignantly.
“No, of course not,” he wife said. He could feel the smile he did not turn around to see. “You poor foolish dear.”
She kissed the top of his head.
THE SUN EMERGED FROM behind a cloud as Jack reappeared, and the garden blazed with a hundred bright colors—more of Poseidonia’s influence, Jack supposed. Its flowers turned their heads toward him flirtatiously and opened their blossoms to his gaze.
“Well?” said the king of the Mummelsee. “How was it?”
“I’d lost most of my teeth,” Jack said glumly, “and there was an ache in my side that never went away. My children were grown and moved away, and there was nothing left in my life to look forward to but death.”
“That is not a judgment,” the king said, “but only a catalog of complaints.”
“There was, I must concede, a certain authenticity to life on the other side of the gate. A validity and complexity which ours may be said to lack.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
The shifting light darkened and a wind passed through the trees, making them sigh. “On the other hand, there is a purposefulness to this life which the other does not have.”
“That too is true.”
“Yet if there is a purpose to our existence—and I feel quite certain that there is—I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
“Why, that is easily enough answered!” the king said. “We exist to amuse the reader.”
“And this reader—who exactly is he?”
“The less said about the reader,” said the king of the Mummelsee fervently, “the better.” He stood. “We have talked enough,” he said. “There are two gates from this garden. One leads back whence we came. The second leads to…the other place. That which you glimpsed just now.”
“Has it a name, this ‘other place’?”
“Some call it Reality, though the aptness of that title is, of course, in dispute.”
Jack tugged at his mustache and chewed at the inside of his cheek. “This is, I swear, no easy choice.”
“Yet we cannot stay in this garden forever, Jack. Sooner or later, you must choose.”
“Indeed, sir, you are right,” Jack said. “I must be resolute.” All about him, the garden waited in hushed stillness. Not a bullfrog disturbed the glassy surface of the lily pond. Not a blade of grass stirred in the meadow. The very air seemed tense with anticipation.
He chose.
So it was that Johann von Grimmelshausen, sometimes known as Jurgen, escaped the narrow and constricting confines of literature, and of the Mummelsee as well, by becoming truly human and thus subject to the whims of history. Which means that he, of course, died centuries ago. Had he remained a fiction, he would still be with us today, though without the richness of experience which you and I endure every day of our lives.
Was he right to make the choice he did? Only God can tell. And if there is no God, why, then we will never know.
MALLON THE GURU
Peter Straub
NEAR THE END OF WHAT HE later called his “developmental period,” the American guru Spencer Mallon spent four months traveling through India with his spiritual leader, Urdang, a fearsome German with a deceptively mild manner. In the third of these months, they were granted an audience with a yogi, a great holy man who lived in the village of Sankwal. However, an odd, unsettling thing happened as soon as Mallon and Urdang reached the outskirts of the village. A carrion crow plummeted out of the sky and landed, with an audible thump and a skirl of feathers, dead on the dusty ground immediately in front of them. Instantly, villagers began streaming toward them, whether because of the crow or because he and Urdang were fair-skinned strangers, Mallon did not know. He fought the uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by strangers gibbering away in a language he would never understand, and in the midst of this great difficulty tried to find the peace and balance he sometimes experienced during his almost daily, generally two-hour meditations.
An unclean foot with tuberous three-inch nails flipped aside the dead bird. The villagers drew closer, close enough to touch, and leaning in and jabbering with great intensity, urged them forward by tugging at their shirts and waistbands. They, or perhaps just he, Spencer Mallon, was being urged, importuned, begged to execute some unimaginable service. They wished him to perform some kind of task, but the task remained mysterious. The mystery became clearer only after a rickety hut seemed almost to materialize, miragelike, from the barren scrap of land where it squatted. One of the men urging Mallon along yanked his sleeve more forcefully and implored him, with flapping, birdlike gestures, to go into the hut, evidently his, to enter it and see something—the man indicated the necessity for vision by jabbing a black fingernail at his protuberant right eye.
I have been chosen, Mallon thought. I, not Urdang, have been elected by these ignorant and suffering people.
Within the dim, hot enclosure, he was invited to gaze at a small child with huge, impassive eyes and limbs like twigs. The child appeared to be dying. Dark yellow crusts ringed its nostrils and its mouth.
Staring at Mallon, the trembling villager raised one of his own hands and brushed his fingertips gently against the boy’s enormous forehead. Then he waved Mallon closer to the child’s pallet.
“Don’t you get it?” Urdang said. “You’re supposed to touch the boy.”
Reluctantly, unsure of what he was actually being asked to do and fearful of contracting some hideous disease, Mallon extended one hand and lowered his extended fingers toward the boy’s skeletal head as if he were about to dip them for the briefest possible moment into a pail of reeking fluid drawn from the communal cesspit.
Kid, he thought, for the sake of my reputation, I hope we’re going to see a miracle cure.
At the moment of contact, he felt as though a tiny particle of energy, a radiant erg as quick and flowing as mercury, passed directly from his hand through the fragile wall of the boy’s skull.
In the midst
of this extremely interesting and in fact amazing phenomenon, the father collapsed to his knees and began to croon in gratitude.
“How do these people know about me?” he asked.
“The real question is, what do they think you did?” Urdang said. “And how do they think they know it? Once we have had our audience, I suggest we put on our skates.”
Urdang, Mallon realized, had no idea of what had just happened. It was the restoration of a cosmic balance: a bird died, and a child was saved. He had been the fulcrum between death and the restoration. A perfect Indian experience had been given to him. The great yogi would embrace him as he would a son, he would open his house and his ashram and welcome him as a student of unprecedented capabilities.
Proceeding down a narrow lane in the village proper, Mallon carelessly extended two fingers and ran them along a foot or two of the mud-plastered wall at his side. He had no plan, no purpose beyond just seeing what was going to happen, for he knew that in some fashion his touch would alter the universe. The results of his test were deeply gratifying: on the wall, the two lines traced by his fingers glowed a brilliant neon blue that brightened and intensified until it threatened to sear the eyes. The villagers spun around and waved their arms, releasing an ecstatic babble threaded with high-pitched cries of joy. Along with everybody else, Mallon had stopped moving to look at the marvelous, miraculous wall. An electrical buzz and hum filled all the spaces within his body; he felt as though he could shoot sparks from his fingers.
I should touch that kid all over again, he thought. He’d zoom right up off the bed.
In seconds, the vibrant blue lines cooled, shrank, and faded back into the dull khaki of the wall. The villagers thrust forward, rubbed the wall, flattened themselves against it, spoke to it in whispers. Those who kissed the wall came away with mouths and noses painted white with dust. Only Mallon, and perhaps Urdang, had been chagrined to see the evidence of his magic vanish so quickly from the world.