The Art Of Living And Other Stories Part 3

The young man said, leaning even nearer: "But you, my friend, as a music lover, must understand that the disappointment I've thus far delimited is nothing by comparison with the disappointment I have yet to describe. The moment my father first saw me in the crib, with these fingers that reach out like tentacles, he cried out, 'A pianist! The Dear Lord has sent us a pianist!' I could reach a full octave at the age of seven. And I was rhythmically talented, and had perfect pitch. I amuse acquaintances by telling them the frequencies of pistol shots, car crashes, screams for help. The point is this: what are a poet's lying words to the rich and the secret intimations of a piano chord, a great pipe organ, an orchestra, a voice? I've searched the globe for some firm reality that could give me even the shadow of a hint that our musical intuitions are not madness. I've stood before the greatest works of sculpture, and I've thought, 'Yes, it's beautiful. Is that all there is?' I've looked up from Zermatt at the Matterhorn and thought, 'very like the postcards.' I watched a friend die. It was just as I'd expected."

The young man smiled as if consciously laboring to make his smile ferocious. "That is why I compose as I do, my dear music lover."

Professor Klingman said, "You, then, are the composer of-" He said it almost casually, as if merely checking an earlier conclusion.

"I am," the young man said fiercely, and waited.

Perhaps as much as a minute pa.s.sed. At last Professor Klingman took off his gla.s.ses to wipe them again. He did this slowly and carefully, his fingers trembling. He hooked the gla.s.ses back over his ears, folded his handkerchief, then changed his mind, unfolded it, and blew his nose. He noticed that he still had his hat on, and removed it, carefully setting it down on the table. "I'm flattered that you should tell me all this," he said softly, tentatively.

The young man waited. He seemed to be growing more angry by the minute.

Professor Klingman sat nodding slowly and thoughtfully, nervously smiling. Finally he said, as if he had no idea what else to say, "My wife was a pianist."

He began then, slowly and patiently, to explain what she had meant to him, though of course his feeling was impossible to put into words.

TRUMPETER.

Queen Louisa's dog, Trumpeter, was n.o.body's fool, which is one of the reasons he kept mostly out of sight, taking care of himself, harmlessly chasing a rabbit now and then, soaking up the sun in the cemetery-where no one ever went-one eye half open, on the watch for trespa.s.sers, sometimes wandering through the alleys of the village, peeking in through windows when the sun had set, observing how shopkeepers counted up their money unaware of the servants who peered from every curtain and hungrily eyed those stacked silver coins, and then again sometimes pausing by old shanties where cutpurses met, filling the night with their blasphemous obscenities, and where there were smells, everywhere, of bile and perspiration and unwholesome drink, still other times trotting to the foul black wharf, where old merchant ships b.u.mped against the waterlogged planks and young sailors snored and whistled in the arms of drunken maidens and sometimes a pirate slipped silent as a reptile from fog-wisp to fog-wisp, wetly smiling, carrying his parrot and rum. Sharp ears lifted, burning eyes narrowed into needle-thin slits, Trumpeter would listen to whatever unrighteousness came drifting his way, and then he would lift his leg, leave his warning, and move on.

Trumpeter knew, as no one else did, all that was afoot in the kingdom of mad Queen Louisa. Not that he took undue pride in this. It was his nature, as a dog, to keep track of things, to be a jealous guardian, eternally alert. Even when, unbeknownst to them all, he lay in a corner of Queen Louisa's room, or slept with his head on his paws behind the stove, or bared his fangs to keep the cat on his toes-for the cat was an old one and weary of mice-Trumpeter's mind was on one subject: the welfare of the kingdom. This was, so to speak, what he was paid for. Not that Trumpeter could really be called paid. But Trumpeter was no haggler, never one to stand on ceremony. It is true, he would admit, that the people of the castle almost never spoke to him and, once they'd grown used to him, hardly looked up when he went gliding like an angel of death through the room; but sometimes when he rubbed against Queen Louisa's shoulder she would give him a brief, absentminded pat, and on rare occasions, for no discernible reason, she'd say, "Sit, Trumpeter," or, "Down-for the love of G.o.d, boy!" or, "Outside!" As for the others, they paid to Trumpeter no attention whatsoever, merely obeyed him as they obeyed the King or Queen, without thought or hesitation. When he stood by the door, they opened it. When he stood by the cupboard, they filled his dish. When he barked, they went over furtively and peeked out the window.

He was n.o.body's fool, but he had, it is true, his limitations, and the chief of them was this: ponder as he might-and ponder he did, hour on hour and year on year, his black head lowered into the carpet's scents, his eyes rolled up-he could never penetrate the reason (for presumably there was some reason) for the curious behavior of Queen Louisa and her court. It was said, and Trumpeter in his way understood, that at times Queen Louisa, to rest her mind, would transform herself suddenly into a large greenish toad. This habit was notorious, reported far and wide; everyone who knew her had seen the thing happen quite frequently. Everyone, that is, except Trumpeter. It was not, in his opinion, a case of the Emperor's Clothes. Trumpeter was no innocent: man's ways are not dog's, he knew. He had seen the whole court sit erect for hours, dead silent except for an occasional whisper, an occasional cough, listening to people on a bright raised platform howl. He, when he tentatively joined them, had been kicked and sent outside. On that same raised platform he'd seen a man in black creep up cunningly on another, a dagger in his hand, and when he, Trumpeter, had hurtled to the rescue, he'd been beaten and seized by five knights and had been chained behind the b.u.t.tery.

The oddities of man were inexhaustible, and this change that came over the Queen-a change Trumpeter could not see except by the reaction of the others-was merely one of them. He had learned to accept, simply to watch and consider, stretched out half hidden behind the curtains or under the table, offering no comment. One moment the court would be walking toward the chapel all in solemn array, bearing high white candles, Queen Louisa at their head in her long sky-blue gown, her red hair gleaming, her expression sweet and sad-they all had sad expressions as they moved toward the chapel, and their bodies were rigid, as if ritually so, slightly trembling with each step-and the next they'd all be leaping, or darting their tongues out-even King Gregor, with a pained expression, his black beard bristling-and the princesses and princes would suddenly begin croaking, ludicrously grinning, and their eyes would bug out. Trumpeter would let out a sigh and shift his position slightly, and when Queen Louisa came down like an avalanche inches from his nose, he would thump his tail once, courteous, showing her he'd noticed. "Goo-boo!" she'd say. This was not, strictly speaking, his name, or the right time of day, but he accepted it.

Whatever the reason for this strange behavior on the part of the Queen and, after her, the court, it was a peaceful kingdom, no one could deny it. King Gregor and King John, who for years had been at war, were now, because of the general confusion, the best of friends, squatting on some garden path arm in arm, or, in another mood, debating at the tops of their voices, jabbing their fingers at the writing in a book. "Saintly, my a.s.s!" King John once yelled. (Trumpeter had no trouble understanding words. It was merely sentences that befuddled him.) "Saintly, my a.s.s! Do you wash your peasants' feet on Maundy Thursday?" King Gregor's eyes widened. "G.o.d forbid!" he said.

If all this was strange, there were other things still stranger. No one seemed to remember anymore, except for Trumpeter, that the Princess had gone away. Not the Princess called Muriel, whom the Queen had discovered and declared to be her own dear long-lost child, and not the numerous princesses and princes she'd found later and joyfully recognized and brought to the castle, Djubkin and Dobremish, Pretty Polly, and the rest. For all these, Trumpeter had no hostile feelings; and he understood-dimly, yet clearly enough-that in making them her children, as perhaps they were indeed, since the life of a dog is but a heartbeat, so to speak, in the long span of man, the Queen had brought happiness to a kingdom that had suffered, before that, grave troubles-peasants against royalty, "madness against madness," as the minstrel said: an obscure saying; but Trumpeter, in his heart, understood it.

He remembered, nonetheless, that another princess had lived here once in the days before Queen Louisa was mad-she had vanished one morning like dew into the blind blue air. Her hair was yellow. He would lie beside the fireplace, an old slipper in his mouth-he was not always, in those days, wide awake-and he would feel a certain pressure bearing down on his shoulder, and when he opened his eyes and turned his head, there the Princess would be, her hair falling over him, her cheek on the flatness between his shoulder and back, using him as a pillow, and he would moan and she would mimic him, harmlessly mocking.

This was no flickering memory but steady as the floor.

Whether or not he understood the details, he understood the importance of a kingdom at peace. Vrokror, that terrible grudge-bearing fiend, had no supporters now. The words with which Queen Louisa had undone him-"All error," she'd said, "begins with soreheads"-were now common slogan in King Gregor's realm. It was part of a verse for skipping rope to. Trumpeter, travelling far and wide, had seen the extent to which Vrokror had been undone. Vrokror was a monk again, as he'd been in the first place, but a monk in absolute and terrible isolation: he saw nothing sentient-certainly not G.o.d-but lived all alone on the top of a mountain, eating tundra plants.

All was well, all was well. Travelling through alleys, Trumpeter saw that the servants were afraid of their masters and would do them no harm, hunger as they might for those coins stacked like pillars in the palace. Watching the cutpurses, studying every smile, he saw that they were miserable, whatever their pretenses. There are never, of course, enough purses to go around. And Trumpeter saw that the merchants all cheated fellow merchants, and the pirates all stole from them, and no one was distressed; they were used to it. Trumpeter began to feel a strange discomfiture.

"Bad dog," she'd say, this real Princess whom only Trumpeter remembered, and she'd shake her finger ferociously, and he would duck his head. But it was a pleasure, he would admit, that attention she gave him; and he partly understood-sometimes fully understood-that she did it for the absolute absurdity of the thing. Here was he, four, five, six times her weight, with jaws that could cut through the thighbones of a steer; and here was she, who with a word could lay him flatlings.

Sometimes lately, in the middle of the night, Queen Louisa would sit bolt upright in her bed. She would be atremble all over. He lay perfectly still, ready to spring to the defense, but there was nothing to defend her from. "We must have," she said one drizzly, miserable dawn, "a royal ball. I must marry off my princes and princesses."

There followed a period of intense preparations; dressmakers came, and cooks and carpenters and pirates disguised as wine merchants, eyeing the silverware. The palace was transformed. King Gregor paced furiously back and forth, stroking his black beard, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the arm of his friend King John. "We've forgotten something," he cried out, "but what?" Trumpeter rushed with renewed intensity from the cemetery to the alleys of the village to the foul black wharf. All was well, all was well. On every lamppost and wall he left his warning.

She'd grown pale as marble and quick to be exhausted. Nevertheless, all was well, it was obvious. King John and King Gregor met daily for war, and their armies came home bleeding-or King Gregor's came home bleeding and King John's army went-and there was dancing till midnight and poetry speaking and courtly love-and the Princess would shake her head and smile: "They're all mad, you know, Trumpeter. Stark raving mad." He would hold out his paw, and she would take it and solemnly make acquaintance.

"She seems pale," Queen Louisa said, pulling at her lip.

"She needs to eat more beefsteak," said King Gregor, and never moved his eyes from the map. "Ha!" he said suddenly. "He'll creep up on us from here"-he jabbed down his finger on some lines on the map-"and little will he guess ..."

Since the palace was filled to overflowing with princes and princesses, none of them the pale one whom Trumpeter remembered, King Gregor and Queen Louisa held their royal ball. The orchestra played merrily, waltz after waltz, and by midnight all the merchants and the merchants' servants had found themselves some princess, and each and every prince had found some daughter of a merchant who was exactly to his liking, and the peace and serenity of the kingdom were more wonderful than ever.

When the ball was long over and everyone in bed, Queen Louisa sat bolt upright and said, "Trumpeter! What's that?"

It was nothing, he knew. If there were anything there, he'd have heard it or smelled it or felt it in his bones. But he dutifully rose, head turned to yawn, and mournfully went over to the window to look out. It was nothing: emptiness. Poor Trumpeter had no imagination.

"Something must be done," said Queen Louisa, "about the pirates and parrots, not to mention the cutpurses." She leaped from the bed, her white legs bowed, presumably presuming she'd been changed into a toad, and stared past Trumpeter's shoulder deep into the night. Absentmindedly, she stroked his head, and he moaned. "That's it," said Queen Louisa, as if it seemed to her he'd spoken. "We must show them we love them and think of them as equals. What can we do?" She began to pace, bowleggedly hurrying back and forth, wringing her fingers and biting her lip. Trumpeter sat, ears c.o.c.ked, head tilted.

A queer expression stretched Queen Louisa's face. "Do we really need the royal treasury?" she said.

Though the sentence was difficult, Trumpeter understood, and, hardly knowing what else to do, he covered his eyes with his right paw. Queen Louisa, however, was too excited to notice. "That's it!" she cried. "We'll invite the cutpurses, pirates and parrots to guard the royal treasure. They'll steal it and never be miserable again!"

A dog has no power. His only hope was that in the morning the Queen would have forgotten her plan.

Morning came, and she had not. "Gregor," she said, "I have a brilliant idea."

Trumpeter slunk off. He rushed to the cemetery, where no one ever went, and kept careful watch for an hour or so. But no one trespa.s.sed, not a rabbit stirred, so he hurried on, though it wasn't yet dark, to peek through windows here and there in the village, but no one was in sight-the merchants and their servants were all away celebrating with their new royal wives-then he rushed, quick as lightning, to the foul black wharf. But it was empty as a rum bottle lying in the sand, and then, with a heavy heart, Trumpeter returned to the palace.

"Dear G.o.d!" the King was yelling, though he was in on the plan, "the royal treasury has been depleted!"

Trumpeter lay down.

All was well; all was well.

She, this Princess whom only he remembered, had grown increasingly pale, increasingly quick to weary. He'd insisted on lying at the side of her high bright platformed bed, waiting, on the theory that sooner or later, inevitably, given the span of human time, the sun would rise and she'd abruptly sit bolt upright, and they would walk out again into the fields to pursue silly rabbits. Then, for reasons not discernible to him, five knights had come and had cajoled and coaxed him and had finally seized him with their iron gloves and had dragged him by a chain to the place behind the b.u.t.tery. When they released him days later, the Princess was gone.

"We've done it! We've done it!" Queen Louisa cried wildly, startling him awake. As far as Trumpeter's eye could see there were people dancing.

"Ah, peace!" cried King Gregor.

"Ah, justice!" cried King John.

There stood Vrokror the Terrible, looking shy as a maiden, holding Muriel's hand; and Djubkin, Dobremish, Pretty Polly, and the rest were throwing rose petals over them, their faces bright with tears. Queen Louisa was laughing with a beautiful lilt, for the king of the pirates was offering her a treasure chest crammed to the gunnels with silver and gold, kissing her fingertips and squinting his eyes like a man who intended to steal it all back again; and King John and King Gregor were agreeing, all smiles, that both of them were certainly, in their own small ways, saints; and the parrots were crying, all, "Cracker! Pretty cracker!"

The palace was full of light-beyond the windows, thick darkness. Nothing was wrong; nothing could go wrong. It was a balanced kingdom, the only kingdom in the world where art reigned supreme.

Trumpeter crept from beneath the dark curtain of the tablecloth and glided to the door. He stood waiting. It was opened. He hurried away from the dancing and light, away from the joyful celebration of things that he knew to be quite proper, and when he reached the depths of the forest, he began to howl.

THE LIBRARY.

HORROR.

I had been troubled for days-odd sounds, objects out of place, all the pitiful and mundane symptoms of a disordered mind, symptoms I know all too well, coming as I do from a family of lunatics, as everyone knows-when a few odd phrases in a book on aesthetics threw everything into sharp new perspective. I had been reading along in my usual fashion, simultaneously urgent and desultory, one hand pressed to my chest, a faint uneasiness in the back of my mind, a sort of floating anxiety like a shape moving furtively from window to window-never mind the reason (I had missed an opportunity to drop in on my father at the asylum outside the village, or, rather, I had thought of several reasons I could not possibly go, and then, not having gone, I had suddenly seen everything in a new light and had realized that my reasons were all trivial and absurd, I should certainly have gone; nor was that all, but never mind)-when suddenly I came upon these curious observations on "living form" in art.

I no longer recall what I read, exactly, or even the general outline of the theory. There was some talk, I remember-very interesting at the time-about "virtual time and s.p.a.ce" in music and painting, and something ... you must forgive my haste ... about "organic forms." My wife-this much I remember distinctly-was working in the kitchen, banging the cooking utensils around, turning the water on and off with a violent suddenness I could only interpret as critical of my sitting in the livingroom, reading while she worked. All her acquaintances have maids, and she feels, she has told me, that a man as well off as I am could surely afford that small luxury. It wasn't so bad when my father was still at liberty, dropping by every night or so and helping with her ch.o.r.es. But my father has been put where he belongs-no fault of mine-so now she talks about having at least a maid. I've explained to her many times why a stranger in the house would be, to a man like myself, anything but a luxury. Even a stranger near the house is deeply upsetting to me, so that, inconvenient as it may be, I walk wherever I go (I seldom go out except for my rare official visits to the bank), since to own an automobile would inevitably involve me with a mechanic for the engine, a chauffeur, and heaven knows what else. But I am straying from my point.

I had been hearing for several days and nights now strange noises from the library. (It took me some time to pinpoint the noises as coming from the library, but I must hurry past all that; my time, as you will see, is limited.) Now, at the sound of a particularly loud crash, I jumped up from my chair, closed the book of philosophy on my finger to keep my place, and moved carefully-I was wearing my slippers-to the library door. With my hand on the k.n.o.b and my ear against the panel, my body bent over like an old man's-like my father's, for example-trying with all my might to make out what it was that was happening inside, I suddenly found myself-suddenly and surprisingly, as when a man wakes up in a different room from the one he went to sleep in-staring with ferocious concentration at the t.i.tle on the book: The Problems of Art. It came to me with a jolt, such a jolt that I found my knees were trembling, that all this while, when I'd thought I'd been listening with all my wits, I'd been mulling over those ideas I'd just encountered, ideas I at that time recalled with the greatest exact.i.tude.

The philosopher wrote-this much I can still make out-of how in paintings, as in mirrors, we see "virtual s.p.a.ce," that is, s.p.a.ce that seems as real as any other until the moment we try to enter it, at which time it proves an apparition. In the same way, reading novels, we move through virtual landscapes watching virtual human beings, people who speak and act as do real human beings until they vanish, or, rather, snap magically into words on a page. The implications, I hardly need tell you, are staggering!

Perhaps, though time is short, I should try to dredge up one or two more details of the argument, to make the larger implications a little clearer. These "apparitions" that come to us in music or, say, fiction are not at all mere imitations, like the figures in a mirror. On the contrary, they are created expressions of life itself. They function in the same ways as do other living things; that is to say, they are pushed and pulled by the same laws that push and pull me or, for instance, my wife, Greer. I speak only, of course, of such works as we call successful, works that have "vitality" or "autonomous life." It was of course this idea-this fact, I should have said, for so it seems to me-that made my knees tremble.

Heaven knows what force it was that caused me to act. I myself was amazed, watching my hand as, with a will of its own, it closed more firmly on the large bra.s.s doork.n.o.b and turned it. Then, in the pocket of my jacket, the same hand closed around my gold-plated penknife and drew it toward the light. With my shoulder-hardly knowing what I was doing, abandoning my senses-I pushed open the huge old door and stepped in.

The world is aclutter with mysteries, as everyone knows. The sane Newtonian universe has proved more illusory than your face in the mirror or the "solid" oak floor. We must somehow imagine, it seems, black holes and white holes, worm-holes through which Time makes astounding jumps, even some subatomic particle, I read, which is approximately the weight of an electron and two light-years broad! We're stuck, if you believe our more outlandish physicists, with the real possibility of dying of asphyxiation because the oxygen has all piled up in a corner of the room where we happen not to be.

We take these things for granted, or at any rate for probably true, and though we glance left then right before crossing a street, as if Newton's universe were still in operation, or even Moses' universe ("I know I have sinned, therefore it is likely that I'll be hit by a car"), we know we have no choice but to make do with the universe we're caught in. I could say more on this subject-I'm a voracious reader and, as you'll see, no fool-but as I've said, my time is limited.

My library-our library, for the house is in my wife's name as well as my own-gives at first the impression of being nothing but books: books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, more books on the five free-standing stacks, three feet apart, which stretch from the east wall of the room to the west with only a four-foot-wide pa.s.sageway tunneling through them, like a series of entrances to a crypt. These shelves too rise from floor to ceiling. One ducks one's head, moving to the heart of the library; above the eighth shelf-the roof of the tunnel through the stacks-the shelves run straight across the room. One feels, in our library, buried in books, entombed. It is partly for this reason that I avoid the place.

Yet the impression from the doorway that the room contains nothing but books is an illusion. Beyond the low pa.s.sage through the free-standing stacks one sees-or, rather, I saw as I came in-that the heart of the library is flooded with moonlight, so that there must be large windows or (as happens to be the fact) French doors. Then one notices a glow in a part of that light, and one deduces (or knows) that in the heart of the library there is a fireplace where not long since there was a roaring fire. Every night around dusk I make a fire in the library fireplace. I never read there-the place makes me uneasy, all that gloomy weight of learning, ton upon ton of contradictory opinion, as if right to the center of things reality is moot-but the truth, I'm afraid, is that if I didn't make a fire there my wife would complain that we need servants. For the same reason I work frantically in the garden, trim the hedges, pick up the droppings from our high enclosing walls of blue spruce.... But enough.

There was not a sound now. I groped for the lightswitch to the right of the door and flicked it three times until finally, as if grudgingly, slightly arcing, it turned the lights on. The room was hardly lighter than before; in fact, it was only the quality of the light that changed. Cautiously, I moved my right slipper forward, then my left, soundlessly heading toward the hearth-lit center of the library. I opened the penknife as I went.

Well, no point making high drama of it. Suddenly, there in front of me-leaping out so quickly from behind the third bookshelf that I hardly knew at first where he'd come from-stood a man with an axe. He was a small man, no more than four feet tall. Why this should be I have no idea, but small he was, a perfectly formed midget with terrified, rolling, somewhat slanted eyes, more terrified of me than I had time to be of him, a ferocious little Russian-a student, I imagined-crazily muttering to himself. Dim as the room was I saw everything with dreadful clarity, like a man about to die. His eyes were sunken, his lips wildly trembled, his coat came almost to his ankles. On the blunt side of the axe there was blood and what might have been gray hair. I tried to speak, but it was as if all the air had gone out of me. My knees banged crazily together. He drew back the axe, blunt side forward, to strike me, but that very instant a young woman in English Victorian dress appeared behind him and cried out, "Lord in heaven! Have you gone loopy?" He turned his head, or, rather, threw it around, to look at her, and his axe waggled downward a little. She too was a midget, though now it was less obvious; something was beginning to happen to my sense of the scale of things. The books on the shelves had grown larger, and the people the same. He looked at the girl with a terrified fixity, as if-in the word's profoundest sense-he'd never seen anyone like her.

With a part of my mind I was so afraid of the little man I could think nothing at all, but with another part, or so it seems to me now, I sensed what he was thinking. Raskolnikov-for of course it was he-had never seen an English schoolgirl and had no way of knowing she was, so to speak, an "outlaw" English schoolgirl; but he knew, it seemed to me, that she was somehow an outlaw, as he was, theoretically; and what had shocked him so badly that he had lowered his axe was philosophical: this girl in dark ringlets, with the slightly puffy eye-sacs, the petulant mouth, the stance he could not judge as obscene or un.o.bscene, not knowing her culture, but knew to be somehow or another defiant and by the standards of her own time and place almost certainly unacceptable, this girl was, like him, a moral outcast, but outcast from a morality so different from his own world's as to cast the idea of "universal human nature" into the trash-heap of ancient pseudodoxia. As he dropped the axe and crazily stared at her, she paid attention. He was astonished by this and reached for the axe again but merely touched it with the tips of his fingers then changed his mind and let it lie. It seems pointless to a.n.a.lyze, but it comes to this: his standards of good and evil-the standards by which he defended and condemned himself-were so different from hers, or her society's, that he abandoned all sense and followed her, like a s.e.xually aroused animal, into the dimness beyond the fourth shelf.

I can hardly bear to tell you the trivia that followed. It seemed to me at the time astonishing, even wonderfully interesting, but on reflection I see that it was neither. I could recreate my state of mind for you perhaps, by trickery and rhetoric, but I refuse to descend to such foolishness. Suffice it to say that I saw Ahab, split by lightning from head to toe, who argued with Boswell's Dr. Johnson, boringly-sometimes threatening to hit Dr. Johnson "a good one, right smack in thy face," to the latter's dismay, of course-about immanence and transcendence; saw Scrooge and Bunyan's Pilgrim, who sounded to my ears remarkably alike; talked with Jane Austen's Emma, who was not at all as pretty as I'd imagined her to be and seemed oddly bigoted on almost everything we touched ... etc.

I will leap to the heart of the matter, which is this: when I had been in my library for several hours, arguing with these dreams or apparitions or realities, my wife came to me dressed in her nightgown-she is generally said to be quite beautiful-and said, "Winfred, are you coming to bed?" I knew this was a threat and a proposal. "Soon," I said, twisting my head around to look at her, "I'm not quite finished." She stood waiting. By now the beauty of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and flanks, well defined under the nightgown, had become, I thought, slightly comic. If one sits looking long enough at mere actuality it becomes, well, obvious. She pivoted away, swinging her rear end in a way that an actress might call cliche, and disappeared through the low-slung entrances or, in this case, exits. From the door she called back, "Remember, tomorrow is visitors' day at the asylum. I know you're busy, of course...."

At this moment, as if summoned by her words, something came charging from the books, terribly shrieking. It came straight toward me. I couldn't make out what it was, at first. It was brighter than the light from a bursting star, coming straight at me with a clatter and roar like a lightning-ball. At the last instant, I saw the apparition with absolute clarity: the hero of my youth-I was sixteen when I first read a version of his story-Achilles! Without a word, without an instant's hesitation, he raised his sword and struck. In amazement, I watched blood rush down my chest from the deep wound in my neck. I stared at him in horror-more horror than disbelief. It was incredible! He was the hero of absolute justice, G.o.d-sent doom, terrible purgation, and I was-I screamed with all my might-"Not guilty!" He stared at me, baffled. Perhaps he spoke no English; or perhaps he was amazed that, wounded as I was, I could still speak. He raised his huge sword to strike again.

My wife cried, from somewhere far away, "Winfred!" And then again, from somewhere nearer, "Winfred!"

He turned, listening, more baffled than before. Slowly, carefully, eyes somewhat confused, he raised that huge, gleaming knife.

Now she was behind me. "You were screaming! Have you gone crazy?" she demanded. He stood teetering the knife, as if he imagined I was moving, like a chicken who nervously twists its neck on the block.

"Winfred," she whispered, "what's come over you?"

Achilles, lover of justice and truth, glanced past his shoulder as if for invisible support, then swung again, this time softly, uncertainly, though his blade nonetheless cut the tendon that held my neck to my right shoulder.

"Winfred!" cried my wife. "Say something! What's the matter with you?"

I sat hunched forward, hiding my condition as well as possible. Abruptly, seeing that I would not speak or turn, she left me, furiously whispering to herself.

Not to make too much of it, I knew then and there that I was dying.

Though time is running out-each word I write is more shaky than the last-let me pause to discuss this peculiar situation. If my sentence ends in the middle, so it ends. Goodbye, G.o.d bless you. So I pray while I still have the strength.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I'm not dying but going mad. (I'm obviously rational, but no one's more rational than a maniac, this I know. My wife, you may say, does not seem to see Achilles; but my wife is no test of reality. She too comes from a long line of lunatics, all people of substance in their day, like myself.) Very well, let us say, for argument's sake, that I am mad. Here sits character x, a madman, struck a mortal blow by character y, a fiction. What can x do, mad as he is, but struggle to maintain justice, normality?

Perhaps my father is unjustly accused. The judge who committed him is afraid of black cats. Even the testimony I myself gave may not have been quite fair, though to the best of my knowledge it was true. My wife also may be unjustly accused, insofar as I accuse her of imbalance. But this much, at least, seems certainly true: if a fictional character, namely Achilles, can make blood run down my chest (if it is indeed running down my chest), then a living character, or two such characters-my father and my wife-can be made to live forever, simply by being put in a fiction.

For this reason-though possibly it makes no sense, possibly I'm making some outlandish mistake-I sit at my desk in this library, writing while the blood runs out of me, the moon hides in clouds, and the fire in the fireplace burns down to ash-Achilles, five feet tall, rather larger than the others, hacking and chopping at my shoulders and spine, while Tom Jones, Gulliver, Hamlet, and many others stand cheering, booing, or complaining in the shadows, taking note of my demise or ignoring it, involved in their own huge affairs. For this reason I construct the following, which I'll pursue as time allows.

"Ah, Greer, what a good, gentle woman you are," says my father.

She shakes her head, gloomy, and with her long fingers turns the cup handle north. The table runs east and west. "You're babbling," says my wife.

Her irritation surprises him, and he glances up at her, then down again at his knees. "That's not what I meant," he says.

She rises suddenly, goes over and opens the icebox door, and, like a child, stands looking inside. "Christ," she says.

"No cheese?" he asks. He has no idea why he thinks she's looking for cheese.

"Cheese?" she asks, more irritable than before. She looks at him. He can see that she thinks he's crazy. He could make a fire in the sink, she wouldn't think it more crazy than his a.s.sumption that she's looking for cheese. She comes back to the table with the milk pitcher and a gla.s.s.

My father feels pain, a light ticking exactly in the center of his chest. Once, years ago, riding with my mother, he had to stop the car-she'd been bawling him out about his failure to press charges against someone who had robbed him-he had to stop the car and run down the road pell-mell to keep from having a heart attack.

"All I meant ..." says my father, and lets it trail off. With enormous effort, he reaches across the table and takes her hand.

Tears burst into my wife's eyes and spill down her cheeks. "Never mind," she says. "I'm sorry." She thinks about it, then slowly lowers her head to the tabletop. My father, after carefully thinking about it, raises his crooked, calloused hand and lowers it to touch her soft hair.

"Dear G.o.d, if I were Winfred's age," my father complains. He moves the stiff hand to the side of her face and brushes the barely perceptible fuzz on her cheek. He does not touch the tears.

"You're crazy," she says, and laughs, half crying. "Has it ever struck you that if you and I were normal people, like Winfred, for instance, in there turning the pages, one, two, three-"

"Now now," says my father. "When you're my age you've thought about everything, more or less." His hand moves slowly, gently, over her hair. He's eighty-two. She's thirty. No one would think him insane except that he once backed his truck through the plate-gla.s.s window of my bank.

The hair p.r.i.c.kles on the back of my neck, as if an ice-cold wind has touched it. Achilles, Lord of Justice, is standing in the doorway, dressed in a drab, neat suit, like a Jehovah's Witness. I see that he has grasped the situation between my wife and my father.

I s.n.a.t.c.h at his elbow. "No justice," I plead, "enough of justice!"

None of this is possible, I realize. My father is in the asylum, Achilles does not exist. I focus hard, trying to read what I have written. The desk is all blood.

My head is filled with planets and stars. Achilles moves slowly toward my father, raising his knife.

"Dear Heavenly Father," I whisper with all my might, for any good fiction will serve in hard times-I clench my eyes against the tumbling of the planets-"Dear Heavenly Father," I whisper with all my might.

THE JOY.

OF THE JUST.