Six

 

In his kitchen, through which the kids had to always run in order to access his backyard and gardens (though ‘gardens’ is putting it too strongly: overgrown paths that led in on themselves and hence to nowhere, circling and winding and confusing) … here there was a great feat of expressionistic design displayed upon his walls. Wallpapering of his own design. The essays. Nonfictions. As he cooked, it seemed wildly appropriate to him to have his essays paper the way to his—and another’s—stomach. That was, and of course there was to it, a story…

 

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In a distant land, he told the kids one chilly afternoon in early fall a few years back, there lived a very old man who surrounded himself with single leaflets of paper. His entire house (a kind of hovel he dug into the side of his favorite childhood getaway place, a small and well-hidden hill) was papered with yellowing, some fresh, sheets of paper with but a single idea drawn out endlessly. Each point made in those sheets, however, had a corresponding place and a very precise thing you had to do or place to move into, or—and this was best of all—dish you had to digest, in order for you to be able to advance to the next page. But, conversely, in order to advance to the next place, dish or thing to do, you had to produce another page, and place it in a very certain spot on the wall. At the end of his life, the old man managed to carve out a labyrinth for himself—a giant, underground (though it was in the hill, so it was sort of underground) cavern of winding tunnels that were the product of years of eating, doing, writing, papering and so on.

 

But the old man had an odd habit throughout this, his odd occupation (which was a morbid self-preoccupation, the moralists and philosophers came to believe—to which the old man just shrugged his shoulders when reading their essays, as his characteristic indifferent defiance expressed itself): he prepared, whenever he had to, two dishes even though he was perpetually alone. (Not even stinking, rotten children such as yourselves dared bother him, he snarled—at which the gathered kids chuckled, cautiously, unsure of the degree of his seriousness in the matter.) And to that second dish there corresponded a second page that was another entry into a second essay. Thus, he constructed, they supposed, not one but two whole works of this kind—however the mystery was that only a single labyrinth was found, the old man dead at the end of one tunnel on that day of discovery, with a stew under his chin and a sheet of paper and pen to his side as his head lay atop a small eating table. If the old man was consistent, there should be two labyrinths. And where had he put this second essay (of which only a few pages have survived, one of which he was in the middle of writing up when he was found dead upon the little table)?

 

The children waited, apparently aghast and momentarily frozen, for the conclusion, but he simply left them hanging, along with his with story, in mid-thought. Legends must remain as legends, he said, coyly. Besides, how could the story be told in truth? he continued, now distracted by the preparation of one of his minuscule meals. What we really have there in this story is the history of something whole, something complete unto itself, which no child can understand. Again, he looked at the frozen children (who now began to stir back to life as they realized his coyness was a lure towards something funny—perhaps), and then slowly and deeply bowed his head towards them, again coyly, continuing: anyway, it’s not for children. It’s for idiot adults to hear, and to bear. They pleaded to hear more, and he slinked closer to that something more.

 

Ah, well, it’s really a story of the whole history of a hermit. Do you know what that is? he said, looking down again. Before they could answer, he anticipated the inquiry and continued without missing a beat. Well, a hermit is somebody who not only has no time or concern or interest in children, but who also cares not for anyone a’tall. Not the very least other human soul, none of them, whether they care to have a body or not. With this, a chuckle could be heard creaking its way through his distracted preparations. But on the topic of souls, hermits are, in fact, the most adept—the most knowledgeable. For their one virtue is to go deep-sea diving in order to find out the truth about them. Trouble is, they never leave their houses. And why was that, the kids wanted to know? Because they think—well most of them anyway—that everyone’s basically the same, and one soul is good enough to go diving for, at least in their lifetime. So they usually chose themselves. Yes—they deep-sea dive into themselves, and come up for air only on condition that they find something worthy of going to the surface for, so they can take a breath that will allow them to continue living. Otherwise, they die a horrible death: they drown in the act—on purpose!

 

The children shuddered, not sure whether to laugh or recoil in horrified sadness. But children are always in this in-between state of either/or emotions, he thought as he watched their expression with a measure of gratification; that’s what a kid is—unsure because the whole of existence weighs upon them, of which they haven’t the slightest or faintest clue … ah yes, he thought quietly, the innocence of childhood. He couldn’t help but see on their faces that expression that must have taken hold of the children that overtook one of his favorite sometime-aphorists, Herr S— as he called him. The children, awaiting the opening act, before the curtain is drawn, have no idea of what is about to befall them; to this a profoundly creased smirk appeared on his face as he continued.

 

Now this particular hermit was keeping a kind of log, a journal—you could even call it a diary. But it had this odd quirk to it, that it kept him going around and doing things, and especially eating dishes that were, somehow, required preparations based on the things in this endless essay. Though this second labyrinth wasn’t discovered (at least not yet), nor was the second essay he composed as he drew out the necessary elements for the first ever recovered in its entirety, we can make certain guesses about what was contained in it—the essay, that is, and possibly also the labyrinth (though we can only speculate about its actual form, as we have nothing but the words to go on).

 

The kids started to lose the thread of his story, for he couldn’t always account for the fact that they didn’t have a certain vocabulary or intellectual facility (and he could care less when he did realize the fact), and so he inevitably appeared to them a bit shadowy, a bit odd, opaque in that kid sort of way—like the obverse experience you have watching the strangely blank, fluttering and distracted appearance of an infant: there is somebody home, but they’re sleeping though the eyes are wide-open staring intently around and around. His voice was audible, his mouth moving up-and-down, sounds were being made, but only occasionally did they have meaning. This fact brought him unending titillation and a strange joy.

 

It was early enough that he still had his coffee with him, and it was slowly being drained away. It always made him feel terribly anxious, in that not-terribly-about-anything-in-particular sort of way. But by the time the morning evaporated, his mind had settled down from the anxiety, and this allowed him to ease into the languor of the afternoon, a time he despised above all other times. Only the early morning hours, and then later in the early and late evening, was he anything close to being a human being—that is to say, if we follow the ancient conception, a social animal. The children always rushed in as his mind was descending from the heights of chemical anxiety, a flush state of mind wherewith he worked best. He could not fault the children for this wonderful habit of rushing in where fools otherwise would have feared tread—they were anxiety itself, he considered. Oh well…

 

You know, each letter of the essay scrawled upon those many pages, he said, found a whole strange world balanced atop. At this the children were revivified. They now were rapt with wonder. But how could that be? they considered, literally. Of course it’s possible, he said to them, looking askance and then into the air, where philosophers always found the sublime. Anything is possible in the life of a hermit such as this. For this hermit—his voice now seemed to be gathering momentum, and he carried them along and out again into the garden, where they loved to run around, hide and jump at each other, crying of monsters, and of creeping things all around his overgrown garden—this hermit was a very special sort of hermit. We already have found him buried alive, in a way, inside this hill-house; and we know what he was doing inside this hovel—at least we have the general idea. But what we don’t know is the exact stuff of the second essay, or the location of this secondary labyrinth, now do we? The children all synchronously shook their heads: no. But I say, atop each and every letter was balanced a whole world, maybe even as much as a galaxy of things we can only dream of this morning. Lots of stories to tell you about, then. But because of this, there was and could be no end. The hermit had to die in the middle of it all. He couldn’t come up for air, so he had to stay submerged. That’s how it works—even right here. He pointed, swirling, around the room just before they crossed the threshold in the sunroom that led outside, onward to the passages that opened up to the interiors of his garden. Nuts, mister! one of them shouted, and took off running, disappearing into a path whose conclusion was obscured by bushes and its own (well-planned) curvature. You were meant to disappear in this garden, he thought to himself. The rest of the children dispersed, and likewise found obscurity in the garden. He was left alone, with a shudder stirring in him—right on time. Each morning, after he felt that something (it could be anything he invested himself into) had been accomplished, he experienced an odd sensation: like something abandoned him, but which also left a profound hole in him, and a rush of memories, mostly echoes of childhood, came flooding back. He wanted to express it somehow, but it felt like the memories, and the accompanying affectations, slammed up against his insides, wanting out, but continually failing to find a way out. He had the same, the exact same, sensation of weird affectation when he was a child; so it wasn’t right to call these echoes of childhood—not exactly. They were like permanent stains that, as he changed clothes throughout the years, reappeared when exactly the same stained clothes were donned. Or something like that. He lost himself for a while, as the children played …