Thirteen

 The children could be heard rapping on a distant door. His music had changed. More somber now. He regressed from classicism to the baroque. It was a collection of trio sonatas. He turned the music down as the rapping became more insistent. The noise grabbed him, and removed him from the inwardness (he loved the concept) of the music—the truest and only real kind, N—. had said long ago (he always recalled these maxims, these arrows and cheap-shots that kept him going). Now voices were mixed into the rapping. “Hey! Mister! We made it, can’t you hear us?” And, sotto voce, “of course he can—but I’m sure he’s planning something else for us, ‘cause this was too easy you see…” and they continued debating, getting entangled in the child’s whirlpool of thoughts and possibilities, a moment before any dialectic, a precious time that bespoke a wide open world (before the dampness of logic washes the fire out completely).

He made his way underground—he actually (but it was strange) had two lower levels underground. There was a basement, and then something more, something further down and buried even deeper into the side of the hill, a place that, if you bothered to unearth the property’s plans (as he did, once yearly, in a kind of ritual that he embroidered with talk of a demiurgos), wasn’t even directly underneath the basement but askew, shoved to where it seemed not to need the support of the house above it, but which tried to subsist entirely on its own. It was into this portion of the underground of the house which the children finally arrived, via the complications of his map of the intervening labyrinth.

His instructions were detailed but the complications childish—no, they assumed the life and meaning of childhood itself. Not in a regressive sort of way; but in a way that could only seem absolutely ludicrous to an ‘adult’. Byzantine movements and pathways from A, through X and Y, finally to B, with each pathway being itself irreversible twice over: in space and time, a feat accomplished by the subtle movements of the various thresholds and doorways that led from one place or room to another—all this being contained (or one could say, housed) in the absolute underground beneath the basement. The design of his senseless directions from the front door to the back kitchen door, which only brought one to a bifurcation point (that between a door outside and another that only led to more complications within the first floor), where a choice had to be made, was meant to have itself conducted along with the earlier history of the enigmatic fellow living deep within that other hill, prattling about inside a self-made cave of sorts. He was confident that in the fragments of this history, which were to be collected along the pathways from there to here, the whole enigma could be solved—though in a strange sort of way, a way, he thought, that would require quite a bit of recreation.

Now it was time for the children to, in their own way, recreate what had just transpired—in all its hopefully excruciating detail. It was the detail that he reveled in. And that’s just what tortured the children, and jeopardized their innocence. And that was what he feared most: that he would somehow be the immediate cause of its loss. But he wondered: would the very first detail—that it might be in a very real sense impossible to recount this strange fellow’s story—strike out upon the innocency of childhood he took upon himself to worry over, overtake the children and steal it away? He decided that he simply must begin with what could be said, to see if the impossibility of this strange fellow’s story being told would not, of its own inner paradoxes, present itself as such—an impossibility, a tale that could only be told as such.

He called out now children, I know your journey has been difficult, and has had to bear the stupidest of problems and complications, and that it perhaps had seemed as if neither the journey nor its complicated pathways would ever end, but it has—he was calling out from some distance away from the heavy door that had to be unlocked and slowly swung open—but there remains for us but one last complication to be overcome, and that begins first with your patience as I see to it that no society resides within the mechanism of the door’s lock. To which there was a great sigh of incredulity. They looked at each other knowing this was—or at least appeared to be—some game which none but he took seriously.

The music, which was turned down, turned from somber and inward to bright and exuberant. He then led himself closer to the door, at a point still some distance from it, where a great bronze telescope was positioned. I have reached my looking station he shouted and in a moment I will fix my eye upon the aperture of this telescope and it will reveal to me the extent or absence of any society residing therein. The children simply could not believe his speech—how deliberately he delivered each syllable. They just knew that he was conducting them in some game. They enjoyed it. The delight was obvious as they looked at each other smiling and then regarded the door itself, imagining what ‘society’ could possibly take up residence in lock mechanisms in doors—and especially ones that chose the eastern shore in particular (this question came from that odd place within where you feel that nobody except you and your friends and your brother and you mom and dad and sisters could possibly be from anywhere else, and that nobody else was from where you were from).

Let me see now… and one of the children, the older of the bunch, piped up as he began his analysis—“so, hey, you should look past the moon, and if you can’t, you should at least see if the people don’t make a shadow up on its face!” To which he replied, earnestly, indeed! I think I can look past it, and though he seems to be frowning upon us this evening, he still seems to be shadowless. So I think we’re in the clear—if there was a society living there, they’ve up and left. I think we can begin to throw the mechanism and undo the lock. Ah, but for the exact means of accomplishing this… his voice trailed off. Just a minute children. I must find the book of instructions. Again they sighed, in unison this time.

His thoughts wandered as he began his search for the necessary book, and he worried that when it came time to settle his mind on the task that seemed impossible— trying to convey to the children the impossibility of telling the hermit’s tale—he might not be up to it. A maxim might do the trick. “Where a man is a law wholly unto himself, he is free”—or something to that effect, he thought. And suddenly those lectures of his, years and years ago, flooded into his mind, recalling days of long travel for some hours of repetitious lecturing, hours on the return journey, traffic, rainy days, sadness occasionally, but mostly simple, happy and uncomplicated times. Times of no personal loneliness, but for that peculiar emptiness that occasions itself when you’re surrounded by family.

And that was the hermit, he considered. A law—of one and only one, never to be repeated; thus was he truly free. Yes. But if he was free, truly, then was he not incapable of being bound in any sense? A free man always escapes, is of the essence of escape and to tell of it—that would be the end of his freedom. Seeing as this is utterly impossible from the mere writer’s point of view, or from an historian’s (most especially), it follows that the story of the truly free man cannot be told. It can only be represented as a paradox. The man himself must be constituted totally from an abstract—and therefore unacceptable—position. But abstract in the worst possible sense, the old ‘object = X’. Freedom in the purest sense made one an absolute enigma, a beyond to everyone and everything. Enigma was the price of freedom, and to be free was to be outside of and beyond everything. The greatest of them had already realized this thousands of years ago—P. putting it before everything else, entirely and utterly even before a first. This one … he had to be a hermit, therefore. So it must be: Character is destiny—another maxim that seemed to be appropriate here, he thought.

Seeing the future in these children, he flashed inwardly back to his days of long travel to earn what little he could out of his credentials. He loved them, found them all comforting in that eventuality written in their dancing and twirling and in their stubbornness and their jovial refusals: staid and settled lives, rosy-cheeked and silently joyous, or sullen and emptied. He saw in them, these faces of innocence, what they must become—the man on the bus, fussing efficiently over his overcoat, with a face content and primed for holiday fruitcake and Madeira; the woman thinking of her purse and fidgeting with her files under a warm incandescence and pursuing her grandchildren as they arrived home, one by one, under a soft snow in midwinter. A youth distractedly talking to someone else at a distance, boredom always around the corner. A middle-aged woman just arriving at the end of something she cannot quite fathom, but which impels her forward into the arms of her children much later as she begins to ponder the dark light that awaits her…. He loved them. Secretly. And he made a pact with their necessity—they must exist, so they should. And will.

I seemed to have unearthed the correct tome, children—and now the music had come to an end, as if on cue for a needed pause, as the complications compounded—but … and the children collectively said, ‘Nooo!’ in something close to frustrated anger … I am told that only by recounting a tale of a voyage of some oddity or other, whose voyagers went in search of a new home, and had to travel across vast seas to reach its final destination, will there be given to the mechanism, once engaged, the proper length of time to bring its action of release to a proper conclusion. There is no other stretch of time that would seem to fit—indeed, we cannot, I am told, simply wait, for in waiting, the mechanism simply follows suit and comes to a halt; its action of release only completes itself if given a stretch of time that follows, quite precisely, this very peculiar tale. And as the children threw up their hands in total resignation, and considered doubling back and leaving the house entirely, the oldest of them was intrigued and managed to convince the rest to stay put and follow the absurdities out to the end. “What else have we got to do, right?” They shuffled and mumbled, and finally soft-landed onto a place of agreement—“but if there’s any more of this crap” one of them piped up, “I’m outta here!” To which the older child said “Sure thing—I think we’ll all be ready to leave”.

To undo this lock, then, required a prayer, a ritual—a return to his past (everything recounted on the tongue, he thought through as an arrow from those books come rushing through his mind, comes only from the past, is the past, and is felt out beyond it). There and then, far before he came upon this shore, he told himself that this—this!—was the work that he must finally set down to finish.

But … as always, today a sadness took him by surprise, and the children, being on the other side of this heavy door, could detect nothing of it but just the general absurdity that surrounded this whole game, spun from his need for delay and diversion (the secret pact he had established with the children from summer to fall). It was the sadness of days where he could find no consolation in what he believed was his destiny, inscribed in his heart, his meandering, searching, and dissipating heart. The chords of Brahms’s first piano trio (only the slow movement) could be heard irrupting in the depths of silence that exuberant baroque trio sonata left him. The gift of the baroque to the romantic was silence. He filled it with something that caressed, and let flow tears.

The children could not hear themselves—the music was pitched almost to deafening … and somehow he managed to set it so that the player only played the slow movements of several of Brahms’ chamber works (in his youth, besides hating the romantics, he only played the fast movements of anything before the eighteen-twenties).

The tale, the work, was folded away between layers of possibilities. Notebooks buried upon one another, with a leaf or two consumed by fury, only to lead off nowhere but to another notebook which found itself laden with several dozens of pages of neatly handwritten pieces, again trailing off. Many abandonments could amount to a real thing—was this an aphorism too? He, as he always managed to do, eventually seemed to find the right notebook. I must—he shouted from the shelves to the children, through the door—endeavor to read the text aloud; however, it must be read by means of my looking glass. “Whatever it takes mister!” some of the children shouted, as others, hushed by the eldest, mumbled gripes and whimpered after accepting profoundest defeat (for they slowly began to realize the challenge of having to double back without precise instructions on the return journey).

There is one more instruction to carry through, if we are to be absolutely faithful to this text, dear children! There were no sighs and lamentations this time; the little crowd was absolutely still, as the music hushed and fell silent. I must undertake to project this text through the keyhole, beyond the vacant quarters for this vanished society that might have been residing within the reaches of the lock mechanism, and have you read the tale aloud. I will follow along with the text and help you with the more difficult and intricate passages. We may allow for periodic interruptions, but I fear this might set the lock mechanism back several notches depending on the length of your pauses. “Oh no, we’ll just read through it. But how long is it going to be, mister?” one of them piped up, desperately. Not too long, but long enough—the mechanism’s quite intricate of itself, and requires the rather precise rhythms and harmonies that this tale might create. And that’s why I must follow along, quietly speaking the words with you and filling in for when the passages become too cumbersome for you to pronounce on your own—this so as to make sure the words are well-said and follow one another as they should. Now, shall we begin? “Yeah, c’mon!”

Behind the children, as they were soon to discover, there was a kind of film covering a precise section of the wall, visible as a distinct absence of wallpapering (a subtle wallpaper, of floral design, but in muted colors and curly wisps of embroidery). It was into this absence that the text would be projected.

“How are you going to project it?” the eldest asked, insistently. Like this! And suddenly the motes of dust were aflame with a thin beam of light emanating from the larger keyhole (there were in fact two, an upper and lower portal, of which the upper was the larger of the two).

They began, haltingly at first; but soon a rhythm was discovered, and the cadence quickened. His voice carried theirs, and the little voices sounded like the little hushed cacophonies of a thousand church services, where the voices meld into a monotony of languid articulations, homogeneous as the incense rising before the altar of god.