Was that the penalty?
No. There was a greater cost even than that.
What was it?
That this too would be forgot.
Would that be such a bad idea?
Wait and see.
Go on.
He drank the cup and gave himself up to the dark mercies of these ancient serranos. And they in turn led him from the stone out into the road and they walked up and back with him. They seemed to be urging him to contemplate his surroundings, the rocks and the mountains, the stars which were belled above them against the eternal blackness of the world's nativity.
What were they sayin?
I dont know.
You couldnt hear them?
The man didnt answer. He sat pondering the forms of the concrete overhead. The nests of the swallows clung in the high corners like colonies of small mud hornos inverted there. The traffic had increased. The boxshaped shadows which the trucks shook off on entering beneath the overpass waited for them where they emerged into the sun again on the far side. He lifted one hand in a slow tossing gesture. There is no way to answer your question. It is not the case that there are small men in your head holding a conversation. There is no sound. So what language is that? In any case this was a deep dream for the dreamer and in such dreams there is a language that is older than the spoken word at all. The idiom is another specie and with it there can be no lie or no dissemblance of the truth.
I thought you said they were talkin.
In my dream of them perhaps they were talking. Or perhaps I was only putting upon it the best construction that I knew. The traveler's dream is another matter.
Go ahead.
The ancient world holds us to account. The world of our fathers ...
It seems to me if they were talkin in your dream they'd have to be talkin in his. It's the same dream.
It's the same question.
What's the answer?
We're coming to that.
Andale.
The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future. At the core of our life is the history of which it is composed and in that core are no idioms but only the act of knowing and it is this we share in dreams and out. Before the first man spoke and after the last is silenced forever. Yet in the end he did speak, as we shall see.
All right.
So he walked with his captors until his mind was calm and he knew that his life was now in other hands.
There dont seem to be much fight in him.
You forget the hostage.
The girl.
Yes.
Go on.
It is important to understand that he did not give himself up willingly. The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. Where there is no penalty there can be no prize. You understand.
Go on.
They seemed to be waiting for him to come to some decision. To tell them something perhaps. He studied everything about him that could be studied. The stars and the rocks and the face of the sleeping girl upon her pallet. His captors. Their helmets and their costumes. The torches which they carried that were made of hollow pipes filled with oil and wicks of rope and the flames which were sheltered from the wind by panes of isinglass set into caming and roofed and flued with beaten copper sheet. He tried to see into their eyes but those eyes were dark and they had shadowed them with blacking like men called upon to traverse wastes of snow. Or sand. He tried to see their feet how they were shod but their robes fell over the rocks about them and he could not. What he saw was the strangeness of the world and how little was known and how poorly one could prepare for aught that was to come. He saw that a man's life was little more than an instant and that as time was eternal therefore every man was always and eternally in the middle of his journey, whatever be his years or whatever distance he had come. He thought he saw in the world's silence a great conspiracy and he knew that he himself must then be a part of that conspiracy and that he had already moved beyond his captors and their plans. If he had any revelation it was this: that he was repository to this knowing which he came to solely by his abandonment of every former view. And with this he turned to his captors and he said: I will tell you nothing.
I will tell you nothing. That is what he said and that is all he said. In the next moment they led him to the stone and laid him down upon it and they raised up the girl from her pallet and led her forward. Her bosom was heaving.
Her what?
Her bosom was heaving.
Go ahead.
She leaned and kissed him and stepped away and then the archatron came forward with his sword and raised it in his two hands above him and clove the traveler's head from his body.
I guess that was the end of that.
Not at all.
I suppose you're fixin to tell me he survived havin his head lopped off.
Yes. He woke from his dream and sat shivering with cold and fright. In the selfsame desolate pass. The selfsame barren range of mountains. The selfsame world.
And you?
The narrator smiled wistfully, like a man remembering his childhood. These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence. This is how he is joined to the world. For escaping from the world's dream of him this is at once his penalty and his reward. So. I might have woken then myself but as the world neared so did the traveler upon his rock begin to fade and as I was not yet willing to part company with him I called out to him.
Did he have a name?
No. No name.
What did you call?
I simply called upon him to stay and stay he did and so I slept on and the traveler turned to me and waited.
I guess he was surprised to see you.
A good question. He seemed indeed to be surprised and yet in dreams it is often the case that the greatest extravagances seem bereft of their power to astonish and the most improbable chimeras appear commonplace. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.
I got another question.
You want to know if the traveler knew that he'd been dreaming. If indeed he had been dreaming.
Like you say, you've told the story before.
Yes.
What's the answer.
You might not like it.
That ought not to stop you.
He asked me the same question.
He wanted to know if he'd been dreaming?
Yes.
What did he say?
He asked me if I had seen them.
Them people with the robes and the candles and all.
Yes.
And.
Well. I had. Of course.
So that's what you told him.
I told him the truth.
Well it would have served as well for a lie wouldnt it?
Because?
If it caused him to believe that what he dreamt was real.
Yes. You see the difficulty.
Billy leaned and spat. He studied the landscape to the north. I better get on, he said. I got a ways to go.
You have people waiting for you?
I hope so. I sure would like to see them.
He wished me to be his witness. But in dreams there can be no witness. You said as much yourse
lf.
It was just a dream. You dreamt him. You can make him do whatever you like.
Where was he before I dreamt him?
You tell me.
My belief is this, and I say it again: His history is the same as yours or mine. That is the stuff he is made of. What stuff other? Had I created him as God makes men how then would I not know what he would say before he ever spoke? Or how he'd move before he did so? In a dream we dont know what's coming. We are surprised.
All right.
So where is it coming from?
I dont know.
Two worlds touch here. You think men have power to call forth what they will? Evoke a world, awake or sleeping? Make it breathe and then set out upon it figures which a glass gives back or which the sun acknowledges? Quicken those figures with one's own joy and one's despair? Can a man be so hid from himself? And if so who is hid? And from whom?
You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability of the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.
So is that the end of the story?
No. The traveler stood at the stone and on the stone visible to see were marks of axe and sword and the dark oxidations of the blood of those who'd died there and which the weathers of the world were powerless to erase. Here the traveler had lain down to sleep with no thought of death and yet when he awoke he'd no thought other. The heavens which he had been invited to scrutinize by his executioners now wore a different look. The order of his life seemed altered in midstride. Some halt-stitch in the workings of things. Those heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to pulse with a reckless energy. As if in their turning things had come uncottered, uncalendared. He thought that there might even be some timefault in the record. That henceforth there might be no way to log new sightings. Would that matter?
You're askin me.
Yes.
I think it would matter to you. About him I got no idea. What do you think?
The narrator paused thoughtfully. I think, he said, that the dreamer imagined himself at some crossroads. Yet there are no crossroads. Our decisions do not have some alternative. We may contemplate a choice but we pursue one path only. The log of the world is composed of its entries, but it cannot be divided back into them. And at some point this log must outdistance any possible description of it and this I believe is what the dreamer saw. For as the power to speak of the world recedes from us so also must the story of the world lose its thread and therefore its authority. The world to come must be composed of what is past. No other material is at hand. And yet I think he saw the world unraveling at his feet. The procedures which he had adopted for his journey now seemed like an echo from the death of things. I think he saw a terrible darkness looming.
I need to be gettin on.
The man did not answer. He sat contemplating the roadside vegas and the barren lands beyond now shimmering in the newest sun.
This desert about us was once a vast sea, he said. Can such a thing vanish? Of what are seas made? Or I? Or you?
I dont know.
The man stood up and stretched. He stretched mightily, reaching and turning. He looked down at Billy and smiled.
And that's the end of the story, Billy said.
No.
He squatted and held up his hand, palm out.
Hold up your hand, he said. Like this.
Is this a pledge of some kind?
No. You are pledged already. You always were. Hold up your hand.
He held up his hand as the man had asked.
You see the likeness?
Yes.
Yes. It is senseless to claim that things exist in their instancing only. The template for the world and all in it was drawn long ago. Yet the story of the world, which is all the world we know, does not exist outside of the instruments of its execution. Nor can those instruments exist outside of their own history. And so on. This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.
So what happened to the traveler?
Nothing. There is no end to the story. He woke and all was as before. He was free to go.
To other men's dreams.
Perhaps. Of such dreams and of the rituals of them there can also be no end. The thing that is sought is altogether other. However it may be construed within men's dreams or by their acts it will never make a fit. These dreams and these acts are driven by a terrible hunger. They seek to meet a need which they can never satisfy, and for that we must be grateful.
And you were still asleep.
Yes. At the end of the dream we walked out in the dawn and there was an encampment on the plains below from which no smoke rose for all that it was cold and we went down to that place but all was abandoned there. There were huts of skin staked out upon the rocky ground with slagiron pikes and within these huts were remnants of old meals untouched and cold upon cold plates of clay. There were standing stores of primitive and antique arms carved in their metal parts and inlaid with filigree of gold and there were robes sewn up from skins of northern animals and rawhide trunks with latches and corners of hammered copper and these were much scarred from their travels and the years of it and inside of them were old accounts and ledgerbooks and records of the history of that vanished folk, the path they had followed in the world and their reckonings of the cost of that journey. And in a place apart a skeleton of old sepia bones sewn up in a leather shroud.
We walked together through all that desolation and all that abandonment and I asked him if the people were away at some calling but he said that they were not. When I asked him to tell me what had happened he looked at me and he said: I have been here before. So have you. Everything is here for the taking. Touch nothing. Then I woke.
From his dream or yours?
There was only one dream to wake from. I woke from that world to this. Like the traveler, all I had forsaken I would come upon again.
What had you forsaken?
The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone. The marks of steel upon it. Names carved in the corrosible lime among stone fishes and ancient shells. Things dim and dimming. The dry sea floor. The tools of migrant hunters. The dreams enchased upon the blades of them. The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night.
I got to get on.
I wish you well, cuate.
And you.
I hope your friends await you.
And I.
Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?
HE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in a concrete tile by the highwayside where a roadcrew had been working. A big yellow Euclid truck was standing out on the mud and the pale and naked concrete pillars of an east-west onramp stood beyond the truck, curving away, clustered and rising without capital or pediment like the ruins of some older order standing in the dusk. In the night a wind blew down from the north that bore the taste of rain but no rain fell. He could smell the wet creosote out on the desert. He tried to sleep. After a while he got up and sat in the round mouth of the tile like a man in a bell and looked out upon the darkness. Out on the desert to the west
stood what he took for one of the ancient spanish missions of that country but when he studied it again he saw that it was the round white dome of a radar tracking station. Beyond that and partly overcast also in the moonlight he saw a row of figures struggling and clamoring silently in the wind. They appeared to be dressed in robes and some among them fell down in their struggling and rose to flail again. He thought they must be laboring toward him across the darkened desert yet they made no progress at all. They had the look of inmates in a madhouse palely gowned and pounding mutely at the glass of their keeping. He called to them but his shout was carried away on the wind and in any case they were too far to hear him. After a while he rolled himself again in his blanket on the floor of the tile and after a while he slept. In the morning the storm had passed and what he saw out on the desert in the new day's light were only rags of plastic wrapping hanging from a fence where the wind had blown them.
He made his way east to De Baca County in New Mexico and he looked for the grave of his sister but he could not find it. The people of that country were kind to him and the days warmed and he wanted for little in his life on the road. He stopped to talk to children or to horses. Women fed him in their kitchens and he slept rolled in his blanket under the stars and watched meteorites fall down the sky. He drank one evening from a spring beneath a cottonwood, leaning to bow his mouth and suck from the cold silk top of the water and watch the minnows drift and recover in the current beneath him. There was a tin cup on a stob and he took it down and sat holding it. He'd not seen a cup at a spring in years and he held it in both hands as had thousands before him unknown to him yet joined in sacrament. He dipped the cup into the water and raised it cool and dripping to his mouth.
In the fall of that year when the cold weather came he was taken in by a family just outside of Portales New Mexico and he slept in a shed room off the kitchen that was much like the room he'd slept in as a boy. On the hallway wall hung a framed photograph that had been printed from a glass plate broken into five pieces and in the photograph certain ancestors were puzzled back together in a study that cohered with its own slightly skewed geometry. Apportioning some third or separate meaning to each of the figures seated there. To their faces. To their forms.
The family had a girl twelve and a boy fourteen and their father had bought them a colt they kept stabled in a shed behind the house. It wasnt much of a colt but he went out in the afternoon when they came in off the schoolbus and showed them how to work the colt with rope and halter. The boy liked the colt but the girl was in love with it and she'd go out at night after supper in the cold and sit in the straw floor of the shed and talk to it.
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