It was the great insult of the probabilities that troubled him without end. Why not one final, just outcome, where all the yearnings, ambitions, and selfless hopes could be realized? Why so many Waterloos? Why live so many histories and not have what is most desired? He was at sea with his humanity, as he had been in the open boat during the storm when he had fled Corsica. He had imagined himself the captain of his own ship, but there was too much below decks. This monstrous residue of nature could never be understood in a single lifetime.
“Historian!” cried Napoleon in his clouds. He howled at the darkness. It was filled with small creatures. They swarmed around him, eating his flesh.
“Yes?” answered a kindly voice.
“Give me what I want.”
“And what is that?”
“Blinders. The mercy granted to horses!”
“And you wish to be... blinded, to what?”
“To these pitiless, endless outcomes. Even one, whichever, would settle my mind, and my stomach.”
“Which one?” asked the historian, seeing how, when offered the freedom of history, the hero would never be satisfied, believing that by a single act of will he might suspend all the currents of injustice and dissatisfaction...
The darkness swirled. Napoleon cried out in agony for release. The particles whispered through their regime of charged geometries, mimicking time, and the worlds inside could not be guessed from their outward simplicities of physics, so far beyond Newton.
The historian thought, I told him who and what he is, which is more than I can ever learn about myself.
As he lived Napoleon’s fatal agony, the historian relented.
Napoleon sighed.
All the probabilities collapsed into one well-shaped tragedy of defeat and humiliation.
Waterloo awaited him, its greenery serene, its mud welcoming.
It could never have been otherwise, throughout all the variants, thought the historian. For that, another human nature was needed. Human conquerors, at their idealistic best, were born of exasperation with their humanity and sought to remake nature. They had always lacked the tools, and became even more frustrated with age. The intractability of history, Napoleon’s exasperation with his family and with himself, had led him into a trap. Humanity had always deserved its tyrants; it admired its tyrants for as long as they served the common tyranny in every individual. This was not what Napoleon’s ideals had needed, and he wore out his own brain and body thinking he might do better, somehow rearrange the drama.
All these bits of evidence! Who knew what went on in Napoleon’s heart, who could say with certainty from all the recorded pieces? Truth was elusive, often pure fantasy. These variants and probabilities grew from a baseline primary world; but any possible world could be a baseline. Our primary, he reminded himself, had just emerged from a dark age of virtual fantasies, a trap which had almost replaced life itself. Unchecked, only the death of the sun would have ended it.
The historian deleted the whole mass of proliferating variants from his plenum. The ever-branching tree toppled, cut off from its roots.
And as Napoleon slept, the historian knew what to do.
Simplify, simplify.
He rewrote, or rather, wrote a new history, such as it was, as real as his encounter with Napoleon was, and it became real, in at least one meaning of the term:
In the days before his exile to St. Helena, Countess Marie Walewska, who had come to the conqueror between his military campaigns like a ministering angel, who befriended him in the hope that he would help her country, and who had borne him a son, rescues Napoleon from the clutches of the British by dressing him as her maid. They escape to America, where Napoleon takes up a new trade—plumbing in wood and ceramic and metal. These are new skills, and he grows rich from his invention of useful devices, which Jefferson adopts for his own great beloved folly, Monticello. Napoleon’s health improves, especially his stomach, as a result of Countess Walewska’s Polish cuisine.
Simplify, simplify. Artfully, the historian spins the probabilities, so that this world will never be found by anyone, and launches it into infinity.
Nappy dies a happy man, leaving his heirs a great entrepreneurship, Nappy Bone & Sons, Waterworks. He passes quietly, with his mother whispering to him, “Sleep, my Napoleone, sleep my Nappy,” as she slips her blade of vendetta from his brain.
A Piano Full of Dead Spiders
I HEAR THEM PLAYING GHOSTLY SONGS IN THE PIANO,” Felix said, “but they’re gone when I look inside.” “You don’t really expect to catch them at it, do you?” I answered playfully, tempted to ask whether he meant the spiders or the songs. “Oh, but I do! I will catch them at it!” He gazed at me tolerantly, and seemed to pity not only my skepticism but my lack of a creative life, even though throughout our years of friendship he had never even hinted at feeling this way toward me. He was the creative one, and I simply went my own way, with no blame attached. I didn’t like my sudden, reproachful suspicion of him, either, and felt that I had to be mistaken. “You should write down their music,” I said, thinking that it didn’t matter where he imagined it came from, as long as it came, and that I should encourage him because my friend the gifted composer was only trying to get himself back to work as best he could. June had moved out on him because she couldn’t bear to watch him sinking. At least that was how it seemed to me. I had never truly understood their relationship; it seemed loving and affectionate, but I couldn’t see what she wanted from it except to be the nurturing mate while he worked; but one side of the deal had died, and I had begun to wonder about my own part in the tragedy. When I talked with June she assured me that she had not completely given up on the love of her life, but she wouldn’t tell me what she was going to do about it.
“I don’t have to write it down,” Felix said. “They play my music —after they take it from me when I sleep. I hear them crawling around in my mind.”
“Music you’ve written down?” I asked.
“No—but it is mine, Bruno, even before I write it down. You don’t forget what you’re driven to write down. You carry it around all day, waiting to pounce.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You might never write it down,” he said, “but it’s always yours. If they opened your brain after death and there was a way to hear the music, they’d hear it.” He grimaced, and I had the crazy image of a split brain spilling bushels of black notes, all in the right order.
I gave him an exasperated look, which he didn’t like. “Spiders don’t play piano,” I blurted out, expecting a fit of temper. Necessary fantasies are denied at great peril, and maybe this one was what he needed to get himself composing again.
“Sometimes they sing,” he said calmly, as if he were gazing out across a peaceful ocean.
“Spiders don’t sing,” I said, still unable to restrain myself.
“You weren’t here when it happened.”
“And they don’t steal music from your mind before you’ve written it down,” I said, hoping that the truth would serve him best if he could accept it. “That’s your tip-off,” I continued, unable to hold back. “Your composing comes to you, but you don’t hear it unless you believe that the spiders are singing... or playing. You’re tricking yourself into remembering because you’re not writing it down for some reason but can’t bear to forget it. There’s a part of you that knows exactly what to do and won’t let you forget the work you’re doing. Pretty clever of... the rest of you—to help out, I mean.” I heard the pleading in my voice and knew that it sounded lame to him, even if it was the truth. Worse, my hammering at his delusion might prove disastrous.
But he only smiled at me. “That is clever of you, Bruno. But they do come and crawl around in my mind and take my music. I feel it ripped out sometimes, as if they’re hungry for it.”
“Are there spiders?” I asked. “Are they physical? Or are you talking about ghosts?”
He nodded solemnly, secure in his story, as if he were accepting some i
nevitable fate as a note-producing cow. “I can’t keep them out. I think they’re physical, but they have immaterial... ways.” He laughed and said, “You’d rather think that spiders had come down on their lines while I slept and crawled into my ears and connected to the nerves of my hearing and played my brain like a musical instrument!”
“But you’ve not actually seen a single one of them,” I said.
“I don’t need to. I hear them. I feel them when they crawl around in my mind.”
“But you’d like to see them going at it, right in front of you?”
“Well, maybe...”
“Then go catch them at it,” I said. “Prove to yourself that this is just... an imaginative way you’ve... dreamed up... to get your work done. Damn it, Felix, that’s all it is!” I was convinced that this was all it was, but a part of me suspected that it could be something worse and irreversible. The bridge was out and I had to stop the train.
He smiled, pitying my frightened disbelief, and said, “You are clever. It could have been that way, but this isn’t a delusion. I don’t need to see them.” He stared at me as if he had delivered himself of a formal proof in geometry. I stared back, determined to be calm and practical.
“But you know,” he went on, “if this is just some fairy tale that I need to have, then you’re doing me harm by trying to convince me otherwise, aren’t you?”
An old, concealed game was playing out between us, and I felt that I had to be the loser.
“You’re hopeless,” I said finally. “But who am I to argue? If you need this vision to do your work, then so be it.”
“Then why argue if you thought that from the start? Why try to throw doubt into me?” He paused. “Oh,” he added, smiling. “You weren’t sure, were you?”
“I was of two minds,” I said feebly. “I wouldn’t like to think my best friend was nuts. But it makes more sense now that I see what’s going on.”
“I’m not nuts or merely deluded,” he said, his tenor strong and resonant as if he were reciting poetry. “And I do hear and feel... spiders, and one day I’ll show them to you, when I catch the little buggers at it.”
I had the sudden image of him laughing madly and dancing a jig around the piano.
We looked across the polished wooden floor, to the baby grand piano. It waited there, shiny and silent, and I thought for a moment that if I listened very, very closely, I would hear the spiders playing his work, such was the spell of his conviction. The man who sold him the piano had told him it had once belonged to Glenn Gould, but I didn’t believe it. Felix would have bought it anyway, since it fit into his new house perfectly. He might be deluded, but he wasn’t impractical.
Felix was a good example of how things go wrong with creative people. They spark, start out with all kinds of irrelevant but necessary justifications, light up and burn for a spell, then reach their mid-thirties and it’s all over. They settle for so much less in themselves, and go thud into middle age as they head for cover and security, throwing everything that’s good in them overboard for a piece of bread, just to fulfill the expectations of other people by waving around a weekly paycheck like a passport to the country of the elect. The ways of piecemeal slavery spread like a cancerous program, which is why even successful writers, poets, and artists are viewed by too many people as only “bums with money,” since they fail to shine sufficiently to dazzle people too dull to notice. And when they tell people that it’s only once around in this world, and if you don’t climb the Everests of achievement you’ll fall forever, these solid folk reply, “Oh, yeah? Well, that’s just too bad. Who in hell do you think you are, anyway?” Most people get little or nothing out of life so “Why should you?” is what they’re really selling. And when the damage is done, the naysayers are secretly glad. It’s their revenge for their own lost dreams. Later, when they hear that so-and-so had become whomsoever, they say sheepishly, “Who knew that’s who he was!” as if it had taken no time at all! And secretly they still believe they’re right, that maybe so-and-so had done it just to spite them. “Well, he always wanted to be famous!” Some even say that it’s only someone with the same name, that it’s not the same person they knew. What always gave me a chill were those who were never noticed, yet had completed their accomplishment and gone uncomplaining into the dark. No one knew their names. How many were there? Hell indeed!
Felix was right on the edge. He needed his spiders, ghostly or real, to provoke the music in his skull; that obligated him to write it down, to work. He had to get it out of himself somehow; it didn’t matter how he did it, or where he thought it came from, because it had to come from somewhere, so what did it matter? He was hanging on to what was best about him in any way possible. He was desperate in a heroically roundabout way, to live up to his myth of himself—and it seemed to be working.
“I’ll videotape it,” he said, “next time I hear them in the piano. That’s what I’ll do.”
“Videos,” I answered with the voice of his enemy, “can make you see and hear anything these days,” and knew at once that I should have said nothing more to discourage him. He might want to prove it to me more than he needed to write the music down, to prove to himself that he had not lost his mind. I wanted him writing it down; but now my doubts had made him wonder, and I regretted pushing his nose in the truth. After all, he had been alone when it happened. A man alone can fool himself. Someone has to witness the miracle, and that runs the risk of exposure.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’ll just have to be here to see them at it.”
I nodded, surprised at myself, and afraid that I had only damaged my friend further in my confused self-justification.
June only smiled when I told her—and I felt that she too was deluded. It came out of her eyes, an invincible wave of conviction, defeating all reality, as she told me not to worry.
If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you can’t ever look back far enough to explain anyone or anything; the rich perversity of the universe, which seems to let just about everything happen, just won’t let you see it all. But I kept thinking that you might glimpse just enough. Maybe.
In the early days new music had flowed from Felix with a deceptive ease—in all the older forms and new takes on orchestral, chamber, song and dance, and pop forms, defying classification, instrumentation, and styles of performance. Yet Felix was unhappy in his acclaim and financial security. He respected only those who accepted his work “grudgingly.”
“What is it?” I had asked. “Really, truly.”
“You want to know?” he replied, as if threatening to assault me.
“If you want to tell me.” Sometimes, in telling myself that I was trying to understand him, I felt more like a fishhook than a friend.
“It’s irrelevant, of course,” he said, “but I don’t want to do what’s easy. Oh, I’ll do it, but I most want to do what’s hardest.”
“That might not make your work any better,” I said.
“Maybe not, but I’d like to be truly challenged.”
“Haven’t you been?”
“Not ever,” he said. “Not once.”
“But if you haven’t exerted yourself,” I said, “might it be that you suspect the effort would be unfruitful?”
“No,” he said. “I suspect that all the work I’ve done is not good, and all the acceptance I’ve had is given to me by fools.”
“But is it bad? Surely you know.”
“How can I know, unless I try to surpass... go beyond myself.”
“Beyond yourself you might not be as able as you are.”
“Yes! That would be a test. I would know what the real edge of difficulty is like.”
“It might horrify you, you know. Incapacity is a terrible thing to face. You obviously believe you could face it and rise higher, but you might only confront your limits and fall back frustrated.”
“Yes! On both counts. I want to know where I stand. It’s the only way to even have a chance of exceeding the
place where I now stand too easily.”
“You do stand tall,” I said.
He gazed at me as a child might and said, “Thank you, Bruno, but I simply can’t endure where I am.”
“You’ve worked hard enough to deserve what you have. Your dissatisfaction is misplaced.”
“But I haven’t worked hard at all! Can you understand? I must go to the edge—or forever wonder about what might have been.”
“It may turn out to be illusory.” And be a precipice, I thought.
“We can’t know that, Bruno.”
He was right—but in a vacuum of conjecture, and I feared that he would lose what he already had by diminishing himself before the public. Nothing drops into the past quicker than a has-been, even if that term only confirms the prejudices of the talentless.
He tried—but faced with the great wall he had set himself to scale he began using up materials from his notebooks. Every old, rejected scrap he had set down in his youth replaced new inspirations. He was eating away at the foundations of his composer’s life rather than building on them with new work. He substituted excavation for a transforming memory, and so the new work did not come. He stole from his youth, in which he now placed a naive faith, with little or no creative change. He strip-mined the past unchanged. Collaboration with one’s youthful self was not merely the eating of one’s seed corn, it was a raising of the dead, I told myself with a growing fear.
His ease deserted him. He lived in a desert of the past, producing only glimpses of what he hoped to find, until he could no longer work and started giving piano concerts, until no one would invite him, because one day he got up and asked the audience why they were applauding something so dreadful.
I was in the audience at that last concert. He played as if discovering each note of his “Athletic Sonata in B” for the first time, as if the strings and hammers of the piano were betraying him. His hands became two monstrous spiders lashed to his arms, and for the first time I admitted to myself that I had wanted to be him, what he had once been, and even what he had become, and I repented my doubts. Suddenly, as I watched him play, I wanted desperately to see and hear his spiders, imagining naively that the delusion would somehow bestow upon me all his talent and skill, and I would become something more than what I was; I would be somebody.
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