And all the while as Alden spoke, Emmett nodded and nodded his head, as if all of this were quite reasonable, and he had known it all along. So that, when Alden was finished—when, at last, he had nothing left to say—and though Emmett, still thoughtfully nodding his head, did not yet respond, he felt that something had been lifted.
The effect of it made him feel almost giddy; he even began to laugh.
You probably think I’m a madman, he said to Emmett then.
Emmett shook his head. On the contrary, he observed, it was all quite natural that Alden should feel as he did. Everything did eventually—he said—give way, crumble, explode, or otherwise disappear— just as well, and at a similar frequency to, in its various ways, its having come into being at all. Everything did (every moment, every thought, every whim or desire), as Alden would have it, get rolled over or under, by and through the very possibility of its approach; of its having been extracted from, cast (even if only in the imagination) as something separate from the wheel. It was, perhaps, then, not a matter so much of reinventing the wheel, so to speak (he chuckled here—softly, to himself), but of allowing it a scope and course vaster than is, at any time, perceivable to the eye.
Would you not after all agree, Emmett continued seriously, that in detecting a pattern of “the great wheel’s” approach in direct proportion and relation to your own life, you risk severely limiting not only your perception of its path, but—as a more or less direct consequence—your own? You may entirely fail to see, that is, the manner in which what you claim to acknowledge as far larger and more powerful than yourself actually is that way: something over which you have no possibility of control and within whose ambit you play only a minimal part. Is it not, perhaps, then, more likely, Emmett asked—now turning for the first time to face Alden—that you have, of late, developed a false sense of responsibility over that which exists beyond your control, precisely in an effort to control it? He laughed. You must know, he added, that for fate and fortune to be rendered powerless, broken of “all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,” one must only cease, at last, to count “the spokes and fellies …”
Now it was Alden’s turn to nod and nod, and so relieved and comforted by Emmett’s words did he feel that, for a brief but beautiful moment he could actually see how it all fit together, just like Emmett said that it did— but at such a remove that, even as he saw it, he knew he would never understand it, and even that became, in that moment, a strange comfort. Was conscience—in either sense: to be, or to have—simply a matter of locating a recognizable pattern between things? A forcing of circumstances into a shape that, if Emmett was correct, could at best be considered figurative, provisional—abstract? Sustainable only within, and according to, the intensely personal light lent by an individual mind?
Yes. Certainly. There must be (Emmett was right) something larger, outside and beyond all that; something that did not bend or conform to such a limited perspective—but shaped it all the same. And if this was so—well, then, conscience itself could only be considered a reaction to, a figurative expression of, that which existed beyond its control. One did not, indeed, suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; nor could one, through simple opposition, end them. They existed beyond all allegory; every possible appeal.
SO RELIEVED WAS ALDEN to have been able to arrive in this way, with the help of his friend, at such a new and redeeming understanding not only of his own past, but of all things, that even when—not long after— Emmett, too, disappeared, he managed (almost successfully) to resist grieving the loss in personal terms. Though he often found it hard, and at times even felt that same cold flicker of doubt—a creeping suspicion of the way the great wheel continued to grind itself, as though deliberately against him—he, for the most part, succeeded in looking at the event as yet a further reminder that what Emmett had said was true. One understood very little of one’s own life, Alden reminded himself—let alone any other’s. Perhaps it had even been fortuitous, in some small way, that he had managed to bequeath to Emmett his past, and just when he did.
It was high time to be rid of it.
IT WAS IN THIS spirit that Alden gathered what belongings he could from the drawers of Emmett’s narrow room, and sent what he found, as a final gesture, to Emmett’s mother. The room had by that time been taken over by an acquaintance of Emmett’s from his single semester at Yale—an Egyptologist, intent on resurrecting Champollion’s English rival, Thomas Young, as the true interpreter of the Rosetta stone. Perhaps due to his respect for history, and the potential intelligibility of even its most indecipherable clues, he had left Emmett’s stacks of papers untouched in the closets and drawers. When Alden leafed through them for the first time he was unsure, at first, what it was he’d discovered. It appeared to be a sort of freehand journal interrupted by quotidian lists: things to do, items to buy, acquaintances to call on—and so forth. Upon closer examination, however, he saw that it was in fact the first draft of a novel, based loosely on the events of Emmett’s real life. It was Alden’s own appearance within these pages that had caused him, at first, to mistake the work as a personal diary. But because he could not recall the events described or the words that either pertained or were attributed to him—except for the telltale entrance of key elements of his own story: those details he had shared with Emmett as the two of them had walked home from Dick’s house together that night along the Canal Saint-Martin—he was forced to reassess. Now, leafing back through the disorderly sheaves of the manuscript, he noticed that the first mention of his name was accompanied by a note: “Change name,” the note said. In the margins two alternatives were scrawled: “Randall? Barney?”
What a strange feeling came over him then, as he transformed suddenly into an unknowable character before his own eyes—and on account only of the slight pressure applied by his dead friend’s pen! That he could have become for Emmett a Randall—even a Barney! That all of the material of his own life, which he had so painfully unburdened, could be disassembled and rearranged to make what even he could see would have been the strangest of fictions! That even the smallest details of himself could have been altered in any imaginable way. That his hair, for example, could have prematurely grayed; that he could have developed a slight twitch in his right eye from an injury that had never actually been inflicted upon him; that all of these things could have taken place in the extraordinary alchemy of the imagination. It was astonishing! To think that all that time in the months before Emmett’s death, and unbeknown to any of them, he had been reassembling everything around him—even the small, personal details of their own lives—into something entirely his own. Even more strange was the realization that the person Alden had been (not the character, half sketched, on the page, but the disparate parts of himself, which had floated around in Emmett’s mind and had constituted for him a— if shifting and changeable—“whole”) was gone. The “he” that he was, or would have become for Emmett, was now irrevocably lost. And if “he” was gone, had he ever existed at all? He who, even in the manuscript itself, had diffused into the disparate parts of the text— remaining ultimately exterior to it, unexplained: the character underdeveloped, the story—wherever it had been going—forever destinationless now, existing only in fragments, and interrupted by long lists, which Alden had at first mistaken for a quotidian accounting of daily life.
Gradually, he understood the lists for what they were: short bursts of inspiration its author was no longer able to contain within the slow progression of sentences on the page. Lists of place names, or objects, or other words without seeming destination or source, trailed each other in a sudden brainstorm, as in the following example, down the center of the page:
Gray owl seen through window.
Memory of St. John, as related by …
Piccadilly Circus Story
Rebecca?
If I had my wits and your age …
Unstoppable
“The Captain’s Daughter”
Mother-
Electra scene
Dancing figure
Lunch with Jude/Marc Anthony
Suspended constructions in space
What mystery! To consider in what way these baffling inventories might have one day emerged in full sentences, as communicable histories on the page! To reflect on the ways that Alden himself might have one day traced the patterns of his own life within it.
As it was, there were only these fragments, forever isolate now, detached from meaning—like reels of film doomed to retain whatever had been darkly inscribed there without once, even briefly, having been brought, flickeringly, to form. And what was memory, after all, but that dark chamber? It would be only by chance that one day you stumbled upon one—looking, no doubt, for something else. Only by chance that a slight misstep would set all the reels at once unraveling; whole sections of them suddenly glinting in the available light.
THIS WAS NO DOUBT the experience of Mrs. Henderson, who would, without warning, be overtaken by extreme vertigo, like the first warning of a migraine headache coming on, and have to sit down; have to pause in whatever she was doing—sometimes at the most inopportune moments—and shake her head vigorously for a while as if trying to get something as pervasive and material as water from her brain. She told Alden this in a letter she wrote, in response to his own, in the months following Emmett’s death. She would, she said, be “overcome,” all of a sudden, by the “senselessness” of it all. It would happen at the oddest moments. When she was, for all intents and purposes, thinking of nothing at all. (The mind could—it was devastating for the heart to learn, she wrote—continue to run along its usual course, as if it had not been, and never would be, interrupted at all.)
Poor Mrs. Henderson. Every week with her flowers. The women’s names on the ancestors’ graves. And then Emmett’s, and no woman’s name there … But it was then that it hit her. It was she—she, Estaline Henderson, née Boutte—who had, for this life, and now for this death, suffered the most. Alden hoped she took back with her on account of it a single flower. That she carried it away from the cemetery and that it was a small comfort to her as she made her way, picking her high heels with every step out of the dirt, back to the car. Just the smallest of comforts— that she was, from that graveyard, taking something away. Something that could be hers alone; that she could watch slowly decompose in its jar, and would provide for her—that slow, organic deterioration, as first the flower wilted, then lost its color, then finally began to fester in the glass—some small relief.
But she never told Alden she did this, if she did. Alden had only the one letter, in which she thanked him for the belongings he had returned to her—the letters, the knit gloves, the photographs, a handmade ashtray whose origins he was unfamiliar with—just the few things that it seemed conceivable to fit into the international mail. She described her weekly pilgrimage to the Henderson graves and in some detail recounted the illustrious deaths of each of the members familiar to her. Then, without a clear transition, so that at first Alden was unsure whether it had been made at all, or whether they were still in the realm of the ancient, illustrious Henderson dead, she expressed her despair over Emmett’s death.
She would have liked, she said—later, when the line had been more clearly drawn—to understand it as a sort of a punishment, meted out by an unkind god, but her despair had now plunged her past the possibility of taking even this small comfort, which assumed a larger justice and design. Instead, she concluded that Emmett had lost his life as anyone loses their life—as the result of a cruel and unaccountable accident. “There is a senselessness to everything,” she concluded that section of her letter. Then: “I will never be able to look the world in the eye again. I used to spend quite a bit of time, you see, gazing out my back window.” “The view there stretches out past the town limits—it is quite pretty country out this way. But now I don’t have the heart to do it. I keep my eyes down when I’m in the kitchen, so I don’t have to catch sight of that view.”
A few paragraphs on, she continued (her last reference to the Henderson cemetery and its valiant dead): “It used to even bring me a certain satisfaction. I would go up to the cemetery and look around there, too. It was a peaceful place and, though it’s hard to imagine all of the suffering those men and women had to go through, it all makes a certain sort of sense—them being buried like that, underneath the soil of the country they were fighting for. Even though, of course, you know—we lost. The Henderson graves are Confederate graves, and the South never really had a fair chance. But that all seems to make sense, too, in a certain way, now. Maybe it’s just that so many years have gone by, or that none of those men were really ever—mine. Now I sit up near Emmett’s grave and there isn’t any sense at all anymore for me up there. I know that you have told me in your very kind letter that he had a ‘strong and courageous belief’ in what he was fighting for over there, but I can tell you that I have known my son all his life. He wrote letters—not very often—but he did, and never once did he mention this war. Maybe it mattered to him in a certain way, but not in a really important way—enough to die for. No matter how little you write, or how private, or grown up you become, or how much you feel that she won’t or cannot understand, you simply don’t believe in something, not enough to die for it, if you haven’t even written about it once to your mother. You should remember that. I know you say you have no intention of fighting in this war, or any other, but I would ask you to remember those words, if you can. It seems that it is a very complicated world now, far more so than it was when I was a girl. That there are far less—boundaries, in a certain way, that separate men from their deaths than there once were. That’s the senselessness of it, as far as I can tell. It’s even strange, I’ll admit this to you, to have my son back here in his own soil again. Sometimes I think I’d almost rather have him buried over there, far away, because whatever it is that killed him has nothing to do with me, or with this place. And whatever border he was fighting for is not one drawn on this ground, or as far as I can tell anywhere on earth. And the worst part is—the senselessness of his grave seems to spread itself out all around me, so that now none of the other graves make any sense either. Now there don’t seem to be any borders or boundaries at all, and I don’t know half the time—and this is why I keep my head down in the kitchen, so I don’t look up and have to see that view: all those hills and the trees out there stretching off into the distance, which is in itself even a lie—what the difference is between the dead and the living, or why drawing that line seems to matter so much.”
When Alden got to the end of the letter, he went back to the beginning, and read again the descriptions of the Henderson war dead with which it had begun: the number of battles each had fought in, the medals received, the number of wounds that had been inflicted—recovered from, or not—even the number of attendees at the Henderson funerals in that part of the country where the Henderson men’s courage and sacrifice had long been a source of pride. As he read it all a second time, it resounded on a very different note, which he thoroughly failed to understand. The deep sincerity that he had first detected in the words was clearly mixed—he saw now—with a fatal cynicism. The two could not be extracted from each other, and yet neither could they be understood as one. Alden himself was still at that time both too sincere and already too cynical to see that he was either one, or to understand, as Emmett’s mother did, the ways that the two were irresolvably joined—so that there was no more boundary between them than there was between the living and dead.
You have to get very, very close to death—as Emmett’s mother did then—to really see it like that. That is, to really see the way, as Emmett’s mother implied she herself had seen—sitting up on the Henderson burial plot at the edge of town, her muddied heels crossed, her head bent, trying not to look around at a view that stretched as far as the eye could see in glorious, irresponsible blues and browns—the way the dead and the living were indeed all mixed up together. So that as she stared at the graves of the long-
dead ancestors of her son, the boundaries that had once been fixed in her mind—not only between nations and other allegiances, not only between the suffering of women and the suffering of men, but even between her own fixed position above and those below— began to blur to such an extent that she had to push very hard against the rock beside her, push hard enough to make the knuckles and the ends of her fingers turn white, in order to gain some assurance of the durability of the things of this world, and remind herself that she was still alive.
Once this was, again, reaffirmed, Alden imagined (though this she did not recount) she would make her way again down the slope, very slowly, extracting the talons of her shoes, which sought to dig themselves farther and farther into the earth with every step, and return to her living room—driven there perhaps by the indistinct figure (amounting for the purposes of this retelling really to just a cigarette out the window, a turned-down collar, a hat) of her husband, who, waving the lingering smoke from the car as he witnessed her approach, nodded silently as she slid into the leather seat beside him, and gunned the motor, which had not ceased muttering all that time. And all evening, reestablished within the comfort of her living room, with the familiar photographs on the walls, the never-used china in the cupboards (inherited from her grandmother, on the English side), and the porcelain figurines, which she collected—twenty-nine of the thirty-one replicas presently available of the presidents of the United States (she was only missing Franklin Pierce and hadn’t bothered with F. Delano yet, either, and for good reason)—she would drink gin and listen to the radio and call out occasionally into the vast reaches of the house small remarks about whatever it was she heard on the news—just for the exercise of comprehending the distance between herself and the rest of the world.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 34
