The Cosmology of the Wider World

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Very weak,” said Belius, easing himself into the chair and leaning his elbows on the table, “but, if I remember everything that happened, also lucky to be alive.”

  “Those dogs did you pretty good. I hate to admit to this, but, for a second time since delivering you, I thought for sure you were going to die. My biggest fear was rabies, but fortunately you escaped that horror.”

  “What am I doing here, doctor?”

  “I had to bring you here where I could keep a constant eye on you. Your mother and I actually lifted you into the back of my wagon that night.”

  “How is my mother?”

  “She’s angry with me and worried about you. I’ve been sending somebody by to check on her every day to see if she needs anything. When I told the people in the town what happened, how you risked your life for them, I had more volunteers to help out than was needed. You can go back home in three days but not before. I want to make sure you don’t get an infection in one of those bites and that your tail is beginning to heal.”

  “My tail?” asked Belius. He reached behind him under the coat and groped around with his hoof. A look of fear came over his face. “My tail!” he cried and stood up.

  “I had to remove what was left of it. They chewed it almost completely through,” said the doctor in a voice that was meant to calm the minotaur.

  “But, but …” Belius threw the coat off and tried to look over his shoulder behind him, but he couldn’t. For the first time, he noticed that the usual tug of its weight at the end of his spinal column was missing. Now he felt the loss of its constant gyration and swish. He concentrated and made believe there was a fly on his left shoulder blade. Tensing the muscles that had always turned the tail into a whip, he didn’t feel the bushy end of it brush the spot.

  “No tail,” he said and his eyes glazed over. The sudden realization of its loss threw his body off balance, and he fell forward to the floor as if now there was no longer enough of him behind to balance things out.

  “Nonsense,” said Grey, who got out of his seat and came over to help Belius off the floor. “You don’t need a tail to stand up. You’re overreacting. It’s a vestigial appendage, a useless throw-back.”

  Belius was so upset that he took to moving his arms at his sides in a swimming motion. Instead of interfering, Grey just stood back and watched the minotaur traverse the channel of his loss. After doing three laps around the kitchen floor, he finally came to his senses. He quietly stood up, walked over and picked up the overcoat and put it on. After the two were again seated at the kitchen table, a conversation ensued.

  Grey told Belius that the enormous house they now sat in was given to him by the town as a lure to bring a physician to the area since the community was growing so fast, and, what with the nature of the local work, all its hazards of spooked plough horses and errant machinery. Grey had been born in the country and done his apprenticeship with a country doctor. Although he had attended medical school in a big city, he never cottoned to the frantic pace of urban life. He missed getting to know his patients and having long conversations that didn’t necessarily have to go anywhere or be concerned with business or the pursuit of status. To him, his practice in the city had been just a long string of complaints with no personalities behind them.

  The boarding house had once been owned by an old man of great learning, who would take in people and use the money he gained to buy books. Evidently, at one time, this previous owner had been a scientist in a country across the ocean. Many strange stories were told about him. He didn’t set up the boarding house until he was well into his nineties. Still, he supposedly had great vitality for one so ancient. He didn’t die, but one day just disappeared, leaving behind all of the books he had collected in the seven years he had lived there. His name was Scarfinati and the libraries upstairs held more than twenty-five works that he had personally authored.

  When Grey began discussing the libraries in relation to the previous owner of the house, Belius moved the conversation around to asking Grey if he would mind him looking through the books in the next few days.

  “By all means. Someone may as well use them. I find little interest anymore in books. I used to go through them avidly, but not so now,” he said shaking his head.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I was in one of them today,” said Belius.

  The doctor waved his hand as if brushing away the thought. “Even when you’re well again, I want you to come any time and take what you want. There’s just about everything up there. There are ten libraries in all, spaced out in different rooms of the house. If you’ll notice, each room contains works on a different subject. By the way, did you happen to see the one with the mummy in it?”

  Belius shook his head. He had not seen the mummy, but he had seen the girl and wanted to ask the doctor who she was. He held his questioning, though, knowing that if he mentioned her, he would also have to mention that he had been wandering the hallways naked and was seen by her in that condition. So he let the conversation move on, and they filled each other in on what they had done that winter between the time of Belius’ father’s death and when Grey had come to call.

  When Grey had drained his third coffee cup of whiskey and they had thoroughly discussed everything from the Inferno to the weather, the old man rose from his chair and announced that he was going upstairs to lie down until dinner. “Feel free to roam around, Belius,” he said with slurred speech. “I’ll see you at seven for dinner right here. By then my niece will be back from town with some clothes for you. You scared the daylights out of her today, walking around the place. She can’t quite make out what the hell you are. She didn’t mind taking care of you while you were out cold, but, now that you’re up and about, I think she thinks you’re the devil come to call.” Grey laughed as he teetered toward the door through which Belius had entered. There came the sound of him stumbling up the stairs and then perfect country quiet.

  Belius remained at the kitchen table. He closed his eyes and rested his head down on the blue and white checkered cloth. The annoyance of his wounds came back to him all at once like a shift of workers returning to their jobs. Mixed in with the ache was a wisp of sleep that grew desperately fast into a thick cloud bank that blotted out even the moaning of his phantom tail.

  Later that evening, after finishing a dinner of broccoli and potatoes, the Minotaur excused himself from the table and asked the doctor if it would be all right to go up to the libraries to read.

  “Certainly,” said Grey. “Nona will make up another room for you since your snoring has devastated the one you were in.”

  “No need,” said Belius, waving his hooves to dispel the thought. “I like it very cool when I sleep. Tomorrow I’ll repair the windows and clean up the room. I’m afraid, though, that some of the knick-knacks are beyond repair.”

  “They were junk,” said the doctor, leaning back in his chair. “Isn’t that right, Nona?”

  “Junk,” she said softly, the first word she’d spoken in Belius’ presence. She smiled at the minotaur, but it was a weak smile that seemed more a plea for him not to devour her.

  “Before I go to sleep tonight I’ll step outside and pick up a rock. When I have something hard and sharp in the collar of my night-shirt, I don’t sleep on my back. I don’t snore then. It was my mother’s invention.”

  “I bought some clothes for you today. There’s a pair of pajamas with them. I’ll bring them to you after I clean up down here,” said the girl.

  “Thanks,” said Belius and bowed toward her. Seeing his horns come down level with her head made her push back her chair a few inches.

  Up in the library that held the red leather chair, Belius found a book by Scarfinati, the previous owner of the house. It was entitled, Cosmology and was thicker than the unabridged dictionary that sat next to it on the shelf. Instead of taking to the chair to read, he remained in a standing position since the nub of his tail had been agitated by all his hours of sitting.

  The house was a
s calm and quiet as he often imagined the bottom of the pond to be when the thick ice of mid-winter covered it. He paused before opening the book, knowing that once he entered through its black leather door, the voice of the author would begin speaking to him behind his eyes. He concentrated for a moment on Nona. Although the girl had said but few words to him and it was obvious that she was frightened by his strangeness, he knew that his interest in her was something more than plain curiosity. She had not yet given him a genuine smile, but he could tell that if she were to, it would be extraordinary. Nona’s eyes were a light hazel and looked as if they might be luminescent in the night. Beyond her initial distrust for him, he thought he saw a personality whose first inclination would be a move toward friendship. As he sat next to her at dinner her closeness had inspired a sense of calm, and once, as she passed him the salt, the edge of his hoof had lightly grazed her thumb.

  For the next two hours, Belius knew nothing but what the words on the page in front of him commanded. The introduction to the massive book was over three hundred pages, and, of this, he only finished a little over a third before the weight of ideas and that of the tome made him slam it shut and place it back on the shelf. All of the ideas he had gathered from his reading began to run through his being like a powerful drug. He was not used to such a great dose of concentration all at once, and the effects of it made him stumble to the red leather chair and sit down. There he sat for yet another hour in a stupor, his big head lying to the side, propped on the tips of one hoof, as he let the wise old man’s theories percolate behind his eyes.

  If the minotaur was correct in his reading, he garnered a few basic ideas from the book. The first was that Cosmology was the study of man’s perceptions of the creation, perpetuation and destruction of all that lay outside himself. From here, Scarfinati had gone on to explain that each different epoch in the intellectual history of the human race had its own peculiar view of how the universe operated, and that each of these different views was a reflection of that stage of civilization’s perceptions of itself. For instance, during the height of an age where mechanical science is in its greatest stages of discovery and development, the world and surrounding heavens are seen to operate like a mechanism.

  None of these epochal Cosmologies, he stated, is any more ‘correct’ than the next. Each is merely a reflection of the face of culture, and each, in its turn, fully captures culture’s imagination like Narcissus hypnotized by his own reflection. All of the implications and outcomes of that ancient myth adhere to each given group of people who stare into the pool of creation. In other words, each civilization’s Cosmology is an intense love affair with itself that nurtures it and allows it to grow but, in the end, is its undoing.

  These thoughts spun about like planets thrown from their orbits. The one central idea, though, that shone more brightly than a sun was Scarfinati’s conviction that Cosmology was of the utmost importance in the formation of civilizations. “It gives to men and women a basic something in common, an illusion of certainty in which they can assuage the fear caused by the fact that they are utterly alone unto themselves.”

  “Beyond the needs of civilization,” Scarfinati wrote, “each individual must have his or her own Cosmology, a personal set of myths by which to live. For to live only in the greater Cosmology of the civilization, is truly to be a ghost that sees everywhere action and creation, but can participate in neither.”

  It was at this point that Belius stopped reading and closed the book. In his excitement, he believed that what he had read was everything, although some thousand or more pages were still left to read. He didn’t even skip to the last page and read Scarfinati’s final paragraph. A vague, shimmering reflection of himself was beginning to form before his eyes as he sat in the chair. Now he believed it was entirely up to him to sharpen the focus of this image; to write a Cosmology for himself and also for the civilization of Minotaurs he dreamed he would father.

  At the end of his hour of meditation, he rose and stretched. Although the fire of the new ideas was still with him, he was physically exhausted. As he came back to his waking self, he had a distinct urge to gore something; to smash his horns into a tree or the side of a barn. He thought then about the old door his father had propped against the willow for him and what had happened the day on which he rammed it into oblivion. Shaking his head, he tried to disrupt the ‘unnatural’ desire. What he needed at the moment, he knew, was to talk to the doctor. There were a thousand questions to ask about Cosmology.

  He left the library and made his way quietly down to the lower level of the spacious house. He came first to the kitchen but did not find Grey there. Instead, he found three cold potatoes, left over from dinner, in the refrigerator. He swallowed them like pills.

  From there, he wandered out into the corridors that were different from upstairs in that they opened into large rooms and were not lined with doors. These rooms were mostly unlit, and, from the light of the hallway he could make out the ghostly figures of furniture draped in bed sheets. Occasionally, he would come across one that appeared to have been in use, but it was easy to see by the layer of dust on the mantles and chandeliers that the doctor rarely, if ever, did any entertaining.

  For the entire day he’d worn the old overcoat, buttoned to the neck and strapped tightly at the waist in case of any meetings with Nona. He was finally becoming used to the feel of its unsettling lamb’s wool lining. He made his way quietly along, sneaking like a burglar from place to place, sweating beneath the weight of the wrap.

  Passing three corridors of these larger rooms, Belius entered a fourth that had but one door in the middle of it on the left hand side. A dim light seeped out from around the slightly opened door. The hall was darkened and seemed a place he should not go, but, from within the one concealed room, he heard muffled sounds that escaped with the weak light. He crept up to the door and took a position outside of it. Turning his head so that he could spy through the crack with one eye, he held his breath as to make the least amount of noise and squinted to see into the murky room.

  Although lit only by a single fluttering gas lamp, he immediately could tell from the sight of instruments and an examination table that it must be the doctor’s office. Below the lamp was a big oak desk, highly polished, behind which was a wall of what he assumed to be medical texts. Grey sat at the desk, slumped forward, his arms laying flat out in front of him on the smooth surface. In the strange light he looked, with his thousand wrinkles, as if he were made from beaten leather. His body shook in intermittent spasms, and, after each of these, he made a choking noise as if he were trying to swallow something made of metal. At first Belius thought he was dying, but then he saw the bottle of whiskey at his elbow and the glass tumbler an inch from his hand, and he realized the physician was simply crying.

  Sitting also on the desk top was a huge glass jar. The light from the lamp made the almost clear liquid inside the jar glow like a frosted window catching the sunset. Floating inside was a tiny human form. Its arms were out at its sides and its legs were bent slightly at the knees. The head was thrown back as if in the act of screaming. It did not float near the top or bottom but was suspended directly in the middle.

  Back at his room, Belius surprised Nona in the act of laying out the new clothes on his bed. He was still very upset with what he had seen in the doctor’s office, and the effects of it cancelled out all of the decorum he had adopted when in her presence. Before she could flee through the open door, he put his hoof out and touched her shoulder.

  “Why does your uncle sit in his office and drink and cry?” he asked her.

  “He’s a man of great feeling,” she said.

  Belius nodded, hoping she would continue.

  A few more moments passed, and then she looked into his eyes. “He sees all of the suffering around him in the world. He tells me that life is only suffering. He has great pity for others. All the time, he seems to be laughing when he is with people, but when he is alone he lets his true feelings out. He
doesn’t want to let on to them what he knows about the hardships they’ll face. He told me once that he wished he could cure everyone’s pain, but that he knows the only cure is death. He drinks to forget his feelings.”

  “Can’t he just accept things the way other people do?”

  “I suppose not, after having seen so many people suffer in his life. I remember, from when I was very young, my mother telling my father that his wife had died. It was when he lived in the city. He had tried very hard to cure her, but in the end there was nothing he could do. Perhaps that was where his sorrow began.”

  “Do you believe these things he told you?” Belius asked.

  “What’s to believe?” she asked and reached into the pocket of her dress. “Will this do?” She pulled out her hand and in it was a rock she could just about get her fingers around. She handed it to him and left the room. He knew, from the way she had spoken, that she no longer had any fear of him.

  As he lay in the dark, shivering and blowing silver clouds of steam, listening to the sound of the wind slipping through the shattered windows, he thought about the word ‘pity’. He recognized it as being that enemy of his which had caused his parents to lie to him in his childhood. He saw that it was simply a ghost of a feeling that, if left to grow unchecked, would finally give birth to depression and deceit. In a moment, he was sleeping.

  He dreamed he was outside in the cold, standing in a pasture covered with deep snow. In the moonlight, he was able to discern, at the opposite end of the wide field, a barren tree that was so tall that its branches went up into the night to a point he could not see. The trunk of it was thicker than a house and much of the bark had fallen off. He began running toward it with his head bent for impact. The further he ran, the colder the night became. He continued on though, hugging himself with his arms and trying to bury his snout down into the front of the overcoat. He ran toward it for an hour, and during that time the cold had snuck into his body and formed a thin layer of ice on his face and horns and even on the camel’s hair of the coat. His joints began to seize and, as he drew close to his target, he moved increasingly slowly. Just as his horns made contact with the smooth white wood, he froze solid. Ice covered him. He tried to yell out for help, but his voice was frozen too. In the depths of the shell of ice, after struggling for a long time to make a sound, he found another dream that carried him away in its current.