by Jesse Ball
A System of Letter-Writing
All the letters were dated, either with the date the letter was sent, or with the date it was received. They went into a series of cabinets built expressly for that purpose and set against a low wall behind which at certain hours of the day, one might see the sun setting. The letters were written in a bent scrawl which somehow managed to be perfectly legible. From a distance it almost looked like Arabic or Sinhalese. Up close, it was all too clear. One couldn’t begin reading the letters, because if one did, hours would pass and one would have accomplished none of the tasks that had been set. Oh, it was all too easy to spend the day rummaging and filing, all night reading and rejoicing. For in these letters, these peculiar letters of a most unpublic, unadmired man, were hidden tortuous machinations and intricate apparatuses of invention. Of course, the difficulty lay not in setting the letters in order, for they were already in order, but in putting them out of order. For the man had employed us specifically for that purpose. He wanted no letters of similar subject to remain beside one another. He wanted no date congruent, no place-name beside itself. For physicians had told him he would die on the eighth day of the third month of his sixtieth year and towards that day he was preparing a scheme of complication that his legacy might be a lure to fortune seekers and puzzle solvers. He was not known as an author, yet in his letters were hidden many novels of curious scholarship. He was not known as a scientist, yet in his letters he had concealed equations and documented experiments which would revolutionize many sectors of our uniformed existence. Not a banker, nor an economist, he nonetheless knew the hermetics of currency. Not a statesman nor a saint, he nonetheless made speeches (gone unheard) that gave to the human soul the dignity it lacks. He was not a baker or an engineer, yet he devised ovens which would bake as no oven ever had, and breads that might be baked within such an oven, breads the likes of which you have never tasted.
And perhaps you never will, for my friends and I, we are a wily bunch, and we have had years with which to tortuate our master’s genius. And all the years we have been spoiling and hiding, concocting and puzzling. In his maze of letters there will seem little to be found, though truly, as I have said, there is little in fact that might not be found in this seething bath, this system of letters that will be alluded to in the final sentence of the final article of an interminable and indiscriminate will.
Parable of the Lamp
A man may have been in the business of burying the dead, and he may have buried them, day in, day out, for decades, such decades beginning sometimes in the gray of dusk, and ending, too often, in the early murmur of dawn’s foundering cascade. He may have kept his shovel close by the bed, or propped safe against a near wall, cleaned it gently at nightfall with a wet rag, oiled it in off moments, laid by. He may have spoken in this life more often to an object than to a person, more often with question than with conviction. He may have stood for hours on a rain-swept slope, admiring neat rows of stone markers, absent of mourners. And he may have begun a long tale, a new part of which he would invent each night as he sat alone at table.
The facts are uncertain. We have only the book with which to decipher the life, however fictional. He certainly lived, and certainly, quite certainly, he died. That lamp which stands between ourselves and a brighter lamp often seems less like a lamp and more like a hooded man. Thus we inquire of him, from where have you come? Thus we throw wide our doors and set out all that is left in the pantry. Do so with an eking touch, and sparingly, for in the book of names, all names are not entered. Our lies are precautions. Our sentinels are doubts that dredge a living sea.
A Badger told a Rat
And how fine it would be, if, at the end of a life, one could seek congratulation from all those one knew in the circumstances of childhood, as it were, within those very circumstances, when such congratulations, forming, as they would, the basis for a life, would have been worthwhile.
The Infant Elsbet
Oh, too often we hear tell of the infant Elsbet, who is found here or there in the night or morning. She is carried, wrapped in a shawl, back to the cottage where she lives, and set again within her gilded cradle. Yet always she escapes, in light and dark, to wander the hills on her hands and knees, tiny mouth panting, tiny eyes asquint. She is accounted good luck by the fishermen, who find her often on the path to the daybreak wharf. Others think less of her, and treat her more roughly, speak to her with a colder tongue. Why does she never grow? Why do her garments never stain? Who keeps the cottage where she lives, who feeds her? The town sits in the shadow of a distant mountain to which no one has ever gone. On gray porches, stern wives negotiate the wool of half-formed garments, wielding impossibly sharp needles. Along the street, someone is calling, “Elsbet is gone again. Elsbet is gone.” Be sure she will be found.
A Statuette
He took my statuette. I saw him. He led himself a pretty path right up the middle of the street, and stopping at my door, he knocked. Seeing no one was home (for I was hiding beneath my bed), he entered and passed through all the various rooms, coming finally into my own, where upon a small night table the statuette was placed. Oh statuette of a tearful god! How long I had kept you close beside me while I slept. But he put you under his coat, with one quick movement of a slimfingered hand, and off he went.
I thought for a moment, as he stood above me, of coming out from beneath the bed and making my presence known. But it seemed the wrong thing to do. Questions would be raised. What, for instance, was I doing beneath my bed on that miserable and immemorial day?
The Hospital
Inside the hospital there were several villages. I lived in the first, in a small cottage with my sister. We were not allowed to go to the other villages, nor were they allowed to come to us. But news was always circulating regarding the escape of a villager from one place or another.
How long had we lived in the village? This was a question I posed constantly to my sister. We would sit, glazed eyes mimicking glazed eyes, and mouth answers which we dared not speak. When we had first arrived, my sister insisted on saying we had lived there always. Now that we had lived there always, she insisted on saying that we had just arrived. Her skinny arms hung off the sides of her stiff wooden chair, which she kept trying to rock as if it was a rocker. The artist who had drawn her face must have watered down his ink fearing he would run out, for her features were indistinct — almost absent. She would only wear the one color, a pale yellow, and she thought herself a great beauty, though she had never told anyone this. She was always tempting me, slipping into my bed halfway through the night, or groveling at my feet.
The rest of the villagers hated us. They felt we were newcomers and should be hurt at every opportunity. But we had been there longer than anyone, and refused to allow their tawdry claims. After I put a fellow through a plate-glass window, they left me alone. But my sister was too delicate. I’d find her, huddled somewhere, bruised and crying, her yellow clothes torn. Once, I saw her running naked along the riverbank, chased by four old women. Together we drowned them, and used their clothing for scarecrows in our yard.
Always of an evening, my sister would be tapping at the glass with her fingertips, as I sat composing elaborate logical proofs that might one day prove there were no other villages but ours. I suppose she meant the same by her tapping as I did by my proving. Once, she turned to me, face filthy from contact with our matted floor, and said, “Of all the villages, ours is the most easily understood. Each successive village is less believable. Each is worse. Even so much as a thought arrived at bravely can mean your expulsion from one place, your inclusion in another.”
“But what,” I asked her, “did we think of, to bring us here?”
“Brother of mine, we looked in every cabinet and under every tree for the way back to an earlier village. But with each passage we fall faster.”
With that she removed her dress and began to rub herself against the curtain. Then I realized, the tapping was continuing, but she was not tappin
g. Looking up, first at this window, then at that, I saw that behind every pane of glass there was an uglier and more spiteful face, beneath which gripped and ungripped, tapped and tapped and tapped again, the many fingers of a great and angry crowd.
Mention
And to think, of all the great and wonderful things that could have happened. . that your name should have been mentioned, and by whom and to whom! Now you are sorry for all the terrible things you did when the world seemed an unkind place. Now you recoil from your darker period, that time which preceded this glorious day. No more shall you sit alone in windswept cafes as rain broods over dim cities. No more shall you stand for hours outside your own terrible door, outside the doors of others. No, no. . you have been mentioned, spoken well of before company, and it is plain to all — your life has acquired the glorious sheen of reputation before which all else must inevitably fall.
A Scene
Day draws to a close. One man passes another in the street, and as they pass, each looks the other in the face, as if to say, “You may indeed be the center of all this, but sir, it is just as likely I should be.” Nearby, a painfully soft little bird has alighted on a branch, watching the comings and goings with great interest. And you and I, we arrive later to that moment, and thus cannot be noticed, nor gainsaid, as we make our way along the thin streets of that decades-lost foundry town. Equally, we can be certain both men were quite wrong.
An Emerald
It came to be known that one of the miners in that filthy godforsaken camp had found an emerald as big as a man’s fist. The jealousy of the other miners. The pleasure of the miner’s wife. The worry of the miner himself over the possible theft of his newfound prize.
And how he woke the next day and the day after from dreams in which it had not been he who found the gem, but another. And how nothing could be done to comfort him but that the emerald should be brought out from its hiding place, and that he should be let to touch it and hold it and wake fully from his dream with all the glory of this true plane upon his dirty lap.
THREE
Claus Valta
During the golden age of punishment, peasants often dreamed secretly of a brutal public death that might earn some measure of fame. The greatest of the executioners, Claus Arken Valta, was much in demand, and would tour the country with a coach and horses, sleeping each night in a golden pavilion. He wore a moustache, though it was not the style, and always bathed his hands in a bowl of milk that would be set beside his axe, or laid nearby the gibbet. He had a fine voice and could carry many a pleasant tune. Often he would sing as he went about hitching up horses for the drawing and quartering of a felon or wastrel. He took pity on everyone, and would cry if he saw a bird with a broken wing, or a three-legged dog stumbling through the crowd. At such times he was inconsolable, and would refuse to go on with the execution. Afterwards, always, he repented and would slaughter as many as nine or ten deserving souls in as many minutes. His penchant for public speaking was exceeded only by his memory for faces. “Why, haven’t I seen you before?” he would remark, as he tightened a noose around some unfortunate’s neck. Without waiting for an answer, he’d loose the trap and watch the bagheaded wretch drop to a wrenching death. He rarely let the dying have their last words before the crowd, instead gagging them, and inventing speeches which they might have said, the which he would recite to the crowd from memory. In this he was no different from other great men. What they imagine is always more palpable, more true, than anything we might wish or wish to say.
Of the Secret City
AND if on the banks of that river to which you once did go, there arose a fair city, of which you alone could know — how sad that this knowledge has eluded you, how sad that you have lived so long from home, spendthrift of your life until even this has abandoned you, even this hidden city, never seen, has faded out of possibility into such a realm as the one in which we now speak.
Parable of Life’s Wake
— A woman who has just smothered the man with whom she slept. The disarray of her clothing. Her steps, back and forth in that tiny room. Light is beginning by the window, intending to cross slowly as it always has done. If the woman were to scream, and someone, anyone, were to come to her assistance, how much could she hope for from such a person? Might they help her to hide her crime? Might they take advantage of her in this, her weakness? If she should sigh and toss her pretty head, and pass through the town in crinoline, gold glittering on her thumbs and ankles, why, who could tell her different? Who could say, “You may not do this that you have done.” For life is its own excuse, its wake the shed gray, the unbearable touch of the harshest wool.
Unnoticed Offenses
One man said: I refuse to be seen with such a person!
He spoke of you.
I wonder what you did, unknowingly, to make him hate you so. I wonder who else, unknowingly, you have made enemies of, on this and other days. And of them, who will wait in the wings of your moving theatre, trembling and grinning, anticipating a later scene or act?
To Knock at an Unknown Door
A wealthy man went walking one day, on the grounds of his great estate. He walked in familiar places, admiring first this view, then that. He ranged farther from the manse until, as the sky began to darken, he realized he was walking in a region of his lands where he had never been. Through a veil of trees, he saw a tiny cottage; in the window were lighted candles which seemed to welcome him.
Such a man, such an estate, such a cottage (near and yet impossibly removed from all else, come to only at dark and in confusion) — out of this what is possible? What is not?
The man approached the cottage and with the boldness of a landowner stamped his feet loudly upon the doorstep and knocked upon the door.
It was a moment before anything happened, but when things began, it seemed they happened all at once. The door flew open — behind it was a man, in face and manner identical to the landowner. With a sneer and a shout, he drove an iron poker straight through the wealthy man’s chest, and with a second roar withdrew it, stepping forward to catch the body as it fell. Discarding the poker, he pulled the body back into the house, drawing shut the door in one clean motion. Not even a cry had escaped the landowner’s mouth. Door shut, the cottage stood again in silence, its windows candlelit, the season pressing in on all sides. It is possible, the candles seemed to say, that a double may stay in hiding at your heel for decades, and that one day you may come upon him. A man may not resist his double.
Late in the evening, a landowner who had been out walking returned, and advanced up the tree-lined carriage drive before his elegant house. He paused repeatedly, as if to admire each thing, each object of his vision as though all were new to him. At the door he was greeted by a servant, who took his coat and led him to table, where his wife and children awaited him. Servants saw to his every need.
Mutterings
Do not come near when flood waters are rising. It was in foolishness that our hearts were overthrown, and it will be in haste that our lives end. A set of toys, laid out on some inarticulate floor, will be like causes in a causeless time. Ask why, as if in doubt. Doubt is a glorious luxury, and one upon which we base all our hopes. Upon a silver field, motley hunters have speared a boar. The composition shakes and trembles, as wind moves from object to comparison.
The Book
In the book she wrote down things that were surely true and things that were surely false. Nothing was subject to interpretation — this was the necessary wrong, with great freedom the result. She wrote, a man has hurriedly leapt from coveted position, and found surfeit of disaster, then stopped, looking out an open window to where two boys were piling rocks. Upon those of our own breath, we heap the hardest, heaviest stone. A knock came then, with a letter pushed beneath the door. She took it to the bed, and drawing her knees up to her chest, read the letter spread out before her on the bed.
My dear, my darling,
I have been told by those who now
manage
my affairs, that I may never
see you again. would that it were not
so, and yet it seems maybe that we
may each accomplish what we need to
best in the other’s absence.
I remain, yours,
X
She rocked back and forth with drawn features, and sobbed once. Yet soon she was again at the window, where she wrote: Those men who are false to those they love have a hell set aside solely for their kind. In it, they must stab themselves for a glimpse of beauty, at which they expire and wake, left only to stab themselves again. With a smile, she closed the book and locked it in her desk. Then she ran nimbly to the door and down the stairs, throwing a light shawl about her slender shoulders, for the wind then came often and without warning from the north.
A Fortune
Once, a man went to a fortune-teller to have his fortune told. He went through his city to the district where such business is conducted. He crossed a small courtyard, and was admitted to her private chamber. She said, “You will die in the spring of the year, and crying of gulls will muffle voices that may come through the wall from another room.” The man was undone.
