by Matt Cardin
I have heard the others talking about me as I sit awaiting the culmination of these things. Their conversation has made reference to Satan and demons, just as my own thoughts initially did. They think an evil spirit possesses me. Such ignorance would be laughable were it not so pitiful. They have yet to understand that the truth shining from my eyes is far older than any demon, far older even than Satan himself. Our familiar spiritual universe, all its powers and principalities, demonic and divine alike—God and His angels, Satan and his demons—are swallowed whole by the abyss, which leaves in their place a roaring emptiness like the echo of a vast cataract flowing eternally into a bottomless pit.
What a pity that my brothers cannot join me in celebrating this vast emptiness, where the peace of oblivion masks the madness of chaos. But I suppose such pleasures are reserved only for the chosen few.
Last night one of them began whispering to me through the door to my cell. I recognized his words as the pater noster, and I was strangely moved to find that he was still working for what he thought of as the salvation of my soul. I felt for the first time a sense of what I have lost, and as I looked around at the cold stone walls of my cell, I began to wish desperately for them to appear solid to me again, and not as empty shells waiting for a puff of wind to knock them down. I raised my hand and wished for it to appear sound and whole again, and not as a repository for the seed of ultimate corruption. My original yearning for spiritual light began to pant and sob like an abandoned child in my breast, and I was overcome by a desire to offer some sort of comfort or reassurance to this brother who still loved me for what I had been. So I opened my mouth and, in a voice choked with tears, tried to give him a reply in kind.
What came out instead was another quotation from my book. Of course it sent him fleeing with a whimper. I had not meant to say such a thing, but it was past my lips before I recognized it. This new truth, it seems, is no longer my own. What happened with my hand is now happening to the rest of me. I could sense my new self laughing deep within my soul, even as I began to weep and mourn the loss of my old self.
I cannot allow myself to reflect on the possible depth of my wretchedness. I cannot consider how much of a pawn I have been. Instead, I must hope that the words I spoke to my brother will prove to have been enough to plant the seed of true understanding in his heart, so that he will be able to stand with the abbot and me when the black flood of reality comes to wash away everything that is unreal.
After all, what I whispered to him was none other than the new pater noster, which is the counterpoint to the old one and the invocation of all that is inescapably true:
Our Grandfathers which art in chaos
Fallow be thy names
Thy kingdom scour, Thy will devour
The earth, and hell, and heaven.
Here at the end of everything, this is all the comfort or reassurance I have left to offer anyone. May it prove to be enough for my brother, and for me.
The Basement Theater
I looked up and found myself gazing at the faded marquee of a crumbling theater, where no title was displayed. The street and sidewalks were dingy, the fronts of the buildings on either side pockmarked and weather-beaten. The once-white rows of the marquee were stained a sooty black, and the red trim was cracked. In spite of its singularly drab appearance, the marquee seemed almost to glow with a grainy saturation of color, like an overdeveloped photograph.
It jutted out from the face of the theater and overhung a set of glass doors with curiously ornate handles that appeared to have been fashioned from some coppery metal. When I employed one of these handles, I entered a cavernous lobby with an atmosphere redolent of moldy carpet and ancient concession food. The carpet, currently cluttered with chunks of plaster from the cracked ceiling, had once boasted a garish pattern of mauves and blues, but the passage of time had long since bleached both hues to a nearly uniform gray whose monotony was punctuated only by the presence of numerous water stains. Ragged tapestries hung with faded magnificence from the walls, and ancient cobwebs clotted the intricate molding of the high corners.
As I stood surveying this spiritless scene, I began to hear a muffled, intermittent humming sound drifting toward me from somewhere in the building. It took me a moment to identify this sound as a human voice. The dusky sunlight filtering through the grime on the doors disappeared into shadows as I wandered farther into the theater.
Halfway down a particularly cramped hallway, which I had assumed would lead me to the auditorium, I discovered that the sound was issuing from behind a black wooden door set inconspicuously into a wall on my right. It was a door that I might well have taken for a maintenance closet. The knob turned easily and the door opened soundlessly to reveal not a closet but a set of concrete stairs leading downward into darkness. The voice drifting up from this darkness as I began my descent was more clearly audible than before, but still unintelligible.
After thirty steps I began to notice a faint illumination shining from below. Then the stairs ended, and the wall opened out on my left, and upon turning the corner I found myself in a long, low-ceilinged basement with a burnished concrete floor and unfinished walls. A harsh light streamed from several naked, clear-glassed bulbs hanging at intervals from exposed wooden beams overhead, and the very harshness of it seemed to impart an abnormal inky blackness to the shadows at the extremities of the room. Amid these bulbs were gathered a number of thespians, standing alone or in groups of two or three. They murmured to one another in low tones and pored over stacked sheets of paper as they performed exaggerated motions with their bodies and faces.
Then I heard the voice begin to speak once again, and when I peered past the assembled actors, I immediately recognized the figure that came threading his way through them. Herbert’s bald head and dark, almond-shaped eyes (so curious for an occidental) were unchanged, as were his neatly trimmed goatee and his slight frame with its small paunch. He was clad in a black turtleneck, black pants, and black shoes, and he waved his arms and shouted out blocking and performance directions to his troupe as he came to greet me.
“Thank you for coming,” he said as he stopped before me with a broad and rather bland smile. “We’re all so pleased to have you with us!” Then he turned abruptly and began making his way back through the crowd, barking directions the entire time, and I realized that I was supposed to follow him. Looking past his receding form, I saw a curious wood-and-cardboard flat against the far wall, like the backside of a piece of stage scenery, or like an unfinished room divider, located several feet from the wall so as to create a concealed space. Situated in front of this flat were a long-legged stool and a high, thin wooden table.
I struggled to keep pace with Herbert, but as I passed one of the glaring bulbs, the thespian standing alone beneath it, a fair-skinned man wearing a crimson sweater, suddenly sprang at me with his arm upraised and what appeared to be a dagger in his hand. My own hands shot up involuntarily, and a scream ripped from my throat as he plunged the dagger into my chest. Then he snatched it back and stood there, grinning, and I realized the weapon was merely a stage prop with a retractable blade. My breathing was ragged as the others applauded his performance. He bowed to them and returned to his private pursuit.
Herbert had seated himself on the stool behind the long wooden table, and with my heart still pounding, I hastened to join him.
“What’s happening here?” I demanded when I reached the table. My voice was shaking. The fraudulent attack had generated a strong and disturbing sense of déjà vu, and I was poised emotionally between anger and dread. “That man who just attacked me—Herbert, I dreamed him last night. I think I dreamed all this.” I waited for a reaction, but he merely picked up a blue pencil and began to make marks on a sheet of typewritten paper lying on the table. “Do you hear me, Herbert? I dreamed this! I dreamed of this rehearsal, or whatever it is, and in the dream I was a part of it. How can this be? What’s going on?”
He barely paused in his editing to glance up at me
. “Just theater.”
After another moment of silence, I became enraged. “Look at me, goddamn it!” I grabbed his black-clad arm and jerked him violently toward me. “I have a life! I have a wife and a child and a job, and I don’t have time to spend here with you, so you’d better explain yourself!”
“I told you,” he said with total dispassion. “It’s just theater.”
“I don’t work for you anymore!” I said. “I’m through with that!”
“Of course you do,” he replied. “Everyone does.” He looked at me until I released his arm, and then he resumed his editing.
“I used to run a spotlight for you.” I said. “Then I quit. Remember?”
“You quit that job, yes,” he replied, not stopping for a moment in his editing of the script. “But you still work for me. In fact, you’ve been promoted. Instead of running a spotlight, you’re now in the spotlight. I should think you’d be pleased.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “This is insane. Why aren’t you listening to me? I don’t have anything to do with this place. I don’t work for you!”
“Well—actually, you’re partially correct,” he admitted, lowering his voice. “You really work for him.” He motioned behind himself toward the wood-and-cardboard flat, and my anger abruptly dwindled as dread began to gain the upper hand.
“You mean . . . there’s somebody back there?”
“Of course!” Herbert's countenance brightened with a momentary and incongruous happiness. “I’m just the director. He’s the playwright, and in this theater, he has the final word.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t follow you.” I was beginning to feel dizzy and sick to my stomach.
“He wrote your part,” Herbert explained patiently. “First as a spotlight operator, and now as a lead performer. He’s writing your part right now. Oh, he lets me make a few changes here and there, but it’s really his show.” He assumed a confidential attitude and leaned closer to me over the table. “And although I’m never allowed to see him or speak with him, I have reason to believe that he’s taken a special interest in you. I think he likes your style. You seem so natural, so sincere. You even think you’re being natural instead of playing a role, and I think he enjoys this. Call it artistic pride, if you will. But then”—he paused here to hold up the sheet of paper on which he had been writing—“I’m just reading between the lines.” I looked at the paper, which was upside down to me as I stood across the table from him, and which displayed numerous edits, additions, excisions, and inserted lines of dialogue and description. And I knew in my sickness that I did not want to know what it said.
“I want to go home,” I said. “I have a family. I have a life.”
“Oh, certainly!” Herbert slid down from his stool to come around the table and clap me on the shoulder. “Yes, yes, by all means go home. You’ll need your rest for the next act.” He began ushering me back through the assembled thespians, who paused in their obscure motions to nod silently at me as I passed.
When we reached the foot of the stairs, Herbert shook my hand and stepped back with a smile. He seemed to be waiting for something.
“I don’t even know how I got here,” I said weakly. “How do I get back home?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that!” he said with histrionic joviality. “You’ll find your way back again in no time!”
And, as it turned out, he was right. Somehow I found my way home again without any trouble at all. My wife and my child, my job and my life, were all waiting for me when I arrived, and nobody appeared to know that I had been absent at all. In time, I tried to forget the episode.
But sometimes when my life seems to slow to a pause—when I lie awake in the dead of night staring at the white-textured ceiling of my bedroom, or when I raise my eyes to a sky blanketed by smoky clouds and glimpse pinpricks of starlight shining through, or when I hear the muffled hiss of a winter wind snaking its way through icy branches and skimming across snow-covered fields—at such times the murky depths of my soul rise to the surface, and the life I have so carefully cultivated cracks open like a hollow egg, and I realize that I have been visiting Herbert and his basement theater again. Each visit is virtually identical to the first: I find myself approaching the exterior of the crumbling theater with its ancient, empty marquee, and I step into the lobby and follow the sound of Herbert’s voice down into the bowels of the building, where I find the same assembled thespians speaking the same lines to each other in hushed tones as they perform the same meaningless motions. The only thing that changes is my mood during my conversation with Herbert. He picks up his blue pencil and starts writing as we speak, and sometimes I feel panicked, sometimes angry, sometimes almost giddy. But I can never make him understand that the situation simply cannot be real, and always the thought of the playwright hard at work behind his wood-and-cardboard flat fills me with a profound dread.
My family never seems to suspect that I have been gone, and so I might have learned to accept these strange visits with a degree of equanimity were it not for the fact that I have been given a vision of their eventual culmination. Somehow I know that one day—whether soon or late is unclear—I will be walking through the throng of thespians in pursuit of Herbert, and the fair-skinned one in the crimson sweater will lunge at me again with his dagger, only this time it will not be a stage prop but a real blade. The dagger will slide between my ribs to prick my heart, and my life’s blood will stain the burnished concrete floor of the basement theater while Herbert and his troupe gather around my twitching body to applaud what they will call my “final performance.”
And although this last part is most obscure, I have in my mind’s eye a vision of the playwright emerging at last from his concealment behind the wood-and-cardboard flat to stoop down and gaze firsthand upon my interpretation of the role he has written for me. Whether I shall get a glimpse of his face is unclear, but even if I do, this much is certain: the only thing that I will ever truly know is my own ignorance. The details of my role in this production will remain shrouded in obscurity right up until my death, and in the end my performance will have been solely for the playwright’s private enjoyment. I will never even know the title of the play. And the full extent of my ignorance will be demonstrated in a final bit of irony that he must surely be anticipating with the greatest sense of artistic pride: I shall die without even knowing why he chose to damn me with this unwanted glimpse into the spaces between the lines of my life.
If It Had Eyes
Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?
—Job 38:16, 17
The fog swirls about me as I approach the noisome tavern on Front Street. It whispers softly to me as I pull open the door and fan the surrounding cloud into graceful motion. Feathery fingers caress my face and hands with a moist, velvety softness, and I hear a chorus of sighs encouraging me to commit my soul eternally to this mournful embrace.
Closing the door and curtly surveying my dim surroundings, I smile inwardly as I walk unnoticed past the rough-clad fishermen and take a seat in a murky corner. These numinous moods of mine are so ancient, their foundations so deeply established in my soul, that I am not even frightened by them anymore. No one in the village knows the fog as I do. No one else here has cultivated such an exquisite sensitivity to its subtle tempers and messages, such a keen ear for the sibilant voice that speaks of long-forgotten mysteries and half-remembered myths. In the dank tavern where I sit with my back to the corner and my eyes to the rough wooden door, not a single person besides me cares to acknowledge the nature of the ancient presence that saturates the very air we breathe. I drink disdain to them, not from any glass but from the chalice of my own mind, as I watch them pour endless beers down their throats in a feeble attempt to drown the pain of their thoughts and feelings, the despair of their worthless lives. The contrast between us generates a warm glow
of satisfaction in my breast.
The fog waits for me all the while, churning and roiling as it snakes its way through the twisting streets and alleyways of the autumn-shrouded village, catching and diffusing the light of a hundred scattered street lamps to produce wreathed halos of soft gold, enshrouding wood and brick and bodies in such a thick mantle of white vapor that one could almost envision the town founded not on solid earth but on a cloud floating somewhere miles above, with the bottomless starry vault glaring down infinite and unknowable wisdom on the rooftops.
The barmaid approaches, all curly brown locks and overabundant bosom, but I refuse to acknowledge her, for to dull my senses with drink on this night would be to commit the worst sin of a deeply sinful life.
For yesterday, I finally learned the secret of painting the fog. As the sun began to dip below the crest of Malvent Hill, setting ablaze all the panels of the great stained glass window of Saint Simon’s Cathedral at the summit (a window whose eccentric and suggestively horrifying depiction of the Harrowing of Hell has led me to study it often as a model for my own paintings), and as the air began to grow cool with a bittersweet expectancy of the encroaching twilight, I positioned my easel on the rocks beneath the Eastern Point Light and flung my gaze seaward to watch the whiteness roll in from the unknown reaches of mother Ocean. God, but she was beautiful, the great black Atlantic with her secret worlds hidden away in chambers and caverns so deep and measureless as to explode the semantic and philosophical capacities of the very word “mystery.” Within these nighted caverns, I knew, there lay concealed the very heart of the Ocean herself, those great wellsprings of the deep that, for a short time long ago, had reclaimed the dry land as their own. And from these chambers, I knew—I alone knew—the fog emanated, offspring of mother Ocean, intent on a nightly mission to mimic the primeval flood by enshrouding the island in moist wrappings. A deep love of this phenomenon, a veritable divine adoration for it, had grown on me over a span of years, and I had often labored to commit my secret passion to canvas, following the artistic impulse that had been implanted in me from birth. But the colors would never tell the tale aright. I could never achieve the correct proportion of white, cream, and pearl, and my paintings invariably emerged as agonizing failures.
