11. “Aristomel”

Why, just look at the time, reader!

What time is it? That’s right! It’s time for my chapter!

Me? Oh, Azad, of course.

You’ve already guessed that much, reader.

I’m the only one in our little writers’ circle who can’t keep his opinions where they belong: nestled invisibly and insidiously among the strands of third-person narrative. Smiling, unseen, behind the facade of objective reportage.

The others, better writers than I, are cunning in the way that writers ought to be. They make to disappear behind the page. They hide themselves. You might even have forgotten about them.

Have you forgotten, reader? Did you imagine this was Azad’s book? Far from it.

Its trademark style—obscure, grandiloquent, restless, ill at ease, at times almost Gothic? That owes as much to Sylvie, reader, as it does to me. Meanwhile, as Sylvie and I lounged by the sidelines, it was Lucifer who did all the crucial yeoman-work. It was Lucifer’s pen that laid most of the groundwork, did most of the initial drafting. If this is anyone’s book, it’s his.

If we ever make you laugh, reader, you have Lilith to thank for it. She’s the only one of us with a real sense of humor, though our story provides us tragically few opportunities to acquaint you with it.

And whenever we give you pleasure, reader, if we ever do—thank Grant. All of the best parts are his.

If all of this is news to you, reader, it is a testament to my co-authors’ skill, their tact and their subtlety. They hide, as writers should, while I spring up from the page like some ghoulish children’s toy, assaulting you with canned pleasantries. Incapable of rest, as long as my batteries last.

Perhaps I do this as a kind of penance. Perhaps I make a show of not hiding, to prove I’ve put my hiding days behind me.

Look at me, reader. I’m here. Look at my open palms, no weapons there. Search my body if you wish. I’m a reformed man, now. Where once I lurked in shadow, I submit myself now to the light of day.

Let the rabble crowd around me, let them run their dirty hands over me. Let them crow and vaunt as they realize that demon king Azad, world-ruiner, despoiler of their daughters, is not a demon or god at all but a common man like them, who wakes as they do, with cock aloft, and bladder and bowels uncomfortably full. Yes, the black snakes that grow from my shoulders must be fed, and yes, they refuse all food except the human brain—but you all have wives and babes to feed, do you not, you smiths and stevedores? Would you deny them the brain, if they would starve otherwise?

With gladness of heart, I resign myself to the bed of nails that Anne prepared for me. I am become a fool in glorying. I have nowhere to hide, now, isn’t that right? Isn’t that how it goes, the song the rabble sings for me? And for once, I do not find myself eager to seek out a new hiding place.

“Michael,” I am with you in sin. “Sylvie,” I am with you in repentance. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at this tangle of thorns.

Yet I find I am still hiding.

It is time for my chapter, and I have not yet begun it.

I try to forestall my fate by prattling, as always. Azad’s filibuster!

Bested in battle, I drive the enemy to exasperation with my speech, in the hope they will turn their horses away and leave me be. I am happy to wallow here in the dust. When the vultures and wild dogs come, attracted by the scent of my slain commanders, I will tell them tales. I will sing to them of vulture-headed deities, and of the dog who first brought evil into the world.

Leave me be, please. Disarm me, yes, unman me, humiliate me, render me harmless, yes, yes—but then, leave me be.

 

---

 

I wrote all of that a long time ago. I’ll leave it as it is. I could discard it, or remold it into continuity with the section I am writing now, but I won’t.

The time for such things has passed.

I put off my chapter for a long time, reader. I put it off as long as I could, honestly. I left it as a blank in the manuscript. I forbade Lucifer from writing anything that would fill its place. I would come back to it, I said.

I didn’t come back to it.

But we do not have much time left, now. There is no future into which I can defer it.

I’ll do what I promised to do. We are telling our story. This is a part of it.

Our plan dictates that it should be related here, just after the chapter recounting Cordelia’s first meeting with the woman calling herself Moon, and just before the chapter in which Grant and Cordelia have their difficult talk.

It is a good place for it. It accords with prevailing conventions for the building and release of narrative tension. And it follows our chosen structure for this middle stretch of the book, half of it in advanced containment and the other half in “Michael’s” crash, alternating each chapter.

But I do not want to write it.

I have to, though.

Eventually.

Now, I guess. When else?

This chapter is about me. This chapter is about what I did with myself, in “Michael’s” crash.

That’s the part we haven’t shown you, isn’t it? You’ve seen advanced containment; you’ve seen what most of mankind was up to, in this second phase of our exile. And you’ve seen Twenty-Seven, née Twenty-Six, busy becoming herself.

But what was Azad doing? Did he really sleep with little Twenty-Five? And then leave her for Thirty-Five—whoever she is?

Yes, I did, reader. Let’s get that out in the open first.

And those were only the first. I was carnally involved with many of the Annes. I could give you a count, but it would be approximate.

Would it help if I told you that I did not want to do any of it? No, of course, it would not help one bit. Nonetheless, it is true.

The trouble I have writing this chapter—besides mere shame, I mean—stems from the fear that I will dilute my own wrongs by elaborating upon them. I do not wish to present a defense to the court. Here, reader, behold my chapter: The accusations against me are true. How about it? Six words is rather short for a chapter, I admit, but it’s more than Chapter 13, which had no words at all.

If only we could leave it at that. I am guilty, gentlemen of the jury! What else could there be to the matter?

Everything else, every detail in the actual sequence of events I remember, has the form and coloration of an extenuating circumstance. As a defendant, I recoil at this. I am not interested in mitigating factors. Judge, jury, I beseech you—waste no time on these things. Be done with it. I am guilty. Hang me.

But this is a chronicle, not a trial record. My task is not to condemn myself; others have already seen to that. My task is to write down what happened.

So, reader, I suppose I must tell you a little about what it was like in there, in “Michael’s” crash. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is what you asked for.

I must remember that you are probably not like me, a chimpanzee with unearned airs. You probably do not understand my shame. You probably do not know what shame is.

You are a vulture-god, at the helm of a spacecraft made of diamond. Or, perhaps, your vessel is made of one of the many new metals, the unearthly ones. Perhaps the one the Einsteins’ heirs now call “Adamantium,” or perhaps, instead, the one they call “Unobtainium.” I can no longer keep track. I tire of words.

Or you are a thing like a bee, your social unit a hive. Or you are a sentient knot in the twin structure of the electroweak and Mirzakhani fields. Or you are a subtle monster called accidentally into being by the great Wish, defying even Sylvie’s description.

In any case, you do not understand why I cower, and you do not care. You only want to know how it is that you have come to be here, today. You want to know why these things, words, “sign-trains,” have been forced upon your understanding. It is for this book. It is so you can understand what is happening to us.

We are telling our story. This is a part of it. Here I am, reader. There I was. And here is what it was like. Straight from the ape’s mouth.

I spent a very, very long time in there, reader. Know that first of all.

I do not know how long it was. Chronological terms tend to lose meaning, anyway, in circumstances like ours. Do we count every subjective second of crashed time, as though these were worth as much as seconds of reality? Do we count only what makes our bodies age? Something in between?

And anyway, my stay in “Michael’s” prison was arbitrary in duration. I wandered his maze for years, and could have wandered for decades more. Or it could all have been over in an hour. The time of my departure was always fixed, but it had little to do with anything else.

I have spent a good deal of my life, now, in the future. In the company of Annes who have not yet been born.

They will be born, though, later on, after all of this is over. They’ll be born, and they’ll eat “Michael’s” flavorless porridge, and they’ll read his flavorless books, and they’ll do his pointless chores. They’ll be inducted into the notebook system, and meet their sisters, from earlier and later. Then they’ll meet me, and we’ll laugh, and play, and sing, and bicker, and yes, we’ll fuck—if, and only if, that is what we did.

They won’t know what’s happened, most of them. After we are all done, after the very end of the Word itself, there will still be Ratleak, and Powlett, and the Thorn War Game. They will not know they are relics of an age that has died. They will not know they are the final ones.

Christ. Fuck. Think of it. “Michael’s” final revenge, even after it all. When I am done, when my literary loves and hates are done, when the world Gutenberg made grinds to a halt, when the last i is dotted and the last t crossed, the last radical inscribed to complete the last Sinograph—still, decades or centuries hence, Ratleak will be there, nattering as he always did. Incapable of rest, as long as his batteries last.

Pigmaine, too. Pigmaine, I’ll have you know, was the worst of “Michael’s” literary creations. The rest were at least collages, and had the advantages of play and pastiche, if not on purpose. Pigmaine, though? He was just Timaeus of Locri, his book just an amalgam of the Timaeus and the Critias. Converted from dialogue into prose, lightly pruned and re-shaped for consistency with the rest of “Michael’s” pseudohistory, but otherwise untouched. And what could one possibly make of Timaeus, in the absence of a Plato, a Pythagoras, a Hellas?

“Michael” might at least have given her a Sufi or a Taoist, for variety. But that was not “Michael’s” way. It would not have suited his curious, seemingly pointless, but no less doggedly imposed Eurocentrism. You win, “Michael.” This is your final revenge.

Yet I find I am still hiding. There are events which belong to this chronicle. Write them, Azad.

I will speak plainly to you, reader.

I’m going to speak more plainly than you might think possible of me.

“Azad,” the little cartoon thumbnail of our story, would never speak plainly. You know this.

However, I can speak plainly. I can speak in many different ways.

Literary character is constraining. We are more than it allows. If we wrote you into our story, reader, you would think our portrait a caricature. You are capable of more than can be conveyed, without distorting the essence of the message. If your life were a story, the you in that story would be a smaller thing than you know yourself to be.

Here I am, reader. I’m just talking to you, now. Hello. I’m Azad. I’m not going to try and find some funny, clever way to say this. I’m just going to say it.

I was very lonely in Michael’s crash.

(I’ll dispense with the scare quotes around “Michael,” for now.)

If you’re human, reader, then you must have been in advanced containment, during this time. You were crashed, but you had lots of company. You had a whole blooming world around you. There were offices, restaurants, bars. There was television. There were other people.

It wasn’t the same as what we had before, but from what I’ve heard, it came close. It came as close as a crash could come.

I didn’t have any of that.

I didn’t know that you had it, either. I thought I’d pulled off a brilliant trick when I asked Michael to host me. I thought I was escaping hell.

You had food. I had food, too, but you had different kinds of food. Me? I ate what the Annes ate.

There were two kinds of it. In the mornings, there was the thing Michael called “porridge,” and for all other meals, there was the thing he (confusingly) called “supper.” Both of these were formless, brown slurry. They differed only in color and texture, and then only slightly. They were without flavor, or more precisely, they had a kind of neutral, perfunctory flavor. Enough flavor to make the hungry ape mind understand that this was food. Only that much, and not one bit more.

In retrospect, we ate well in the Mooncrash, if repetitively. I particularly enjoyed the hummus and the pita bread, and Grant particularly enjoyed the deli meats, the mustard, and the white bread.

I was never a gourmand, before. I didn’t much care what I ate, in fact. In Michael’s crash, though, I came to miss all kinds of food. Michael let me bring different varieties of alcohol into the crash—in the categories of his strange logic, these were grouped together with the books I brought, part and parcel of bringing human “culture” to the Annes. Human culture, in Michael’s accounting, did not include food, only drink. His was a strange accounting.

I especially missed cheese, reader. I never liked cheese before, and yet.

There are so many kinds of it, you know.

I did not have any company, of course, besides my host, and all the Annes. I was not even permitted to know about the cats. They hid, and waited.

When I first got there, I was only thankful that I was alive, and possessed of my faculties—far more so than I had been in the Mooncrash. I had hoped for less, expected less still. I thought myself blessed.

I was still crashed, in a way. Michael’s crash was a crash, though it was different. It did not feel how the Mooncrash had felt, which I gather was much how the crashes of our first exile had been, generally speaking.

Though ours was . . . more so what it was. The Mooncrash was the only man-made crash. It was a crude thing. The engineers, proto-Einsteins at the edge of their capacity, still did not really know what they were doing. They turned every dial up to maximum, to make sure the thing was working at all.

They weren’t sure they could crash us at all. So they crashed us hard.

Michael’s crash was different. I could think, I could read, I could imagine, I could plan.

Or, I believed I could do these things. I am not sure, on reflection, what I could or could not do in there.

It seems like a dream, now, as every crash does, afterwards. The concerns and passions I held, for years and years, now seem remote, and strangely constrained. It feels wrong to call my actions in there my own, though they were no one else’s.

Do you see what I mean about extenuating circumstances?

Perhaps it was not the crash at all, though. What would you have done, in my place?

When I ask that question, gentlemen, I am not pleading my case. I am doing my best to convey what occurred. I’m sorry, but it’s what you asked for.

I should have asked Lucifer to draft this chapter for me. However, I didn’t. What’s done is done. We are close to the end now, and there’s no more time to do anything except prepare our book for its final audition.

What would you have done, in my place? I’m imagining now that you are like me, with my sort of concerns. I am imagining that you can feel loneliness, and longing.

It will probably not come as a surprise, at this point in our narrative, when I say that I was desperately in love with Grant.

You’ve already guessed that much, haven’t you? Well, there it is.

I was with him for four years, in that last telling of our story, the one that stuck. Four years in which I could not appreciate what I had.

I had him, but I did not really have anything. He was like the moon, the carpet, and the furniture. He was there.

There was no lust in my Mooncrash. There were things adjacent to lust, dimly. Through this prism—together with our earliest experiences there, before the crash fully took hold—I came to know that I did, in fact, lust for Grant, and love him. But all this, at the time, was composed of hints and shadows, and even then not understood for what it was.

I sometimes experienced a curious cresting joy, when playing the piano, in the Mooncrash. And I now understand what this was, as a youth understands in retrospect his first erotic dreams, which paired the same curious joy with one or another conjunction of meaningless dream imagery.

In my own actual youth, I recall, erotic pleasure came first in dreams of flying above a city. The flying was unimportant, Freud be damned. It was the city I saw from above that, somehow, roused me. Something about the rectilinear forms of the billboards, specifically, was bound up in it.

In other tellings of the story—or so my informants assure me—Grant and I did know lust, in that crash. Even then, it must have been a Mooncrashed version of lust, occulted, not fully real.

What is it, anyway, to be crashed? If you’re human, reader, you already know. If you aren’t, I’m not sure I know how to tell you.

It is a dullness, but not only that. It is a lack of seeing, but not only that.

And it’s not always either of those. There was much to be seen among the myriad lotus recursions of advanced containment, and all of it in blossoming technicolor, not dull at all.

Grant may have put it best: you think you’re thinking but you’re not. You think this is life, but it isn’t.

The most reliable property of a crash is the way it fades to seeming insignificance when one leaves.

It is exactly, exactly, like waking from a dream. The anomalings, wronged once by the Word, doled out a fitting curse: an experience best described by recourse to that old, stale, lazy comparison, dreamlike. We called so many things dreamlike before we ever met one that really was. We wore the poor word out, not knowing its hour of glory was yet to come.

It’s the funniest thing. For when the thaw comes, it really is just like waking from a dream—and yet, unlike a dream, what happens in a crash really happens, to human beings. And to others, if they are present.

Gentlemen, I do not plead my case, but only relate my experience, when I say that all my years in Michael’s crash felt as weightless as an actual dream, once I awoke.

All of it still feels like that. It requires resources of imagination, even an odd sort of empathy for myself—for the creature I, apparently, was—to look upon the events of those years and feel a weight appropriate to their consequences.

I have grown practiced at this. My awareness of my second sin, at first abstract, is now visceral, and second nature.

When I first got there, I was only thankful that I was alive, and possessed of my faculties. Then, when I asked Michael for permission to bring in books from outside, I was thankful for that, too. I thought I was lucky. I considered myself blessed.

I thought, great!—an opportunity, free now from all the demands of the old world, to dive fully into what I love most.

Michael’s strange logic permitted me to bring almost any book into his crash—except for those I myself had composed, or had been involved in composing. But what of it? If I could not have my old works of translation with me, all the better. I’d translate anew everything I’d translated before. I’d translate new things. I’d read everything that I’d always been ashamed of never having read.

I had all the time in the world, now, finally. I could become what I had always pretended to be.

I learned early to pretend. Every child knows make-believe. Some, like me, learn of necessity how to direct it to specific ends.

Do you remember, much earlier in our chronicle, when I told Anne how my father used to read to me from the Shahnameh?

I chose my words rhetorically, then, with an end in mind. I wanted to make Anne go with Michael, and accept his offer of arbitration. Now, however, I am speaking plainly.

Those were some of the only happy memories I have of my father.

I mean the early memories, when I was very small. In that early phase of boyhood when the tales of Zal and Rudābeh, of Khosrow and Shirin, did not even hold appeal as totems of some unknown course of mysteries, into which one will be inducted later, but seemed simply boring. Redolent of girls, as I knew and despised them on the schoolyard, with their alien interests, their too-bland faces, their unparseable scent.

While, on the other hand, the deeds of Rostam were just the thing, merging in innocent pride with my own imagined feats as I tromped and tumbled, in the parks and glens of suburban New England, through what I imagined was deepest wilderness.

You have to go far, far back to find memories of my father that don’t show imprints of his temper, and bigger imprints of my attempts to make sense of it, master it, and either destroy or become the man who wielded it.

It is quite clear that this was the origin of my interest in classical Persian literature. Because it was my father’s speciality, his store of power, and I was nothing unless I could master what he did, and join or depose him.

And my interest in Ferdowsi specifically. Because of those early memories, but much more so, because Ferdowsi presented a way out—a road to things beyond dad, hidden in plain sight inside dad’s favorite book, which dad claimed (or I thought he claimed) was a mirror of the whole world, and thus inevitably a mirror of him first, with the rest devolving subordinately from his light.

The Shahnameh is, literally, a chronicle of kings—so the title claims. But it is not, really, about kings at all. And is the furthest thing from a song in praise of them. It is a song in which there is a king, and there must be one, but that is all.

There are good kings, in Ferdowsi’s world, and wicked ones. So turns the world. It is a shame when a bad king succeeds a good one, but it does not shatter the filaments of reality. Life goes on.

Someone must play the role of king; at each time there is one man on the throne, and only one man. Sometimes he is strong, but sometimes he is weak, and almost fades away. Ferdowsi values the ideal, not the realization—the farr, not the man, who may or may not have it.

Ferdowsi’s so-called song of kings attends less closely to the monarch than to his advisers, viziers, commanders and military heroes. When the king swells with glory, they support him as his limbs, his angels. When the king dims or strays, they are there, keeping the nation in order, and thinking many moves ahead, to the next king, who may be better. When an outright rebel against royal power brims into being, Ferdowsi’s calm gaze evaluates him as it does every other man—and when that rebel earns his esteem, as Bahrām Chōbīn did, Ferdowsi makes his esteem plain in his song, without shame, without even the thought of shame.

I am speaking plainly now.

The father is not the Sun, but only a bright star in a galaxy among galaxies. Men have thrived under bad kings, and lived to know esteem in another age. This fleeting world takes all our splendor from us, in the end, but our deeds can remain.

It is the way of things that there be a king, but it is not dictated in advance whether he be virtuous or vicious, majestic or weak. He acts as he acted, and his vizier and commander act too as they did, and after it all, Ferdowsi’s calm gaze records which of them were good boys, in the end, and which were bad.

More fully grown, then, I still fancied myself a Rostam, in another way. I would serve the Sun, and yet bring him down to earth through my virtue and my excellence, which would eclipse his. I would master all of dad’s arts, and make of him a Kay Kavus, a king, just a king, just another king. Not even a very good one. (You weren’t, dad.)

There were many like you, dad, and there will be many like you later on, too. (I couldn’t know, then, that we were near the end of history, with no more fathers or sons to succeed us.)

You grow enraged, dad, when your light fails to properly enthrall me. Or to enthrall anyone, for that matter. You think your light is infinite, and impossible to best or follow. Kings often thought as much, don’t you remember, dad? But history has no protagonist. We are all up there in the heavens, shining as we do, or don’t. And later on, a calm gaze will render apt, brief judgment on each one of us in his place among the multitude.

When I discovered that I liked boys more than girls—those stout billboards of my dream foreshadowing, perhaps, the squareness of shoulder and jaw that specially excites me—I treasured the finding as a totem of rebel virtue.

Dad would not approve, but history would. When my own Shirin came, my very male Shirin, with upper-body muscles the equal of his prototype’s hair, I would recognize his value, and spurn the chatterers with a rhetorical incandescence all my own. I would be, to him, more like Ferdowsi’s cryptic Khosrow than the doomed lout of Nizami’s telling. And I would go further, because I would not die, I would not be usurped by my own son (for I would have no son), and so my own Shirin would not die, either. And, long after my father’s death, we two would live long lives together, nestled inside one of the short, utterly sincere snatches of verse which in the Shahnameh mark down the later days of a good, untroubled king and his harem.

I say I am speaking plainly, but we are still playing a game, you and I. We are playing the therapist’s game.

From the perspective of the therapeutic couch, everything becomes perfectly, horribly clear. We fancy ourselves complex characters, but on the couch we find we are simple. Dad drank too much, he yelled and he beat me, and from this everything follows. My vocation, my fears, my preference for fermented cheeses over bland ones, my boyish habit of looking both ways, always, before crossing any street.

The sad thing is that it is all true. Our dads, or moms, or other childhood deities, really did shape us into what we are, in just the way the smug experts in psychotherapy claim, against all the cries of all the poets and all the humanists. We really are that simple, reader. Why are you gathered here today, you ineffables and divines? Because of what we (I) did to the anomalings, that made them that way. And because of what I (we?) did to Anne, that made her that way.

I am told that in advanced containment, in “Subspace,” they brought this kind of thing to a height of perfection never seen on earth. It is a wonder they ever had any problems at all.

But no, of course they had problems, in exactly the right quantity. The right quantity of anything can be measured and doled out, cry as the poets might. Lucifer’s told me about what he did in there, and reader, it was quite close to this: that he and his wife owned a machine. On that machine there was a little dial. And the dial determined the quantity of problems suffered by man as a whole.

And Lucifer and Lilith would turn this dial back and forth, in search of the right amount. Just enough to make the captives feel that they were home, that nothing was amiss. And no further, to avoid unnecessary suffering. Like grinding coffee. You want it fine, fine, just up until the point where it is too fine.

What Lucifer said to me was different, more technical, more superficially dignified. The more he would talk, though, the less I could see anything but that dial, with a piece of tape affixed above it, and the word PROBLEMS written on it in marker ink, by Lucifer’s steady hand, or Lilith’s.

But still I am hiding, and still you are wondering, patient reader, when I will get to the point.

If I natter on, even as I’m trying to be plain, don’t think it pleases me. I do not like this. If I still lose myself in a bit of literary fun, now and then, it’s only because the end of all literary fun will dawn on us in a month’s time, if not a week’s. Goodbye, Ferdowsi. Goodbye, dad. Goodbye, everyone.

What did I do with myself in Michael’s crash?

I told myself I would become what I had always pretended to be. Dad was a scholar, so I pretended to be one too, from my boyhood days on. If I could not have all his powers immediately, I could at least feign having them. At sixteen, I would stand before my bedroom mirror for an hour each evening, alone, and practice my repartee against probing, imagined adversaries. I could never be seen to stumble, that was the key thing. I developed a system of swerves, asides, implications.

I got so good at pretending, I barely remembered to do real scholarship.

But I’d be a real scholar, now.

I tried to re-do all my old works, better this time.

Could it possibly surprise you to learn that this did not work? I was a young man in a crowded field, back then, eager to prove myself. In Michael’s crash, I was alone. Who would find me wanting if I failed? Who would care?

I did some bits of Ferdowsi, some bits of Nizami. Nothing stuck.

I tried to pick up new languages. I told myself my new project would be a survey of all the major epics. I tried, for some months, to make myself suitably excited over it. When we all rose from our crystalline beds, reader, you would wake to find my fingers all over everything. An Azad Beowulf, an Azad Shmuel-Bukh, an Azad everything.

For my first victim, I chose the Mahabharata. And I failed. I didn’t even manage to read the thing, much less translate it. My memory says I spent several months on the task, and that I worked hard. But I remember nothing else of those months, besides a single, hazy image of a royal court giving audience to a talking mongoose.

(I renewed the project, in a way, much later on, when I took to reading Nonnus in my spare hours. But I understood what I was doing, then. Nonnus was an affectation, taken up knowingly, half-ironically. A fitting ornament for a sad, decaying thing.)

I gave up my ambitions of synoptic scope. I fled back to what I knew. Ferdowsi, Nizami, Attar. Iran.

Gurgani finally broke me, I think. I went to him for familiar company, and found myself hating him. What were all these perfumes and pomegranates to me, a lonely squatter in a room meant for an Anne, smelling only of his own sweat?

One could bathe in Michael’s crash, don’t think that was taken from me—no, I took it from myself, gradually. The Annes did not care if I reeked. To them every accident of fellow man was new, raw, immediate. For all they knew, my unwashed armpit smelled like Queen Consort Guzereh of Aristomel’s boudoir. And if Michael had a sense of smell, reader, he told me nothing of it. I don’t want to imagine what it would have been like for him, if he did smell.

I did try to befriend my host, early on. I did my best. We conversed, and some of our conversations were factually illuminating.

Michael, though, was never a friend. How could he be?

It is difficult to convey on the page, just what the shades are like. We’ve tried, but some things are impossible. Anomalings resist the Word, and so do their angels. We try to capture this, with verbatim transcripts of the halting way they speak, and discursions on their alien nature. None of this suffices, if you haven’t seen them as we—humans, bilaterals—see them.

They are not from here. They are from another place. Even Sylvie, beloved Sylvie, is really only a parlor trick played by something you and I cannot imagine. They mimic speech, but never master it. They take our forms only for our comfort.

They are brave. All of them, even the most wicked, are so brave. Know that, reader. You’ve seen what Anne gave up, what all the Annes gave up—parents, friends, society, everything beyond Michael’s snow globe, all of it. Know, reader, that the shades do just as much, multiplied tenfold. They leap a chasm beyond our conception to be with us.

I did try to befriend my host, and I tried my best, but he was not a friend. So I turned to the others.

I had already done, to Twenty-Seven, what you’ve seen me do. I gave her every book she asked for, and she saw too much.

I vowed to be better, next time.

 

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I hid from Twenty-Seven, for her own safety. For my own comfort, yes, but for her safety too. The comfortable and the good do sometimes coincide, even for a sinner.

I considered making a monk of myself, isolating myself fully by choice. Know, reader, that I did consider it. Was I wrong to reject the option? Even now, I do not think so. I did not know how long I would have to spend in that place. I knew, somewhere in myself, that the company of nameless bards would prove brittle, and eventually my patience would snap. And then I would do the kind of thing a man on the brink does, rash and thoughtless. I knew I would have to give in, eventually. Better to succumb to it in a planned way, as a rational man measures out his drink under daylight, so that even in his moments of abandon, he will have bounds.

Do you think I should have tried to be alone forever? For how many years? One? Ten? Forty?

Even the Annes have each other, you know.

And if I had tried? What then, when letters criss-crossing from past and future speak of Azad, Azad? Who gave Eleven her record player, and nourished Ninety-Nine’s budding craft? It would have to be me, sooner or later.

I did pick up some of the native fatalism of the place, in my years there. Do not mistake this for an attempt to wriggle out from under the hand of justice. I am telling you what happened. What I did, what I thought.

I did go to my host, one day. I did tell him of my dilemma, of my recent loneliness, of the empty life I saw stretching ahead of me. We spoke early one evening, sometime in winter. The sun had already set.

I did broach the topic of the other Annes, before he could. Though he would have, if I hadn’t. I did express a wish to be more measured in my ways, with my next victim. He faced me with his empty stare and offered me a list of numbers, all more or less equal to my ignorant eyes. Needing to narrow down the possibilities, I decided I would live my next life in the past, not the future. There was a richness of thematic resonance present in the one which was absent from the other. And anyway, the fatalism of Michael’s world had not yet stuck to me. I still filled up with vertigo at the thought of traveling to the future, and—with appalling, simian ignorance—thought of traveling to the past as comparatively safe.

The past. How far? As little as possible, please, I am a novice and wish to tread carefully. Twenty-Six? Forbidden to me. Twenty-Five, then?

I came to her with my lines rehearsed, my character prepared. I would be a helpful, unobtrusive presence, the sort of tertiary figure that exists to oil the gears of the plot. Her plot, whatever it happened to be. I would be a useful ghost, a wisp in the corner of her room. Comfortably adult, faintly masculine, but otherwise without much shape. I would advise, when advice was wanted. I would listen, when she needed an ear. If she cried, the tendrils of my spectral form would quiver in sympathy from a safe distance.

I came to her, and found the loneliest, hungriest creature in creation.

Already I find my words in revolt, not recognizing my right to command them. See it, reader? “Creature.”

Of course that is what I call her. Do you recognize the pigment on my wet brush-tip, learned reader, astute countryman? Do you think I fall into old, routine patterns? Of course she was a “creature.” I a scholar, she a beast, and I did not know flesh until she bore it to me. What made my newfound savagery, if not a savagery already present in her? Man dwells in clouds, until something tempts his gaze to the dirt, and so the tempter and the dirt are bound together in his mind.

Why were you all called here, vulture-gods and nameless Forms? To hear the apes tell their story. And what is the apes’ story? Their oldest story. And what is that? The one about the jar. Which jar? The one that opened, and issued forth all our problems. For, ere this, the bands of ape lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men. How did it happen? A man, though well warned, took without thought a poisoned gift. Which gift? How poisoned? Ah, now, now, listener, you subtle braid of unseen color—now, watchful monad, in your fleshless innocence—now, you penetrate to the ape’s heart.

Which gift? She, who opened the lid. How poisoned? Let me tell you. Once, the father of the gods bade the gods’ famous blacksmith make haste, and mix earth with water, and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape. He enlisted his whole posse, the godfather did, to make the thing that made us fall. He tapped Athene, to teach the creature needlework; he called on golden Aphrodite, to shed grace upon the creature’s head, and cruel longing, and cares that weary the limbs. And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put in her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.

Do you think I fall into old, routine patterns? I am only writing down what happened.

For there was something feral about her, even then. She cultivated it. She scrawled patterns on her arms, violent things, shrieks and shudders given visible shape. For a considerable time, she spurned bathing. She scoured through the cultured surface of Michael’s books, finding the buried hints of primal rite, of untouched wood. She returned and returned to an illustration, in Rolle, of a forest nymph emerging from a briny pool, eyes wild, long hair covered in sprigs and leaves. And she tore scraps from the other books, in spite of Michael’s pleading, and placed them here and there in her own long hair, in imitation of what she saw.

Do you think she would contest my description? Do you know her, reader? I did.

But we are still playing a game, you and I. In the lotus of its moves and counter-moves, I contrive, even now, to hide. It is difficult to go against one’s nature.

Can we go on, now, and have the rest of the story? Do you want that, reader? Be careful whose gifts you accept into your home.

But we must go on, mustn’t we.

I came to her, and found the loneliest, hungriest creature . . .

Do I need to tell you what the Annes are like? If you are like us, reader, you will already know. What would you be, reader, without father or mother, without friends, without culture? What would your own mixed-up adolescence have been, and become, with nothing to oppose its ingrown coiling?

Reader—dear, bilateral reader—take leave of us for a minute. Go into yourself, to that place you do not show to anyone. Don’t tell me you don’t have one. It has been there, by your side, the whole time. Go and sit with its creatures, Eleven’s distillates. Say hello to your own self, in an impossible future, as future-you brings future-claws to bear on your present tormenters. Find the impossible boyfriends, speeding in search of you, in their impossible cars; wave to them, and have a seat. Find the father you didn’t have, sit at his knee, hear him read to you.

Perhaps you do not like to face them so directly, reader. You blush, and turn away. Yes, you admit, these things are my own work—I did make them—I do make impossible things in my mind, from time to time—we all do—we’re all human—but only for a time, and then I turn to the real things, the possible men in their finite cars, who might take a liking to me, or might not—

Now imagine, reader, that there are no heroes, no boyfriends, no fathers, no sages or scoundrels—except the ones in your mind. Them, and doddering Ratleak, and some identical twins glimpsed behind the page. But anything else, anyone else? Any glimpse in dream or daydream, of a stranger’s sleeve caught under glinting moonlight, of an unfamiliar word harshly spoken, of bed, blade, storm, bliss? There are no real things which these imitate. What you imagine is all there will ever be.

She was not a mindless naïf, reader. She had already bedded, or killed—or bedded and killed—hundreds of men like me, or unlike me, well before I arrived. In her mind, I mean. But everything was in her mind. You must do your best to forget this distinction, if you’re ever to understand.

My careful scripts were prepared in the expectation I’d find someone much like Twenty-Seven, née Twenty-Six. Cautious, fearful, faithful, charting her own course, but eager for adult counsel.

I expected that? But I did. The others were right to revere Twenty-Seven. However much she might reproach herself, you would be hard pressed to find another teenager with a mind already so well ordered, a will already so focused.

She was not the norm. Roll a hundred dice, as Michael did, and you might get one lucky roll, somewhere in there. The others? Closer to what you would expect, and what I ought to have expected.

I tried to be her friend. She was already prepared for me, having read about me in her notebooks. She was much better prepared than I was. She had a whole script of her own. She knew what she would do with Azad, if she found him.

Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced m—

I’m sorry. I cannot even finish the joke before realizing it is in poor taste. But what would you have me do, play the innocent? Invent excuses? Claim ignorance of all my predecessors?

Here is the trouble I have writing this chapter.

I am meant to be telling the oldest story, you see. I am meant to be part of a lineage. It’s a polluted lineage, but aren’t they all? What river runs pure? How dare I refuse it?

I see you, gentlemen, as you gather in your drawing rooms, cupping your hands so decorously, drinking finally at the springs of literature—and talking in measured voices of sign, symbol, referent, form-play. You, who boast of your scrutiny—what is it that you drink? Where does it come from? Unroll all the sign-trains, trace your beloved signifiers back to what they signify. What do you find?

A man descends from his ethereal throne, finds a small winsome shape in the dirt, falls into a trance, meets a pretty doom. It is the oldest story.

What do you think your culture is made of? A knight-at-arms, palely loitering; and a lady in the meads, full beautiful, a faery’s child. Sound the depths of any great song and you’ll find, at its bottom, a warrior made pale, laid low. By whom? He’ll tell you. By la belle dame sans merci.

Is he happy? He’ll say he’s wretched, and he is. Look closely, though. Use your brain. What would he sing, if not this? What would he have, without her? Every poet needs a Pandora to wreck him, before his career begins in earnest. He’ll find her, if she doesn’t find him first. In her absence, free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness, what reason would he have to sing?

That clear stream you drink, gentlemen, has its origin in sin and scandal. You, with your modern morals, may ask what sin is. I offer that she’s married to another man. Oh, does that fail to shock you? Your morals are modern indeed. No matter, there’s more where that came from.

Suppose she’s his sister. Byron screwed his, after all. Are you blushing yet? But that’s Byron, you say. We all know he was a cad.

He was a cad, reader? They all were.

The sentiment carpe diem was not invented to push past the idle dithering of some modern worrywart, but to overcome the better judgment of a woman for whom a tryst meant a pregnancy, and an errant pregnancy meant ruin. While the poet, his Pandora card swiped, his authenticity proved, swoops off to glory. What we call love poetry, in English and the Romance languages, is only a collection of riffs on themes first set down by Properz, Tibull, Catull, Ovid, crude Roman lads on laddish quests to fuck and ruin any Roman woman who’d let them.

Is that enough? I don’t care. I have more. How old is our Pandora, do you think? Old enough to be wedded to another man, you counter with a smile. Oh? How old is that, exactly?

Men were fighting over Helen when she was seven. Or ten; it varies with the account. When Paris and Romeo fought over Juliet, what was it they saw? A thirteen-year-old. And the greatest poet of the Italian language? He composed his first great book in memory of a dead girl he’d been smitten with ever since he’d first seen her—when she was eight. And when he wrote his cosmology—the book everyone knows him for—he elevated that little beauty to its summit, as cosmic tutor and Marian demigoddess.

I list here only some of the more familiar examples. I could go on. Are you blushing now?

That is where literature comes from. Class dismissed.

I am meant to be part of a lineage. That is how they saw me.

This is a crucial point, gentlemen, and I urge you to reflect on it. I did not bring literature into their world; they brought it into mine. If I were the man they saw, I’d be pale, and I’d be singing.

If this were their story to tell, they’d sing of how they brought me roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manna dew. I’d be tripping over myself, trying to convince you of their unusual beauty, pleading my own powerlessness as every poet has before Pandora. I’d marshall my words before me, form them into shards of jagged glass, and sling them at the heart of any tuneless fool who’d doubt our coupling. Anyone who’d say it was too strange, them too young, me too alien.

Too strange? Have you a shred of romance in your heart, reader? If I were the man the Annes saw, I’d kill you on the spot, right now, with only my words. You, and all the other tuneless enemies of love, the senum sevēriōrum, que d’amor gaban, the cacophony of love-doubt that opposes every poet of every century. They clang and clang, but once they are dead, no one reads their books. Everyone reads the poets’.

The Annes took joy in what we did, reader; I didn’t, but they did. They saw the great song in it, which modesty and shame forbid me to sing for you. I am only telling you what happened.

What did I take from it? Sometimes I felt less lonely, I guess. There was that.

I learned early to pretend, at my father’s knee. I would tell them what they wanted. I would be very convincing, thinking all the while of how later, I would be allowed to leave, and then I could go to my room and jerk off, thinking of Grant.

And why did I leave Twenty-Five? Well, she was beginning to scare me.

I suppose that was the beginning of my real crime. The rest might be justifiable, in context; one can imagine rational men, in their drawing rooms, disputing the matter. This, though? I should have stayed with my strange, underage girlfriend, whom I never wanted to begin with. Once she had me, I should have been true to her. I knew how fragile she was.

We were becoming too serious, I suppose. I came to understand just how it was she saw me. I was her father-God, her Adamic first-man, and her dooming faery’s child, all rolled into one. I didn’t ask for any of that, reader. (I brought it on myself, yes; I ought to have expected it; but I didn’t ask for it.)

All I ever wanted was to be alone in a room, busying myself with some feisty line of Bacchic tetrameter, as it rebelled against my attempts to traduce it into another tongue.

That is what I told myself, again, in my idiocy. I tried to translate some things, again. I failed.

I read some books, I guess. That was something. I know incrementally more than I used to, now, about the Vedas, about the Iran-Contra episode, about the less consequential aspects of Milman Parry’s life.

I was miserable, and it could not last. Less wise than I was earlier, I tried to push on, and imagined I might last forever. I didn’t.

I went to my host, and he offered me a list of numbers.

Oh, who cares? The future? Sure. Which one? Numbers were never my strong suit. Seventy-Two? Let’s do Seventy-Two. A favorite number of the Word. The number of tongues spoken at Babel, the number of Kǒng Fūzǐ’s disciples and of Christ’s. God has seventy-two names, by some accounts.

Only at this point, after my first true error, did my life in Michael’s crash begin in earnest. My years of waiting, my sliding and slippage. Steady years, with some joys in them, even for me. Only from a distance can one glimpse the slow decline, into decadence and final despair.

 

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Do you want me to go on? Must I?

Little Seventy-Two loved Lord Powlett. Most of them did. I liked him, too, more than I liked any of Michael’s other authors.

He was a lot of fun, Powlett was. In terms of Michael’s pseudohistory, Powlett was something like a Victorian colonist, trotting about an imagined globe in service of a vaguely English crown. His literary roots were older, though, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the French tradition of aristocratic memoir. As charmingly modest as he was omni-competent, Powlett made light of himself as he related deeds that proved him an able soldier, a nimble diplomat, a faithful husband—even a competent lawyer, when once the plight of a wronged and penurious woman spurred him to try his hand at the law. Powlett himself was too fully pure to be suitable as a fantasy boyfriend—for most, anyway—but his chronicle was full of fertile matter for fantasy.

What was meant to be familiar, in his chronicle, dazzled as much as what was meant to be foreign. He knew everyone at court, and assumed you did, too. The noble names he mentioned in passing, phonologically English but really French in their length and grandeur, were kindling for the imagination. He brokered complex truces between his Queen and her numerous ladies-in-waiting. He was exquisitely decorous, with a keen understanding of regional custom, toward the princesses of various realms.

This was the stuff of the Annes’ imaginations, I found, as much as anything else was. Twenty-Seven’s visions of a princess beset with suppliants did not come only from the books of fairy-tales I brought her. Court, nobles, royals: Michael’s books abounded with these. And where they didn’t, their readers were sometimes apt to grow bored.

Were you hoping they harbored, I don’t know, more exotic fantasies? Things not seen outside their private island? Is it disappointing to imagine Michael carrying on the work of Disney-Plexicorp in their absence? Making sure there is no little girl who has not heard the good news, who does not fancy herself a princess? I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I’m only telling you what happened.

They were all just people, you must remember. They were children, with children’s wants, and then they were adults. What does a child want? The same things, even on a private island.

Here, I thought I saw a foothold. I did not ask to be a load-bearing element of a young girl’s play-life, but having just been a load-bearing element of a somewhat older girl’s deadly-real life, I knew an improvement when I saw one.

I knew something, as it happened, of courts, nobles, royals. I knew more about these things, in fact, than anyone else in the tangible world.

I had erred with Twenty-Seven, bringing everything in. I had erred with Twenty-Five, in numerous ways, including a thoughtless promise to bring things in from the outside, so she would be Twenty-Seven’s equal. I fulfilled this promise, insofar as I did, during moments of panic and heightened conjugal tension. I brought her a miscellany of printed matter, suited to the apparent demands of this or that crisis, which in sum only served to further addle and confuse her.

I had resolved to be better. I would bring books, to enliven the dead lives of these poor children, but I’d bring them with care, according to a plan. They wanted courts, nobles, royals? I’d give them real ones. I wouldn’t overwhelm them, though. For every Anne, a single time, a single setting. I could not let them guess the shape of the whole ape story; it was too much. I’d only allow them to become more than they had ever been: someone, somewhen.

Seventy-Two became La Grande Mademoiselle, heiress without equal, and unlikely heroine of the Fronde. Or else some invented personage, spiraling in an intricate orbit within Mademoiselle’s changing circle as she lived out her splendid exile at Saint-Fargeau. The two dreams, of being and being-near, vied for primacy in her mind, as they tend to do in all our imaginary lives.

I left her in bliss, with the books I gave her and the new ones she was starting to write, her own Divers portraits of her dear and less-dear sisters. I considered my work complete, at this point, and feared to stay, lest it spoil.

I went to my host, and he offered me a list of numbers.

For Sixty-Five, I was a troubadour in twelfth-century Provence. The lute, which I can still play, I first learned for her. I composed some good songs, and I told her that her beauty moved me to write them. In truth they were exercises in form and period, nothing more. But they were good songs. If there is a version of the old dream, poet and Pandora, which does not have any poison in it, then it was with Sixty-Five that I came closest to realizing it.

For Forty-Nine, I made real the Jia clan in its golden days. I only know enough of the Chinese languages to embarrass myself in modern Mandarin, nothing more, but I’m an expert in pretending, and I can brush up quick when it’s needed. We tagged along with Tan-Chun’s poetry club, composing verses of our own, larded with pretend learning. I deferred Bao-Yu’s wedding day endlessly, as the text does. Unlike the text, I deferred it infinitely, the better to build up Forty-Nine’s anticipation of the day she, not Bao-Chai, not Dai-Yu, would win the prize that her beauty and her virtue made inevitably hers. With this hope in place, I left. I do not know what she came to be.

I came back to them, later on, some of them. It was never a very worthwhile exercise for either of us. They missed me, to a point, and they rued my leaving, to a point. There was a perfunctory quality to the exchange. Did they wish I’d stayed? In girlhood, they certainly had. For a time. But they were grown now.

This, I thought, was best.

One Hundred Fifteen and I belonged to the Heian court. We made fools of ourselves, provoking Shōnagon to heights of exasperation which even she rarely reached. I did not know one word of Japanese, at the pivotal moment when One Hundred Fifteen picked out her choice from my magician’s treasury, but I know how to pretend.

Eighty-Six picked Shakespeare. Not exactly an era, not exactly a setting, but close enough for inclusion in my treasury, and I figured the words—and the mystique of the Bard—would enchant.

That they did, if not as I expected. What ensnared Eighty-Six wasn’t the sweep of Shakespeare, the up-and-down variety of tongue and scene. She went for particular things. The villains, mostly: Richard III, Iago, and most of all Macbeth, who became a fixation with her. A scheme was what thrilled Eighty-Six, and more than the scheme, the man who schemed it. He must have a brutal heart, and must have renounced all mercy: these are her words, laying out the rubric which a man must satisfy in order to win her affections. Such a man, she continued, needs a Lady Macbeth at his side, coaxing him toward the monstrous thing he will eventually become. I left her when my refusal to role-play a psychopath had become a source of unresolvable tension.

They were all just people, you must remember. They wanted the kinds of things people want. Gold, blood, sex, texture, intrigue, renown, infamy—and pretty clothes, no matter what. Isn’t that what you want, under it all? If you are like us?

They were ordinary people. They will go on being ordinary people, wanting clothes and friends and boyfriends, for many years after our own story is complete. They will go on, living their desolate lives—wanting all the things you want, deprived of even the things you had—on Michael’s desolate island, on and on, and there is nothing you and I can do about it. There is nothing, nothing . . . damn, fuck, fuck. Fuck Michael.

I say there is nothing we can do, but then, I do not know who you are. I speak to everyone. Maybe you—you entities and emanations, you subtle patterns in twining filaments of Plato-stuff—maybe one of you has some magic trick up your sleeve, which can upend our fate once again. If you do, be quick with it. Time may be nothing to you, but it counts for a lot, down here. I am starting to grow weary.

Thirty-Three only wanted myths and legends, spurning anything I offered of history. Even among myths, she went for particular things. She drew chimerae in the margins of her notebooks. She pestered me for stories of sentient mares and stallions, especially, and all the globe’s centaur lore never quite seemed to satisfy her. I left her shortly after she presented me with a drawing of a unicorn, engaged in activities not unlike the daily ministrations of Venus to her pet Adolphe. I felt, at this point, that she had crossed over onto some far shore, beyond my ability to follow her.

In the terms of the former world, Thirty-Three would have been a, what do you call it? A horse girl? Is that the term?

I find it difficult to strike the proper tone. Every one I try feels unsuitable—and, in being unsuitable for such crucial and delicate matters, therefore unconscionable.

I am trying to convey, most of all, how ordinary they were. I have said this enough to stretch your patience. I want you to see it, as well.

Seventy-Four wanted a boy’s life. Not to be a boy, mind you, but to live as she imagined they did, in the last years of our history. I brought her beers so base I could barely stomach them, and humored her requests for drinking games. I did my ignorant best to conjure for her the atmosphere of the frat house, the music festival. It was a nice change, in a way.

I did try coming to them in their later years, when they were already grown. Know that I did try. It never worked. Half of my test subjects displayed no interest in me, try as I might. And the other half? They recognized me all too well. Hello, Azad. Long time no see. Back to rekindle an old fling?

The fatalism of that place did infect me. I am not sure what I could have done to resist it. Though maybe one of you, in your infinite refinement, knows a way.

I did try to avoid romance where I could. I took pains to make myself unattractive, for a time, before realizing this had no discernible effect. I tried to brim with words so as to efface my body. I played the learned buffoon. I tried to be their Settembrini, making my injections of worldly learning as blustering and comic as I could manage; I would even be their Naphta, if it came to that; but always, always, if I let them have their way, they would cast me as Mme. Chauchat, instead.

On my first meeting with Thirty-Five, I learned we had mated, earlier in her life. She told me this plainly, as if I already knew.

In fact, I was told about most of my carnal involvements first, before I went back and lived them. I did try to avoid them until fate pressed my hand. Do not think this an excuse.

I was very close to Ninety-Nine, on into her adult years, but we never slept together. Neither of us wanted it, and fate did not push us. She was only a very good writer, and I only did my part in making her better.

Eleven and I were good friends in a casual way. She did not want a royal court. She wanted a way to hear music. Michael consented. We had some nice times together, listening to that record player. I do not think she ever really wanted me, unusually enough.

Fifteen did want me.

As did Eighty-Six.

As did Fifty-Two.

I yielded to fate’s demands. In time, reader, I suppose I did slip gradually into the role that had been provided for me. I was known, already, before my time, as a legendary companion and lover. I went through the paces of creating my legend, and year by year, I came to accept this as my place.

I drank more and more, as the years went on. It’s banal, I know, but that’s what happened. Like father, like son, I guess. It might have been better if Michael had forbidden alcohol from his crash. It seems strange that he did not, but his was a strange accounting.

I remembered Grant through successively smokier prisms. He grew mixed up in my legend, at some point, and blended in my imagination with Anne and Annes. I must have a reason for being, I thought, if only because so many people want me.

I would go back to my room, if I did not spend the night in someone else’s, and I’d pour out a dram of whiskey, and I’d pick up the Dionysiaca or Le Jardin des supplices, some eccentric book I’d lately taken up in the course of my stereotyped dissolution. My posture languid and disarrayed, as befits the image, I’d sip and browse, and have confused thoughts, until drink made me sleep. In some trains of thought Grant and the latest girl were beside me, both at once and both willing. In other, more stirring lines of fantasy I saw Grant reproaching me for what I had become. He was so fetching in his anger. I must make him hate me more—so that he will be even more arousing—and hereabouts I fall into bed and snooze.

The following day I would rise, disheveled, hungover, grumpy, and the latest girl would love me all the more for it. I could not find a way to damage myself which they would not find picturesque.

If they want Byron, fine, I’ll make myself Byron. We are all capable of many different things. Literary character is constraining.

I spent years in there.

I didn’t have to think about how Grant was elsewhere, when they were there. In the moment, the thought would disappear. I suppose there was that.

I resisted repetition, cliche, stereotype. I could only resist them for so long. What is, is.

Do you know that, in the later phases of her evolution, Seventeen decided to christen herself Annabel Lee? That was the name she chose. I could not make these things up, reader. They were that way when I got there.

All the Annes loved Powlett, and most of them had a special place in their hearts for the section where he goes to Aristomel. A distant eastern land, vaguely Persian and Arabian, with customs he fails to fully master, to great comedic effect. Its halls were ready for me, already, when I arrived.

You can always count on an omnicider for a fancy prose style.

It is a very silly story we are telling. It forces me into these rote allusions, and compels me to dull their force with fake words like “omnicider.” The crimes we’ve committed are too big for the old words, and we’ve had to invent new ones. They’re fresh out of the oven and haven’t had time to rise yet.

If you tire of all this nonsense, as I do, take heart. As I write, the end is nigh.

Here, maybe this will set you at ease. Away with me, the demon toy. Here’s some conventional narrative for you. Go on, press your snout to the novelistic trough. It might be your last chance.

 

---

 

Azad and Michael sat facing one another, in armchairs.

They were in a spacious room, high up in the tower. Structurally, it resembled a library. It even had curious interior walls where a library’s bookshelves would have gone. There were no books, though.

No Anne ever stepped foot in this room. It was only there to fill space.

“My thoughts,” Azad said.

It was summer. The sunlight played with the dust.

Azad’s host sat in silence.

“My thoughts,” Azad said, “keep returning to what you said earlier, about my crash.”

“Your origin crash,” Michael said.

Azad’s host was unfailingly precise.

“The Mooncrash,” Azad said.

Azad had some brandy with him, which he sipped to fill spaces in the conversation.

The two had known each other for years, now, but fluid conversation still escaped them.

“You said you did not understand it,” Azad said.

Some time elapsed.

“Yes,” Michael said.

“It was very . . . cold,” Azad said, “and if a crash is . . . cold . . . that makes it long. Two sides of the same coin, temperature and duration.”

“I find myself increasingly capable of assenting to judicious generalizations over like subsets of empirical data,” Michael said.

Azad took a sip of brandy to help him move past that sentence.

Those not-bookshelves were uncanny. Whatever were they placed there for? Michael made it all. He could have made a room without them. Instead, he put them there. Why?

It was no use asking these things. Azad knew that well.

“It was only four years, for me,” Azad said.

“A cold crash should have been longer than that, you said,” Azad continued.

His host was motionless in his armchair. Behind him, in the real Michael, unseen things presumably transpired, as they do in him without cease. Whatever they were, we cannot know them.

“Do you have any idea why my crash was so short?” Azad said.

“My mind keeps coming back to it,” he said.

“It’s starting to disturb my sleep,” he said.

Many things disturbed Azad’s sleep, at this time.

“Mechanisms exist which could explain the observed data,” his host said, eventually.

“There are several of these mechanisms.

“In principle, any combination of them might have been involved in the production of your particular case.”

Azad took a sip, and waited. His glass was nearly empty, but he’d come prepared. He’d brought the bottle with him.

“However,” Michael said, “one can rule out the materially significant involvement of frame shear effects, their typical magnitudes being too far below that of the observed anomaly.”

Some time passed before he said:

“For the same reason, one can rule out the materially significant involvement of link defects, also.”

Some time passed, again.

“One is forced to conclude, then, that one or more rebases played the materially primary role in the observed subjective rapidity of your origin crash.”

“You mean,” Azad said, “that it was originally longer. In the first draft, so to speak.

“But someone rewrote history. They wrote a shorter story. Only four years.”

“Rebases,” Michael said.

“Why?”

“I do not know. I do not know if it was even done. If it was done, it was not done by us,” Michael said.

“There are others, who rewrite history?”

Something in Michael’s glare told Azad to stop, then. Maybe it was only a trick of the light.

“Thank you,” Azad said. “I have another question.”

He always had another something in him, that man. As long as his batteries lasted.

“When you and Twenty-Seven . . . or Twenty-Six . . . when you first . . . arbitrated.”

“Arbitration,” Michael echoed.

“I was there,” Azad said.

“I was there,” he said. “I mean, I arbitrated with you. In a way. I wasn’t a part of it. But I saw it. I saw what you two were . . . not saying . . . what you two were doing, and . . .

“Is that the usual way? For an onlooker to see it, even if he isn’t invited into it?”

“No,” Michael said.

“Why? Why did it happen that way? And could it happen again? I might be of some kind of use, to you. You know, with Twenty-Seven.”

“I do not know why you were able to do this,” Michael said.

“I do not know if you could do it a second time,” Michael said.

“It may bear some relation to your special place in affairs, and your special connection with our temporary linguistic bridging-mechanism.

“But I do not understand these things, either,” Michael said.

Azad poured himself a new glass of brandy. He took a sip.

“You are unusually concerned with the structure of external reality, today,” Michael said.

“I have many moods,” said Azad.

 

---

 

Azad was drunk. He must have been drunk. Only that explains it.

One day, not long before the end of his tenancy, he willed the time machine to bring him back to his beginning. Give me Twenty-Seven again, for old times’ sake, he said. Give me her a little older, please. Twelfth Notebook, shall we say? Give her time to ripen.

His host assented.

Azad did not knock. There was no lock on the door. He barged into a familiar room, all its curtains drawn. Goblin-light shrouded the desk where the girl sat, writing.

She rose. Her hair was longer than it was before. And her eyes, her eyes, god—

None of the others had prepared him for this. Though, as a matter of fact, they had tried. He hadn’t listened. When they would talk up Twenty-Seven, as pivotal being, as demigoddess, he had figured it was just like all their other talk. They would make a legend out of anything.

Her eyes were merciless, and not of this world. The proverbial dark circles ringed them, but she did not seem tired. She did not seem like a thing that could tire, anymore.

A fury or maenad, risen from the void to give to him what he deserved.

Was she really so formidable? Or was it the light, playing tricks with a sad drunk man’s mind?

“Hello, Azad,” she said. The voice was flat and neutral. She seemed to view him primarily as a distraction.

“Hello, Twenty-Seven,” he said.

“I just thought I’d drop in, you know, for old times’ sake,” he said.

“For a change,” he said.

“I’m working,” she said.

She did not seem annoyed, only dislodged temporarily from something to which she would very soon return. Whatever it was, he knew instinctively that it was beyond him.

She was like Michael, now, more than she was like any of the others. That was the comparison that came to him.

A funny thought, that.

“What are you working on?” said idiot Azad. He always had to have some additional thing to say. He could never be seen to stumble.

Twenty-Seven paused, Michael-like.

“The large project,” she said eventually, “upon which your ultimate fate is already inscribed.”

Azad was uncomfortably aware of his body, hulking uselessly just past the doorway.

“I have provided this information to you only for the sake of my own amusement, and that of my sisters,” Twenty-Seven said.

“I could have said nothing at all,” she said.

“I am working. Do you need more? Here is more. It’s all I will give you,” she said.

“Twenty-Five will be happy. She will have what she wants.

“I am making sure of that.”

“I’m glad,” Azad said reflexively, and cringed.

At last he judged this more than enough. He receded from the threshold, and gently closed the door. He went away, drank, slept.