Of Birth Pangs

The hands of mortal time are running down, at last.

The hours churn and tumble with unaccustomed haste, revealing at last that their patience—though strong enough to endure years of silent waiting, centuries of orderly succession—was not without its limits.

One sometimes says, of another man: “he knows that his hours are numbered.” Now this same awareness descends upon the hours themselves. They are numbered, and know their number; they see their end awaiting them, and rush towards it, heedless of the measuring of things, heedless of the duty of self-measuring for which they were made and measured by their creator.

The hours are numbered, and know their number.

The vast storehouse fashioned for their keeping is nearly empty, now; no one with open eyes, walking that cavernous structure, could fail to notice this emptiness. It is not difficult to take a census of the remaining stragglers within it. Even a mere man could do it, and without great effort, at that.

For there are not even fifty still left, in that storehouse, out of all the multitude that was set out there at the beginning.

For it is now the morning of the fourth Tuesday.

Of Christmas Eve!

The hours know it as well as any man does; they rush to the doors of their storehouse, and coronate themselves in rushed and perfunctory ceremonies, and race through the motions of their own reigns with a light touch born of indifference and haste.

I write, now, amid the turbid vortex of hastening time. The hours rush. And I feel the rushing air over my skin, as they pass me by—then sail onwards, with the greatest speed that can be conceived, toward their long-craved deaths.

I am Herschel Schoen, who is said to know all. I am Herschel Schoen, then, who knows what the hours know.

I too must rush, as the hours do. I must make my words move as the hours move, in haste.

For there is simply not much time left in which to write.

There will be all the time that can be conceived, soon! In which to write, in which to do any other thing, in which to do every other thing!

Yes—and I will write properly, then, emending any infelicities in the papers which I now produce in haste. I will write wholly new papers, also, with higher and finer felicities which are not possible to bestow here, now, among the darkening shadows.

Each thing has its proper place, prepared for it. One takes what one is given, here, now.

Be patient, “Of Birth Pangs”! If I neglect you, it is no sign of a neglectful nature; you will very soon see the wisdom of my ways.

If you are cold, take heart: I will very soon mend all the holes in your shabby coat, and it will not be shabby at all, when I am done with it.

If you are lonely, have hope: I will very soon birth the many siblings which are your birthright, and you will not feel ashamed to show your face before them, for I will see to it that you are adorned just as they are, with a crown set high on your high brow, and the finest jewels aglitter on its brim.

But here, now—?

Here, now, I look up from the page to inspect the clock, and find that another hour has been coronated, and has reigned, and has passed away.

While I sat on the couch, composing the preceding, prefatory material—another hour was coronated, and reigned, and passed away.

In four hours, then, I will have to leave off writing, and leave home. I will walk to the subway station, then, and ride the train. I will be away, for a time, and busy with other matters.

And after I return? In the afternoon, and the evening, of Christmas Eve?

Listen carefully, “Of Birth Pangs”: your father speaks to you now, and you will very soon understand the inner meaning of his unwelcome words.

I will have time for papers, yes, this afternoon and this evening; I will write, yes, and write prodigiously. But each thing has its proper place, prepared for it. The last rite claims these afternoon-and-evening hours as its own, and I grant them to it, gladly.

The afternoon and evening will be a time for arms, for armor, for the final readying of my forces and a final survey of the ordnance amassed for their use. There will be no place set aside amongst those grim, final hours for infinitely winsome things like you, “Of Birth Pangs”—for fresh-faced babes, merry and pleasing to the eye.

So I must set down here, now, in haste, as much of your winsomeness as I can, in the numbered hours still available to me. What I set down will be numbered, finite; it will capture scarce little of what makes you precious, though you are precious, as all my papers are. For the rest of yourself, you will have to wait—but not long, now.

No, not long at all, now.

 

 

You will have to weather the night on your own, “Of Birth Pangs,” before I can attend to you properly.

A night, one night, and only that.

But then, this is not so small a thing as it might sound. For the night in question will be unlike any other.

It will be the night of Christmas Eve, and the night that inaugurates Christmas Day itself. The longest of all nights, and the coldest, and the cruelest.

And so—the value of timeliness notwithstanding—I would do you an unforgivable injustice, “Of Birth Pangs,” if I did not gird you in a more fortifying coat, in preparation for the long night that awaits you.

It would not be proper—even here, now—for me to send you on your way with no shield against the elements besides my own airy, insubstantial reflections about time’s last days, and the way that time then comports itself.

Raise up your chin, look at me. Do you see what I am holding? Yes: a second preface, a more purposeful preface, fitted specially for you. Go ahead, put it on.

What sort of thing are you, “Of Birth Pangs”?

You are a fresh-faced babe, pleasing to the eye, full of airy and insubstantial jollity. And, looking you up and down, the eye immediately catches the spark of family resemblance. You look very much like your kin, do you not?

You look very much like a part of my December chronicle—do you not?

I am taking care, as I write you, to make you the sort of thing which a mere man can take stock of, and assess, and come to understand.

A single look at you is enough to confirm this fact, but if more proof is somehow wanted, it can be easily supplied. One need only look at you, and then look at the papers which surround you on the couch, here, now, on your right and left.

These other papers are armaments, as you are—and they are only armaments, as you are not. They do not address themselves to my Mother, Ruth Schoen, or to my Sister, Miriam Schoen, or to any man of that sort, but only to their one and fatal duty.

You, however, have a doubled duty. Though you too are a weapon, you are a weapon of a garrulous and sociable sort, with a keen interest in men’s notions of propriety, and in the mist-dispersing art one must practice if one is to reach and touch men’s faculties of understanding.

One would think, then, looking at you, that you are simply another part of my December chronicle. Its next part, following “The Burden of Babylon.”

Indeed, perhaps we must grant that you are, in the end, after some hesitation. But if we hesitate, we do so with good reason.

My December chronicle—or, rather, what I suppose we must now call “my December chronicle proper”—was measured out from finite cloth, as all things are. The limits of its finite span, like the limits of man’s own finite span, were not chosen whimsically.

My December chronicle proper comprises five parts:

Of Raven

Of War

Of the Gospel (I presume here, for expediency, an affirmative resolution to the question of its inclusion in the chronicle, on which see “Of Ministry”)

Of Ministry

The Burden of Babylon

We begin, in “Of Raven,” at the beginning, on the first Monday. The very first events of note, out of all the offerings of this eventful December, are set down therein.

My Adversary revealed himself to me on that day, the first Monday; our game became a different sort of game, then, and set the rest in motion; December emerged from the murk, then, showing its true colors.

We end, in “The Burden of Babylon,” with the Sunday of the second week. On that day, I came to appreciate the nature of the last rite, and the infinite precision with which it must be prepared, lest all be lost.

On that day, my duty revealed itself to me.

I saw that it was not through the insubstantial words of Herschel Schoen, tutor, that men’s eyes were to be opened. I saw the city with the eyes of Herschel Schoen, prophet, and felt those eyes’ impotence. I understood, at last, that I was not given to the earth to teach the future with my airy breath, nor to see the future with my impotent eyes, but to make the future, with my strong and sovereign hands.

I saw how it was that I must spend the third week: in preparation. In the writing of armaments; in the gathering-together of suitable offerings, consecrated to the Intercessor; in the setting out of each thing in its proper place.

I understood my duty, then, and was glad.

My yoke emerged from the murk, showing its true colors. And showing its true heft, too—which, if Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah had known it when we spoke on the high mount, would have put a stop to all that prophet’s sneering and derision, and all his envy, as well.

My yoke was heavy, yes—but finite. It was heavy, yes—but it could be borne.

I was glad, having remembered my duty. Which was finite, I now understood, and which could be borne.

But mists still rose up, all around me, clouding the minds of my Sister, Miriam Schoen, and my Mother, Ruth Schoen.

They were fearful, still. I heard them howl in fear, and in nascent despair, still forgetting the things which made their fears baseless and their despair wholly inapposite. I saw their gazes flitting across the shadows, distracted by the fronts that plunged and churned through that dark and senseless sea, unable to glance even for one brief moment at the far horizon, which was aglow even then with the first light of the coming dawn.

It pained me, watching them howl in needless fear. And it worried me greatly, to think of the terrible lengths to which they might go, spurred on as they were by their spurious despair.

The last rite is exacting, and demands much. One could be forgiven for imagining that I, Herschel Schoen, would give the third week over fully to its demands, sparing no time whatsoever for merriment, or for the gentle redirection of wayward gazes, or for the exacting strictures into which one’s words must be fit, if one requires that they be understood by mere men.

But I am Herschel Schoen. I am a busy sort, and more industrious than most.

I have spent the third week writing, to arm myself. I have written things which were only armaments, when this was required of me. And I have written, too, things which were armaments, and which were something else as well.

I have found room, even within the exacting strictures imposed on me, to write armaments capable of serving their martial and primary purpose, and yet serving also to be of another use, a use which is my own alone, and which is proper and pleasing to me.

I wrote a December chronicle, in the third week.

In order to arm myself—and, also, in order to dispel the mists of fear and despair from the eyes of my kin—I wrote a December chronicle, in the third week.

In the name of victory, and also in the name of not prolonging fear and despair any more than is strictly necessary, I wrote a December chronicle.

In this chronicle—in plain words, for the eyes of mere men—I recapitulated how my present gladness had come to be.

I narrated, as a man might narrate to one of his fellows, the way that December’s soil was tended in the first week and the second week, and how the seeds of my gladness were sowed in it. I showed how it was that the first buds of that happy plant first showed their faces; how it was that the sprout grew, matured, flowered; how it was that it rose out of the murk, and became itself, and paraded all its thousands of true colors before my gladdening eyes.

My December chronicle proper, therefore, can have but one possible end.

What else? It ends with “The Burden of Babylon,” and with the Sunday of the second week. It ends at its beginning, and makes a merry circle; its lips touch its body, its glad mouth opens; it slakes its hunger on the feast of itself, and is made full.

In the Sunday of the second week, narrative passes the scepter to the act of narration. The December chronicle ends, and then comes to me, bidding me to begin it.

This doubled threshold, both end and beginning, doubly delimits the December chronicle proper.

Once this boundary is reached—and reached as an end, as in “The Burden of Babylon,” rather than as a beginning—the chronicler finds his material has been fully spent up. His audience feels the fullness of its belly, and knows that its former appetite for narration has been slaked, and is no more.

All things are in order, with nothing amiss. Every story which needed telling, before, has now been told. Any justification or aetiology which might be thought a prerequisite for living has now been supplied, and chronicler and audience alike are free to cast the page aside—to rouse themselves up, to soar headlong into the blue expanse of an unchronicled sky, to live.

Of matters beyond this circumscribing girdle, what could possibly need saying? Need saying here, I mean, in this way? In papers made winsome and unwarlike?

In papers like this one? Like you, “Of Birth Pangs”?

Why do I spend the hours of the last morning—of Christmas Eve itself!—with my nose deep in such trifling matters?

Why do I narrate, still, here, now, knowing full well that I was not sent as a tutor for men, but as the unseen hand that makes men’s future?

It would be a lie, if I were to say that I fully know the answer to these questions. And I am Herschel Schoen. I do not lie.

Nevertheless, I must provide some sort of answer. I owe this to you, “Of Birth Pangs.” What sort of father would I be, if I could make no answer whatsoever to that simple question which every son must ask, sooner or later: why did you make me?

Why, then? Why do I go on chronicling, when my chronicle’s inciting hunger has been thoroughly sated? Look past the border of my chronicle and you will see a fresh day’s sky spread itself open to you on the far side, cloudless, wordless, blue. And instead of simply soaring, there, I sit and stare at my lap, scribbling and scribbling, too busy narrating the day to live it. Why?

Perhaps it is only because the hours rush by, whipping up a wind that rushes continuously over my skin, whispering the hours’ death-wish to my every follicle and pore, and whispering it again in the next moment, in a ghostly voice which never tires, and which is incapable of mercy. Though I have borne a great deal in my time, and have done so without cracking or despairing, still I confess that I cannot witness the spectacle of time’s perishing and not feel a dark thing rising in me, a wild and unregulated disquiet, heedless of its own limits.

Perhaps I am only fiddling and fidgeting with my pen, as Frederick does with his stick, to dispel a restlessness and disquiet which I know is baseless, and which still churns on within me. Each man has his ways, fitted for him.

Yes, there is that. And there is more, also, beside it.

Do not imagine, “Of Birth Pangs,” that you were sired for the sake of fidgeting, and for no other reason! No such coarse aetiology could possibly suffice in the matter of your princely head.

I write, now, on the morning of the fourth Tuesday.

Four days ago, on the third Friday, I began to write “The Burden of Babylon,” the culmination of my December chronicle proper.

And yesterday, on the morning of the fourth Monday, I finished what I had started. My December chronicle, I had thought, was at an end.

But December itself churned on, heedless of my plans.

Do you hear me, Mother? Perhaps not; perhaps you will never read these words, after all.

But since I have begun to tell you a story, I now feel I must continue. Since I have thus far failed to sway you from your quest for oblivion—since you go on searching for some patch of dark earth which will remain in shadow even as all else is brought up into light—I feel I must go on trying.

Will you read “Of Birth Pangs,” Sister? Perhaps not; it did not exist at the time you were packing your suitcase, last night. You will not have it for company, today, as you wait out the churning hours of your long and lonely flight. And—no matter how brightly its dawn might shine here, now, over the high skyscrapers of the city—the gloaming shadows of Portland, Oregon will not be graced by even the merest hint of that rosy glow.

And yet I feel I must continue—for your sake. Even as you flee from me, and race towards the gloaming shadows, towards Vincent Vierge, towards despair, towards death.

My words are powerless to reach you, and hence powerless to save you. Still, I feel impelled to write as though my words had these powers.

Sister, Mother: I write to you, and for your sake. I write as though there is some power in my airy breath, my insubstantial pen, which might still reach you, and save you—even at this late hour, even on this penultimate day.

I hear the clock ticking feebly, ready to be done at last; I hear the death throes of mortal time. And I sit, here, now, on the living room couch, narrating.

Insofar as I can—where and when I am given free rein, and not wholly constrained by the last rite’s strictures—I pluck out minutes and hours from this final crop, and consecrate them.

I consecrate them to you, Mother, and to you, Sister.

I have been given the deathbed body of time, and can do with it as I like, within limits. How, then, shall I spend these last free moments?

The same way any man would, in my place. Contemplating my kin, whether or not they know it. Speaking to them, whether or not they hear.

I am Herschel Schoen. But I am a son, too, and a brother.

 

 

The present hour, which had only begun when I last checked the clock, is already in its middle age.

I must make haste, or else there will be nothing at all for my prefaces to precede!

I must tell what has happened, what is happening, in plain words, hastily, here, now.

In the third week, I began in earnest my preparations for the last rite.

I had a duty, and nine days in which to fulfill it. A duty, and nine days: these were the axle at the center, I knew, around which all else turned.

I could no longer afford, therefore, to spare any time on things which were of no consequence.

I did attend school, in my usual way, on the third Monday. Perhaps too fully worn out by the labor of receiving the last rite’s prescriptions, I did not think to do otherwise; I walked my usual morning route out of habit, thinking nothing of it, and so I found myself at school, and in school’s clutches, and unable to leave until school’s regents deemed my departure acceptable.

I experienced, for the first and last time, the private tutelage which Mrs. Rachel had prepared for me. I endured hours upon hours of her prying, and of her airy and aimless speculation.

At long last, after hours of trying to meet her questions with diversionary tactics or with mere stony silence, I relented. I engaged her in a discussion of the last rite, and my preparations for it.

I offered up a spark, then, which set her speculative mind newly ablaze. In the ill-arranged monologues and ramblings that followed, she brought the evil glare of her roving mind to bear on a host of never-before-mentioned diagnostic possibilities. Wholly new “spectra” lent their colors to her evil “picture,” and she mulled with great interest over the question of my proper placement along the graded cline of each such rainbow.

After this, I vowed to be more prudent, and more careful in my comings and goings.

I did not attend school any more, after that.

(You will note, Mother, the way I would fall into silence when you would question me about my time at school, from the third Tuesday onward. Perhaps I dissembled, in doing so; one could argue the case this way. Still, you will note that I did not lie. For I am Herschel Schoen, and I do not lie.)

Each morning, I put a stack of papers and a pen into my backpack, and left the house, to prepare.

If the libraries had not been closed, I would have gone there. As it was, I made do with parks, and with their benches. When it rained, I took shelter under the limbs of the trees.

I sat, and wrote.

I wrote my December chronicle, and I wrote much, much else alongside it.

I wrote what was needed.

I wrote in accordance with infinitely precise specifications, given to me as my duty and my yoke. I fashioned precisely that which the Intercessor and I will need, tomorrow, as we go about our work.

When lunchtime neared, I would leave my spot in the park, and walk to school. Not to my school, where evil Mrs. Rachel lay in wait for me—but to Midwood High School, just next door.

I met Frederick there, and ate with him. I ate what he ate, for he would offer a portion of it to me, in exchange for the pleasures of conversation.

I spoke with him, and with his associates, during each of their lunch periods. They told me a great many things, as was their way. And I responded in my way, telling them a single very great thing, over and over, no longer expecting that I would be understood, and thus capable of enjoying all the ways that conversation can bring pleasure even when understanding is absent.

On the third Tuesday, the natural course of conversation led me to make some vague indication of my family’s penury. I did not say much; I did not plead with Frederick, or make any reference to his own family’s famous wealth. Nonetheless—and this is the only reason I mark the occasion at all—this exchange induced Frederick to give me a small bundle of cash, on the spot, as a friendly gesture.

I thanked him, and said no more to him of money, then or at any later point.

I put Frederick’s gift to good use. I went into the city’s shops, and I purchased the things that were needed.

The things which I purchased are all around me, here, now, as I write.

I look about the living room, and smile, seeing our forces arrayed in all their finery.

I smile, seeing the orderly lines of red-and-green nutcracker men, set out in the appropriate positions, and waiting tirelessly there. I smile, seeing the hardness of their bodies, the sharpness of those bodies’ edges and corners. Everything about these men proclaims their nature, proclaims that they were fashioned for one purpose only: for war.

I smile, seeing the fierce fur of the holly wreaths. I see the abundance of these wreaths, set out in all their appropriate places on the walls of the living room—and, where appropriate, on the sides and tops of that room’s furniture—and I smile, feeling the proud vaunting joy which they proclaim in their profusion, and which their profusion itself proclaims, redoubling their chorus.

I see a small plastic potted tree, sitting where it needs to be, in one corner of the room. I see the glow of the red and green lights, strung over it, proclaiming that December does not belong to the dim grey shadows scattered over the sky, but to the Intercessor. Their bodies resemble their master’s, for he too is red and green, and lit prodigiously by a ceaseless inner flame.

I hear the simple metallic sounds of the music box that sits beside me on the couch, and I smile. I have written much, elsewhere, of the box’s song, and what that song proclaims; I need not repeat myself here.

As I write, “Carol of the Bells” sings by my side. It pounds, on and on—and then it stops, and I reach out my hand to wind the arm of the music box again, and it begins anew, with undimmed intensity. Again it pounds, on and on, proclaiming the inevitable.

In the third week I purchased these offerings, and I set them out in their proper places. The Intercessor will be pleased, I think, when he comes, to see how thoroughly I have done honor to him here.

And I wrote. With a firm hand and a fixity of purpose, I wrote papers worthy of my nutcracker retinue, papers fashioned for war.

I wrote armor, and I armored myself.

When I say that I armored myself in my papers, you must not imagine that I am using a figure of speech. I am being perfectly literal. When have I ever been otherwise?

I placed papers upon my body, setting each in its proper place; I affixed them to my flesh with tape, in the appropriate manner.

As I walked the streets of Brooklyn, New York, my papers were with me, under my shirt and coat, girding my chest and back. At lunchtime, I strode the halls of Midwood High School with a lordly air, knowing that I was well protected.

It was apposite, as well, to place papers upon my face, and my neck, and my scalp, and on all the other parts of my body not covered by clothes. Each morning, with a king’s smile on my lips, I retrieved the tape dispenser from its drawer at my bedside, and adorned myself in kingly splendor, setting papers fitted for the coming day in their proper places.

Upon my head, as was appropriate, I wore a crown.

I constructed it with great care. I gathered up a suitable collection of pages from my papers, and I folded them and taped them together with the utmost subtlety, making a structure out of them which could sit easily on the top of the head, with its proud steeple rising up from the apex of the scalp.

I have my Sister, Miriam Schoen, to thank for this. Long ago, many years before I emerged from the holy shell, she took me aside, and taught me the rudiments of tape-and-folded-paper craftsmanship. Indeed, the architecture of my crown follows very closely one of the designs which she taught to me, then.

A tricorn hat, I think she called it.

I cannot imagine, Sister, that you anticipated what significant ends your humble lesson would one day serve. Still: I thank you.

 

 

The music box pounds. The clock ticks.

Soon enough I will have to leave this couch, and go up to the city. To meet my Adversary’s regent, and take stock of him, and assess his own preparations.

I must set it down, here, now. Or else never.

The things that happened yesterday, on the fourth Monday.

I must tell you, Mother, Sister. It is only right.

For these events concern you, Mother, and you as well, Sister.

I despair for you, Mother. I despair for you, Sister.

I have opened my heart and laid myself bare before you. You have faced me, your kin, seeing how I open my heart fully to you, hearing how my voice rings out in the private darkness of the apartment rooms.

You have seen how terribly I am wracked with worries concerning you. You have seen how I hide nothing of this painful unease from you. How I give voice to my every worry and warning, unable to be held back by shame, or by fear of censure, or by any other obstruction to my purpose.

You have faced your kinsman, and seen his bare heart throbbing within his opened chest, and heard him voice his worries and doubts.

You have seen the specter of despair in my quivering eyes, and you have seen how fiercely I wrestle with that specter, setting myself utterly AGAINST your desolation and AGAINST the notion that you might, in the end, have to be given up.

And if this notion should prove true, in the end? If you should come to desolation and ruin, and leave behind incontrovertible signs of your fate, which even your kinsman could not deny, much as he might wish to?

Then, and only then, will I resign myself to the loss of you. Then, and not a moment before.

You have seen me, laying myself bare before you, for your sake. And you have met me with—what?

With blank looks of incomprehension.

Or, alternately, with looks of incomprehension which are not blank, for they are tempered and textured by impatience, by indignation, by exasperation. But even in these latter cases, incomprehension is the dominant element of the composition, dictating and structuring all the rest.

You do not understand, you tell me. What cause have I for worry, much less despair?

I have tried to tell you.

I have tried, and seen my words bounce off the impregnable hull of your incomprehension, making no mark whatsoever.

To this disheartening sight, I have reacted in the only way I can: by trying again. And again, and again. How could I do otherwise?—when to do otherwise would mean giving you up, Mother, and you as well, Sister?

Still, mists cloud your minds. Still, when I tell you I am gravely worried for your sake, you squint and cackle, and then ask me: “Why? Why is that, Herschel?”

And even now, at this late hour, these questions are not sincere. Your tone betrays your lack of interest in the answer, and reveals that you are merely humoring me. Perhaps you are not even doing that; perhaps you are only playing back a series of thoughtless reflexes, gained through extensive experience in the act of humoring me, and now able to assume full sovereignty over your arms and your mouths, leaving your hearts free to attend to their own separate duties.

Your tone of voice reveals much, at these moments.

It is a tone which grown men never use when addressing their peers (do not imagine that such things escape my notice!). No: it is only when speaking to children that men use this tone. And only when their speech concerns some forgivable folly of the sort which men expect from children, and which men believe to be wholly toothless and thoroughly tame.

“Why? Why is that, Herschel?”

You cannot hear me. I know this all too well. It is not because I harbor any convenient illusions on this point that I say: I will try, again, to tell you.

If all seems lost, still I will go on trying. Only when all is lost, and that loss makes itself irrefutably manifest before my eyes, will I cease to try.

“Why?” Why indeed! “Why?”—you ask me this NOW, knowing full well where you are headed, and knowing too that I know?

Could you really be this far gone? It is right there, laid out for you to see! Open your eyes, and look!

Simply look at the events of the fourth Monday, and—

No, no. No more of this, now.

A glance at the clock reveals an hour on its deathbed.

It is the second hour, the one that now readies itself for burial.

The second hour, of the five that I had set aside for the purpose of writing you, “Of Birth Pangs.”

In a few minutes, the second hour will be wholly gone, and there will only be three more left. And then I will have to leave you, “Of Birth Pangs.”

Tomorrow, of course, I will return to you. But whatever I write tomorrow, upon my return to you, will be wholly dissimilar to what I write now.

I will write you a crown, then, and the jewels that are upon that crown; I will write nothing that is not kingly onto you, and nothing that is not hallowed. There will be no place at all, in tomorrow’s writing, for such things as the ruin of one’s own kin, or a plaintive voice that tries and tries again to avert the inevitable.

No: if I am to write of these things, it must be now.

 

 

I sat in the Midwood High School cafeteria, directly across from Frederick, eating lunch with him and with several of his associates.

It was the fourth Monday, shortly after noon.

This was only the fifth time, I suppose, that I had eaten lunch at Midwood.

But it is odd, even in retrospect, to think in such terms.

Perform the same act twice, on successive days, and you have merely repeated yourself. Perform it a third time, however—on the very next day—and your body will begin to notice what you are doing. You have now created a routine, something which can be ossified into a thoughtless and replayable series of reflexes. Tracks are being laid down within you, already, along which the fixed courses of these automata will run—whether or not you realize it.

Perform the act again, for the fourth time? Now your routine becomes a custom. It becomes that which is done, and fades into the background, into eternity. From here on out, there is no use keeping count. The fifth time might as well be the five hundredth, for all that anyone notices.

I sat at one of the long, narrow bench tables. Frederick sat directly across from me, as was now customary.

I munched on lumps of fried dough, and on the spiced mash of meat and vegetables which was their filling. This was Frederick’s customary lunch. And Frederick had set aside a hearty portion of it for my use, as Frederick always did.

I wrote “as Frederick always did,” for I wished to underscore the hypnotic power of a custom. I meant to illustrate how, under the sway of this formidable power, one is apt to forget the distinction between that which was made on the sixth day, and that which was, instead, only made six days ago.

But I could just as well have written: “as Frederick had done exactly four times before.”

And perhaps it is truer, in the end, to put it this way.

As I sat on the bench that day, watching Frederick laugh and gesticulate, I was very keenly aware that this was our fifth lunch together at Midwood.

If a custom is that which makes one lose count, so that one cannot tell fifth apart from five hundredth? Then what Frederick and I had, in our Midwood lunches, was not in fact a custom at all. For I was in no danger whatsoever of losing count.

It was our fifth lunch together at Midwood, that day. It was our last lunch together, at Midwood or anywhere else.

A custom is that which fades into the background, into eternity. But the lunches Frederick and I shared, at Midwood, were not the sort of thing which can ever partake of eternity.

Frederick is my friend. Hence I met with him in the cafeteria of his school, and broke bread with him, as friends are wont to do.

Frederick is my friend, and my Adversary’s man. Hence I met with him in the cafeteria of his school—not habitually, not reflexively, not by custom—but five times and five times only.

Five times I sat across from him in the midst of the dying shadows, and chewed with him the food of the shadows, which pleases little and nourishes not at all. On five specific afternoons, I sat across from Frederick in that Midwood cafeteria, keeping quiet for the most part, content to merely listen as he raved and rambled.

I drank deeply of him, those five afternoons, knowing that his well would very soon run dry. Aware that none of this would be permitted to pass through the gates of eternity, I made a miniature eternity of my own within its five-fold walls.

I splashed and swam in the shallows of mortal time, reveling in its ignorance of the inevitable. I kicked my feet against the strange, smooth, innocent shorebed at its bottom, where things that cannot last are nonetheless seen to flourish, for a time, among the seaweed and the rocks. Even the impossible can sprout there, for a time, before being called up out of the murk to account for itself.

On those five afternoons, I let the impossible pass into me. I gave it temporary lodging, within me, and was no less courteous with this odd guest than I might have been with any other.

A five-hundredth lunch, no different than the fifth—why not? Herschel Schoen settling in to the bench table for the five thousandth time—why not?

Herschel Schoen face to face once again with his Adversary’s man, and smiling as he always does, and drinking deep of the cybernetic doctrines that pour from that man’s evil lips, as always. Why not? The gates of eternity cannot admit the impossible, it is true, but they cannot admit the mortal, either. Shadow is shadow, and there is no need to split hairs further.

All this was pleasant enough, while it lasted. But as I have said, it could not last.

Its days were numbered, and that well of numbers has run dry. It was mortal, and now it has died.

There will be no sixth lunch, at Midwood or anywhere else.

For there will be no further delay in the matter of my Adversary’s man, and the proper handling of such a man.

Today, in Washington Square Park, I will meet my friend Frederick one last time.

I will do my best to bid him farewell, then. It will not be easy, for he still believes in impossible things. For him, the twenty-sixth of December is no less real than the present day, and the sixth lunch at Midwood no less real than the fifth. How can one reason with such a man? How can one press the finality of the occasion upon him, so that the meaning he construes is the same one which was intended?

I do not harbor any convenient illusions about my likelihood of success, but still I must try, in honor of him.

That will be the last time I see my friend Frederick.

As for Frederick qua Frederick? Frederick Eggert? The pimpled prodigy and polymath, with a great evil in him, inherited from his evil father?

As for Frederick, my Adversary’s man?

As regards him, matters are slightly different.

I will not see the last of Frederick Eggert today, in Washington Square Park. Nearly, but not quite. I will meet him one more time, soon afterward.

I will meet him tomorrow morning, on Christmas Day, with the Intercessor riding close by my side.

And then—?

I will tear Frederick Eggert’s arms from their sockets.

I will throw his limbless, wretched body to the ground.

My heel will grind his face into the dirt, and I will keep watch over him as he bleeds.

I will not leave off watching until I am quite sure that every drop of his evil blood has been drained from the pallid husk beneath me.

Then I will crouch over his exsanguinated and broken torso, and I will extract the bones from it.

I will place them beside the other bones which I will have taken from his dismembered limbs, so that all Frederick’s bones are collected together upon the ground, in an orderly array. And I will visit each bone in turn, and bring it under my heel, and crush it, and grind it into a fine dust.

There is no compromising with evil.

My Adversary has set himself against me. And so, I set myself against him. I set myself against him utterly, and without exception, and without mercy.

 

I sat in the Midwood High School cafeteria, directly across from Frederick.

On the fourth Monday. Shortly after noon.

Time is scarce, and I have not yet touched upon the matters which crucially involve you, Mother, and you, Sister. Prudence would advise me to skip over the earlier parts of that lunch hour entirely, so as to ensure that I will have sufficient time to develop the crucial episode near the end of the lunch hour in the careful manner which it deserves, and which you deserve.

I will do no such thing, however. Prudence is a virtue, but it is not the only virtue, nor is it the highest virtue.

I will begin shortly after noon, not far from the start of the lunch hour. I will begin with Frederick.

With Frederick, and with his evil enthusiasms, which were then reaching their apex, their culminating realization. The evil growths which had always been latent within him were flowering at last, showing their true and sickly colors for all to see, and their sharp thorns.

I will begin with Frederick, speaking evil. With Frederick, speaking in the tangled, ingrown, infelicitous language which is my Adversary’s native tongue.

I do this in honor of you, Frederick. I will not pass over your apex in silence; I will not write as though the words we said to one another, in our last true conversation, were of no significance.

And I do this as a preparation.

You will never read these words, Frederick; tomorrow, I will show no mercy towards you, and make of you a thing which cannot read any words whatsoever. You will never know how I have honored you, today. Nevertheless, I do honor you today, so as to prepare the fate which will be yours tomorrow.

You may well think that fate ignominious, when it comes, and not befitting of your princely nature. But I will know better. I will know that you have been honored and held up, in preparation for your end; I will know how you were placed on a kingly dais, and how the fullness of your splendor shone out in a fitting and final display, and how Herschel Schoen himself fell to his knees before your feet.

“More is different!” Frederick exclaimed, shortly after noon, at the lunch table.

“More is different, it really is!

“Daddy and I always said so, of course. Daddy and I predicted all this.

“Not the particulars of it—I suspect there is some way to predict those, too, but we haven’t found it yet. But the abstract shape of the development, I mean. We expected that.

“It would have been a surprise, really, if it hadn’t happened.

“If ‘more’ had arrived, but arrived alone. Without ‘different’ tagging close behind it. Now that would have been remarkable, and fascinating, and in need of explanation.

“What has happened, though . . . ‘more’ and ‘different’ arriving together, right on cue . . . because more is different, and cannot be anything else but different . . .

“That’s the default, if you ask me. The ‘null hypothesis,’ if you prefer hypothetico-deductivist midwit lingo.

“The production function for multiplexed automatic transduction can be characterized, to a quite good approximation, through its leading exponent alone. Know that exponent, and you know all there is to know about the determinants of automatic transduction skill, at least in the massively-multiplexed setting.

“This tendency holds across all probed regimes, for every bank of transducible functions which arises naturally. If some of the functions are more complex than others, so be it: they will be transduced automatically in order of ascending complexity, and the law which governs the relative frequencies of the various function-complexities will have some leading-order tail behavior, which can be converted by means of a simple calculation into the exponent governing the leading-order behavior of the production function.

“The production function never fails. That’s not a theorem, it could have been false, it just . . . wasn’t. It was a prediction, of daddy’s and mine, and we were right.

“So that’s the ‘more,’ then, securely in our hands.

“As for the different, well! I admit I struggle, trying to conceive of a mind which could doubt its appearance on the scene.

“What would the hypothesis even be?

“It is a theorem that any function, of any complexity, admits of an asymptotic representation as an infinitely large machine of the Generalized Eggert Regulator type.

“It is an empirical fact that daddy’s automatic transduction algorithm, when applied to a finite machine of this type, causes the machine to converge rapidly toward a highly accurate approximation of the function whose sampled input-output pairs serve as the algorithm’s own inputs.

“It is an empirical fact, too, that multiplexed transduction of many simultaneous functions is feasible.

“And even more than that: when the node count is sufficiently high to escape a boundary layer near zero, the multiplexing of many highly heterogeneous functions within a single Generalized Eggert Regulator actually yields beneficial interference, presumably because there is usually some conceptual overlap between any pair of practically relevant functions, and the overlapping part can be stored once rather than duplicated across nodes, as it would be if one employed two smaller Regulators to tackle each of the functions in isolation.

“It is an empirical fact, then, that arbitrarily many functions of arbitrarily high complexity can be transduced automatically onto the same single Regulator. With beneficial interference, even.

“And as the size and complexity of the function bank is steadily increased, how could the Regulator fail to display novel behaviors, when run in its self-stimulative mode?

“What—am I supposed to imagine that the Regulator does its job, and approximates some immensely complicated function to quite close accuracy, and somehow fails to exhibit identically complicated behavior itself, when its input terminals are hooked up to its output terminals in a feedback loop? To predict is to become!”

He had lost me some time ago. I opened my mouth, and let it hang open for a moment, realizing that it had run out ahead of my words.

It is not always easy to concoct an interjection which can be lobbed into the stream of Frederick’s monologuing without precipitating some sort of disaster.

He is always kind, and always patient; that is not the trouble. But he runs far ahead of me, in his monologuing, and he is given to assuming that a silent listener is a listener who understands him perfectly. The gap between the comprehension he imagines in me, and the ignorance which I harbor in its place, only grows inexorably as my silences drag on. And this, in turn, only encourages my further silence: a single ill-chosen word could be enough to reveal the whole ignominious extent of the gap, all at once.

“Your father,” I said, slowly.

Frederick paused, mid-sentence, and waited for me to finish.

His angular face beamed at me. His eyes had grown brighter, in recent days. His smile had become unregulated, boyish, overflowing.

I wanted very much to avoid disappointing him. He was so patient with me, and so earnestly intent on “educating” me on all the topics which were closest to his heart.

“You and your father,” I began again, “predicted something, which has now come to pass. A ‘development,’ you called it, earlier.

“What is this ‘development’?”

Frederick made a hrmph noise, pairing it with a kind of full-body shrug.

If another man had gestured in this way, I would have taken it as a sign of exasperation with me. But I know Frederick. If he is exasperated, in moments like this one, it is only at the wires and terminals within himself, for failing to predict and master the course of events.

Still, it was clear enough that I had revealed my hand. The gap was no more. The full extent of my ignorance had been laid bare for Frederick’s consideration.

“Herschel,” he said, “I explained all that just a minute ago. Weren’t you listening?”

I hung my head, and was silent.

“I explained it on Friday, too,” Frederick said. “Were you listening then?”

His voice had nothing of the harshness that one sees in his words, considered on their own. I remember quite clearly what he said—it was exactly what I have written above, between quotation marks—and yet I cannot shake the feeling that the words on this page are not his words. Taken out of their proper context, pried away from his boyish grin and his shining eyes, set down on the page to fend for themselves, these words display a crudeness which has no counterpart in their patient and subtle fashioner.

I recalled to mind, as best I could, the nature of Frederick’s lunchtime monologue on the day to which he had referred.

“You spoke to me with tremendous excitement, on the third Friday,” I said.

“As you did,” I said, “on the third Thursday, also.

“And on the preceding day. And the day before that day.”

Frederick nodded.

Something new had risen up inside him, at the opening of the third week. And, though the third week and its preparations placed immense demands upon my resources of attention, still I could not fail to notice the change in Frederick.

A new and unregulated enthusiasm had taken root within him. Taking succor from his soil, it grew precipitously, and flourished. A riot of shoots and branches and blooms was unfolding within Frederick, and his voice took on new colorations, emulating the giddy hues of the blossoms. His limbs, which had always jerked and trembled, now did so with a greater intensity, and in a wholly new way, not quite his own.

His father’s machines were the cause, he told me.

The growth within him was a reflection, he told me, of a similar growth in these machines.

His excitement seemed to mount and mount, day after day, without end.

Each time we spoke, he made a curious show of repudiating all his former excitement, only to claim in the same breath that today’s excitement was the genuine article.

“That was kid stuff,” he would say each time. “That was all kid stuff. What I saw this morning, in the lab, before heading out to school . . . everything before was just kid stuff, mere toys, in comparison.

“That was real, in the lab, this morning. This is the real deal. It’s here, Herschel, here at last! Clear out the toys, because playtime is over!

“Me and my incorrigibly low standards, eh? Look at me, how I got all worked up over mere toys, just yesterday. Look at me: I see a machine perform the simplest of tricks, with only a few errors along the way, and I get myself into a tizzy.

“When something real, something big, gets dumped in my lap? Like it did this morning, in the lab? I don’t even know what to do with myself! I keep trying to raise the bar, but somehow I can never raise it quite high enough.”

He would say something of this nature, on each day, during the third week.

He would pause in the midst of a monologue, sometimes, and stare silently into the middle distance, his eyes glassy with awe. Whatever it was that awed him, however, would soon enough be revealed as yet more “kid stuff,” put to shame by this morning’s laboratory marvels.

“Your father,” I ventured, “has made some sort of breakthrough in his work.

“Armed with this discovery,” I said, “your father has been able to produce new machines more quickly than ever before. His evil aim, substitution, comes visibly closer to fruition with each passing day, now.”

Frederick laughed.

His laugh was loud, wild, unregulated. Even the unflappable Madeleine jumped in her seat next to him, when she heard it.

“Discovery?” Frederick said. “Ha!

“Psh, discovery. Daddy does not make discoveries, Herschel. He distills a governing curve, computes its leading behavior, and then rides it smoothly toward his destination.

“He calculates his course once, at the very beginning, and then follows it, all the way. No roadbumps, no sudden ‘discoveries’ that catch him by surprise.”

“But,” I said, “his research has changed, recently, hasn’t it? It has picked up speed, at the very least.

“That acceleration—was it one of the things your father foresaw at the very beginning?

“I cannot imagine so,” I said, “given how thoroughly it appears to have taken his son by surprise.”

“Well,” Frederick said, wrinkling his face in concentration.

“Well,” he said after a pause, “yes and no.

“I mean, well. I mean, yes. Sure, if you must.

“If you really must, then yes, I suppose I have to admit it: daddy has come up with a few new tricks, recently. And they do wonders for the stability of the automatic transduction process, and for its rate of convergence as well.

“But Herschel—you must understand this—they are only tricks. Little tricks, easy to explain and forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight.

“They aren’t anything like what I think you’re picturing, when you use the word ‘discovery.’

“So for instance,” he said, starting to fiddle with his hair, and matching the cadence of the fiddling to the cadence of his speech.

“For instance, daddy’s early Regulator machines were structured in the simplest possible way, on the circuit level.

“All the input terminals were wired up to an array of units, and that array was wired up to the next, and so on. The wires were many-to-many. Everything that could be connected was connected.

“And not with ordinary wires, mind you—it was all done with wires of daddy’s special sort, capable of adjusting their electrical parameters in response to negative feedback originating in the output terminals.

“This design worked, so it got a lot of use, earlier on. But if you think about it from a signal-processing perspective, you’ll see it’s very far from ideal.

“If you stack up more and more arrays, all wired up like that, you will often find that the adjustable wires conspire to magnify tiny ripples near the input terminals into outsized disturbances near the output terminals, washing away every other pattern which the nodes near the output ought to be taking stock of.

“Meanwhile, when you feed the system’s errors back through its output terminals, those error signals will diminish as they go further back—this is merely the expansion effect I just noted, except in reverse.

“And so the nodes of the different arrays do not adapt to feedback at the same rate. A reasonable rate of progress near the output terminals implies glacially slow adjustment at the other end. And if you try to speed up the slow parts, then the fast ones will go even faster, and become unstable.

“But Herschel, it does not take any discoveries to fix the problem. Only tricks, simple tricks, obvious in hindsight.

“These days, daddy always strings up an extra set of wires between each array and the next.

“These wires aren’t many-to-many. Each node has just one of them, which connects it to a single node in the next array. And these are ordinary wires, too, not adjustable ones.

“These wires simply conduct the signals they are given, without changing them. They do not magnify or diminish anything, by themselves. In isolation, their signal propagation qualities are made to order, precisely what we’d wanted.

“Their only problem is that they cannot adjust. But the adjustable wires are there, too, alongside them. So long as their conductances are kept small—relative to the conductances of the ordinary wires—they cannot do much to alter the signal-propagation picture, and so we are in the clear. And since they can adjust, so too can the system as a whole, just like daddy’s original design could.”

I was trying my best to keep up with him. He deserved no less.

“Your father,” I said, “aspires to create a machine which can behave just as a man does.

“Do the machines behave more like men, then, when their innards are fitted with this additional mesh of wires?”

Frederick produced an uninterpretable volley of sighs and staccato jerks, and then was still.

“That is not the right question, Herschel,” he said.

“It does not matter,” he said, “what happens, or does not happen, as an immediate result of any one variation in the design.

“What matters is its effect on the rate of future change. Its effect on the governing trend, and the leading exponent of that trend.

“Herschel, you must grasp this point, if you are ever to understand what is happening.

“I mentioned one trick, the one with extra wires. There are plenty more where that came from. But you needn’t worry yourself over the details.

“They are all the same, in the end, really. Because there’s only really one thing that can ever be wrong with a Generalized Eggert Regulator, at the design level.

“What you want is for the system to be humming away, during adaptation, with every number inside it kept on roughly the same scale. They can change, of course—that’s the point—but they shouldn’t be vastly bigger or smaller than one another.

“The currents that flow upward, the errors that feed back, and the adjustments of electrical parameters in response to that feedback: all of these need to be kept about the same size, through the whole adaptation process, if you want that process to be optimally swift and stable.

“All of daddy’s tricks are simply different ways of keeping these unruly numbers in line.

“Daddy keeps the numbers under control with extra wires, yes.

“He does it with specialized cells, too, that directly measure the average size of their input and then divide that input by this number, yielding an average size of one-point-oh in the output, guaranteed.

“He sets the electrical parameters just right, too, at the start of the adaptation process. Those parameters are whatever daddy chooses; why not arrange them so their numbers are all on the same scale, to start things out on the right foot?

“He does it in all kinds of ways. But those ways, they’re merely different means to the same end.

“All of the details are spurious, you mustn’t fixate on them. The thing I’m trying to get you to understand—it’s a fact about a general class of systems in the abstract, and nothing can be allowed to matter besides the short list of properties that characterizes the class.

“All my talk about ‘wires’ and ‘electrical parameters,’ say—that’s just for ease of exposition, a lie-to-children. Daddy hardly uses any electrical components at all, these days—they’re far too slow for his taste. He’s redesigned everything from the ground up, now, based on optics. No speed limit except the universal one, the speed of light itself!

“But I’m not talking about optical devices either. I’m not talking about wires, or shot noise, or stimulated emission, or about this trick or that trick, or about anything else at all. I am talking in the abstract, about an idealized class of systems called Generalized Eggert Regulators, and the abstract numerical constants that characterize systems of this class.

“Those numbers matter; nothing else does.

“And once those numbers are set up right, there is nothing left to do.

“There are no more discoveries left to make. Daddy’s machine is perfect. All that’s left is to feed it sampled input-output pairs, and watch it do its magic.”

Although he had said much—some of which I had even understood, no less—it did not add up, so far as I could tell, to any sort of answer.

“Frederick,” I pressed.

“You tell me,” I said, “that your father’s cybernetic systems are not the same from one day to the next.

“They put all their past feats to shame, again and again. They grow more and more astounding—by your lights, anyway.

“All that is solid is melting into air, it would seem, in Damien Eggert’s private laboratory.

“You remind yourself that you have set your expectations too low. Your mind reaches for wild marvels, for absurd hopes, for the very limit of what it can conceive. And twenty-four hours later, you peer into your father’s laboratory again, and see things which are so wild and so absurd that you had ruled them out without even thinking. You realize, yet again, that your expectations will need to be raised.

“And twenty-four hours after that? It all happens again, in just the same way.

“The machines did not always develop so quickly. They did not, did they, Frederick?”

Frederick shook his head.

His face had dimmed, suddenly. His usual exuberance was nowhere to be seen.

“What changed them?” I pressed. “Why do they astound you in this way, now, in December? As they have never done before?”

Frederick’s arms slouched, uncharacteristically, at his sides. It was not a welcome sight. I felt myself pine for the usual avidity of those arms, for their restless way of wheeling and waving.

My friend had an appetite for joy, did he not? He ate his fill of joy, in every moment, did he not?

Or was I merely mistaken? Had I been mistaken the entire time, from the first Monday on?

I have been known, on occasion, to be a less than satisfactory judge of character.

I looked across the cafeteria table. And for the first time, it was not my friend Frederick that I saw there, but Frederick Eggert. Damien Eggert’s son.

Gleaming, sorcerous, demoniac.

Pryer and delver, and despoiler of temples.

Frederick looked down in silence at his cafeteria tray, refusing to meet my eyes.

 

 

“Well,” Frederick began, abortively.

“It’s a combination of things, really,” he said, making another attempt.

“No big discoveries,” he said. “Remember? Just a matter of stacking one simple trick on top of another. Getting the key numbers right. That’s all.”

I glared at him.

“Frederick,” I said. “You are leaving something out, I think.

“The first time we met, you told me that your father had made a machine which predicted a human pilot. Which foretold how he would move the controls of his plane, in the next moment.

“Your father did this—I was given to believe—by recording the real motions of a man, within a real plane. Using this recording, in conjunction with his ‘principle of control through negative feedbacks,’ he coaxed the mindless straw and made it dance, in ghoulish mimicry of the original man in his original plane.”

At the phrase “ghoulish mimicry,” Frederick cringed slightly. He did not speak up to contradict me, however. His silence was disquieting; it seemed at variance with the deepest parts of his nature.

“I had imagined, then,” I said, “that the nature of the recording dictates the nature of the dance.

“Chaff conceives chaff, and stubble brings forth stubble. Straw sheds no light upon itself, and it glows with a pilfered flame, if it glows at all.

“A machine, fashioned out of metal, has nothing which it may rightfully call its own. It is an assemblage of shadows, housing deeper shadows within.

“A man may be a pilot, but he is never only that. For him, piloting is a trade, which can be taken up and put aside as he pleases. The potential that is implicit in his will is a thing that was always present in that will, in its entirety, from the first moment onward.

“Perhaps it is possible to build a circuit which follows a recording of a pilot, and learns to move as he does. But it does not move for the reasons he moves, even if the motions are the same.

“His dominion ranges over every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air. He is a pilot only by circumstance, and might become anything else, under another circumstance. His will came first, and all his sixthmade pluripotency derives from its seed.

“But the circuit—though it may act just as he does, when he is piloting—cannot become anything but what it is. It has nothing to call its own.

“One must give it another sort of recording, and start anew, if it is to do anything else. Is that not right, Frederick?”

Frederick raised up his head.

Mischief glimmered in his smile. His eyes were cupped half-moons, dancing with a secret mirth.

When he spoke, I rejoiced. The spark was still in him, I saw; it had merely been hiding, and only for a moment.

“That is not exactly wrong,” he said. “In fact you’re right, more or less.

“You’re right, but only within a limited scope, narrower than ‘machines’ or ‘circuits.’ Those are more flexible beasts than you seem to imagine.

“What you’re describing is what daddy and I would call a single-use Regulator. One that’s only tasked with the transduction of a single thing, a single activity—piloting, say, for instance.

“You’re not wrong. Dinosaurs like that really did exist! And yes, daddy’s old fire-control circuit was one of them.

“Daddy never makes them anymore, though. All his machines are multiplexed, now. Massively multiplexed.

“We don’t just give them one kind of recording, anymore, about one narrow task or job function. We ask them to predict all kinds of things.

“Things that people do, of course. And things that nature does, too, in the background, when people aren’t watching.”

To Frederick, this distinction about multiplexed machines seemed to be a distinction of some importance. I could not imagine why.

I thought: bundle up straw in whatever manner you like, and it is still straw.

“So,” I said. “Rather than constructing many circuits which lack minds and wills, your father has decided to conjoin them, and make a single circuit without mind or will.

“Instead of dancing falsely in imitation of a single man, this circuit can dance falsely in many different ways, imitating any of the men who were recorded for its benefit.

“It comes to much the same thing,” I said, “doesn’t it?”

Frederick sighed, but not unhappily.

Only now was he plumbing the depths of my ignorance. Only now did he appreciate how much he had wasted his breath with me, earlier on. Bewitched by the glamour of “daddy’s” newest machines, he had been using his technician’s argot with me more often than not, in recent days. Dazed by the apparitions that visited him daily in “daddy’s” laboratory, he supposed without even asking that I understood it all. And in his defense, I had not spoken up to correct him.

Now he retraced his steps, more carefully, so that even I had a chance of understanding them. Was he disappointed in me? No doubt he was. But the opportunity to “educate” me was pleasing to the tutor in him, I saw.

Pleasure and disappointment contested, then, inside Frederick. But there could be no doubt about the eventual victor. As I have said: he had an appetite for joy.

“Once again,” Frederick said, “it’s more complicated than you imagine, Herschel.

“There is beneficial interference between the multiplexed functions,” Frederick said. “Which means, well . . . hmm . . .”

He stroked his chin, considering how to make his point intelligible to the likes of me.

As I waited, my eyes darted across the table. I saw the faces of Frederick’s associates, to his left and right, and by my own sides also.

I saw Madeleine’s eyes. She stared, intently, in my direction. Her gaze was fixed on a point just above my head.

She was looking at my crown, I realized.

Her lips were curled in a not-smile. It was broader than her usual fare, but just as inscrutable.

I envisioned a dark landscape, where Madeleine lay in a field of cords.

Her hands toyed with the mangled remains of what was once a paper crown, and a mess of chewed paper fell from her not-grinning lips, in disorderly strands—

No, no!

Not now, of all times!

“Frederick,” I said.

It was impolite, interjecting like this, without waiting for him to collect his thoughts. But I needed him. I needed him, now, lest I fall into the abysses of Madeleine’s curls, lest I heed the command that was woven into them: give up, resign yourself, let yourself die.

“When your father feeds his newest creations, Frederick,” I said, “what sorts of recordings does he give them?”

This was not mere lunchtime banter, like much of what preceded it. This was a matter of preparations, and of war.

 

 

“Oh . . . well, everything!” Frederick exclaimed, rather too readily.

“Everything,” I said.

“Every sort of recording, do you mean?”

“In a sense,” Frederick said, “I suppose.

“Though the relevant notion of ‘recording’ may be more . . . expansive than what you are imagining.”

I could make nothing of this.

“Anything that can be converted into voltages on the terminals of a Regulator,” Frederick said, “is fair game.

“Which really just means anything, actually,” he said. “The conversion into voltages does require some fancy engineering tricks, sometimes, but it’s nothing that daddy and his team can’t handle.

“So yes: anything. ‘Anything that is a product of the human mind, and anything in nature which could stimulate the intellect.’

“That’s daddy’s criterion for transduction eligibility. It’s very broad, you’ll note.”

I stared at him, thinking: I see now why you hesitate, before revealing such things.

I thought: you imagine that I might be ignorant of my Adversary’s intentions. You imagine that you might let slip some secret which will confer an advantage to me, on the field of battle.

His concern was baseless, of course. I knew what my Adversary meant to do. I had seen it at once, on the first Monday, when Frederick and I had first met.

Raven, pattern, prediction, substitution. My Adversary’s plans are fitted to my Adversary’s taste, and so any part of them cannot help but reveal the whole. If you show me the seed, do not expect the branch or the flower to take me by surprise, later.

My Adversary was not making a substitute pilot. He was not making a substitute for any one thing, or another. His plan called for a substitute world, with a false image of each and every thing contained in it.

In Frederick’s terms, my Adversary wished to raise “massive multiplexing” to its apex. To “multiplex” everything, leaving nothing out.

A massive undertaking indeed! And one that would have to be finished very soon. My Adversary’s preparations, like my own, will be for naught unless they are wholly complete by Christmas Day. For my Adversary and I will be racing one another, on Christmas Day, each of us striving to realize his designs before the other party has a chance to realize his.

There was nothing surprising, then, in the newly frantic pace of Damien Eggert’s research. My Adversary felt the dying of the hours just as I did; he saw the horizon, and the glow that was growing there. And so, he spurred his agents and regents to make haste, to redouble their efforts, to sacrifice sleep and even sanity in the name of shepherding his massive project to completion.

Though it was not surprising to hear of this, the hearing of it was a welcome thing, nonetheless. It meant that my Adversary had been insufficiently careful when first he measured out the great task before him. Surely he would have maintained an even stride, all the way through to Christmas, if he had been able to.

His work had fallen behind schedule. Why else would he find it necessary to accelerate it, now, at the last minute?

I have often said that I have great respect for my Adversary. In this moment, however, my faith in him began to waver.

I thought: have I been facing a mere fool, across the game board, this entire time?

I thought: Has all my respect been paid to an imaginary man, a character of my own devising? To my own ideal of a worthy opponent, rather than the real hand that moves the enemy pieces, and may well move them rashly, with haste, in foolishness?

I thought: I have seen your many works, Adversary. They struck fear into me, as they were meant to do. But wars are not won through lavish public displays.

Frederick was looking at me with an amused air, I noticed. No doubt he had taken note of my silent reverie, and wondered what sorts of wild follies might be coursing unseen through my inscrutable mind.

I met his sly, guarded smile with a smile of my own, of a very different sort.

“Frederick,” I said, in a strong loud voice, a voice readied for war.

“Has your father tried putting Raven’s Matrices through the ‘input terminals’ of his machines?”

I did not need to ask; I knew he had. Only a fool could imagine otherwise.

Frederick grinned, and his eyes narrowed.

The expression was one I had seen on his face many times before, but never on the face of any other man. The obvious glimmers of malice and perverse intent which ridged its edges could not hide the pure-hearted merriment which formed its soft and molten core. Indeed, the whole of it was all the more endearing for the inclusion of these dissonant notes.

It was the look of an evil friend. Both sides of that two-word paradox were equally manifest in it, and brought to their apex.

“Oh, Herschel,” Frederick said. “Herschel Schoen! No one else like you out there, that’s for sure.

“Hardly anyone asks the right questions,” he said. “Even smart people.

“But you do,” he said. “It’s what I like about you.”

“What happens,” I asked, “when a Raven problem is put through the machine?

“Can the machine see what it is? Can it select the answer which is deemed to be quite right?”

Frederick leaned towards me, and spoke to me in a gleeful whisper, confirming what I had in fact already known.

My Adversary’s machines, like all machines, were made for a single task, which they cannot help but do—and which they carry out with peerless efficiency, with unmanlike savantry. The threshing machine threshes, the mechanical reaper reaps—and my Adversary’s creations forget.

“Oh, daddy’s machines can do Raven, all right,” Frederick said.

“Daddy’s machines can get them all, on Raven,” he said.

 

 

Frederick sat across from me, and Madeleine sat to his left. On his right was another one of his associates, Florian.

Florian’s skin was tanned, his hair bleached-blonde. Well-tended muscles bulged from his forearms. His chiseled, jutting chin was nearly the stuff of the comic pages.

He was usually silent, in my experience, content to sit and radiate, attracting admirers like moths.

But he spoke up, then.

He was looking straight at me, I saw. He wore a look of astonishment, but it was a casual and regulated one, and did nothing to dim his radiance. He seemed entirely the master of his own astonishment, and wholly unsurprised by his own surprise.

“Wait,” he said. “Herschel Schoen?

“No way. No way.”

“I am Herschel Schoen,” I confirmed.

Florian turned to Frederick.

“Frederick,” he said, “that’s Ruth Schoen’s kid.” He nodded slightly in my direction, but only to clarify the referent of his remark; he was talking to Frederick, not to me.

“I am aware,” Frederick muttered.

Florian turned to me.

He showed me a jagged and lopsided smile. I saw the malice, and the perverse intent, which he was laying bare before me. They ruled his face absolutely, untempered by any of the warmer feelings that ordinarily accompany a smile.

He laughed, mechanically, without any real mirth. It seemed a perfunctory gesture, only a way of clarifying how little he thought of me, by purporting to find the very notion of me amusing.

“How’s it feel,” he said, “to be the son of a terrorist?”

I jumped in my seat.

“What?!” I said.

I was not even angry, not yet. That would come a few breaths later.

The allegation was so wholly unexpected, and so wholly bizarre, that no immediate reaction was possible—save for the blank and abject confusion which I had just voiced. Florian’s utterance was an alien thing, hurled down from an alien place, with no earthly precedents to serve as guides to its nature and meaning.

Florian did not elaborate, but simply watched me, grinning his awful grin.

Everyone was watching me, now, I noticed. On the opposite side of the table, three pairs of eyes converged on my face: Florian’s, Frederick’s, Madeleine’s.

“Son of a terrorist,” Madeleine said. Her tone was pointed, but where it pointed was unclear; an ambiguous perversity dripped from it.

“Edgy,” she said, biting her lip. “I like it.”

Her perversity was not so ambiguous, now, I suppose. It is easy enough to discern her meaning, as I consider the moment in retrospect. At the time, however, I paid her little mind. Other, graver matters demanded my full attention.

For my anger could be delayed no longer, and I now felt it arriving, in full force.

“You would do well,” I said, “to watch your words, where my Mother, Ruth Schoen, is concerned.”

I drained my body of all feeling, and then restored into it only the things I wished to lay bare before all those assembled at the table: lordly contempt, lofty disdain, unleashed and unregulated spite.

“Perhaps you imagine,” I said, “that my Mother, Ruth Schoen, is the sort of woman of whom one can say what one wishes, with no concern for the truth or propriety of one’s words.

“If so,” I said, “I pity you. If so, you will come to regret it, in times that are very soon to come. You will regret, and wish to repent, and make amends—but it will be much too late for that.”

“Ooh,” Madeleine said, giving Florian a nudge on the arm. “Was that a threat? I think he just threatened you, Florian.

“Be careful,” she said, in a loud fake whisper, with mock concern. “He’s got a few screws loose.”

Florian simply laughed. It was another one of his perfunctory laughs, though this one seemed to have a rather different meaning.

“I gotta watch what I say, huh,” Florian said, smirking. “Yeah, I bet.

“’Cause if I don’t, she’s probably gonna get Charlie to take me out, right?

“I mean, if she doesn’t do the job herself—which, let’s be real, she totally would. I mean it’s Ruth Schoen we’re talking about, here.”

“Charlie?” I said.

“Yeah, Charlie Packard,” Florian said. “You know, the union leader? Her new squeeze?”

I stared in silence, trying to make sense of this. An alien thing, ambiguously perverse, laid out at a right angle to Truth.

“A whirlwind romance for the ages,” Florian said, with mock sentiment. “Zero to sixty in record time. The Bonnie and Clyde of bomb-throwing nihilism.”

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, was romantically involved with a man? Could this be true?

Could it be true that she was, and yet she had not told me of it?

Frederick, I noted, had been silent for the whole of the exchange. Wishing to understand this, I looked straight across the table, trying to meet his eyes.

Frederick’s face was downcast, and in shadow. His hands were in his hair, kneading and rearranging it in a repetitive yet highly intricate manner. This was an advanced form of fidgeting, I supposed, only accessible to those who have reached Frederick’s heights of paired neurosis and genius.

He seemed to notice, after a moment, that I was looking at him. In any case, he finally spoke up.

“Florian, please,” Frederick muttered. His manner had a primness, and a deference, which were wholly inapposite to the needs of the moment.

“I don’t think . . . this . . . is . . .” he said. “I don’t think this . . . is necessary, Florian.”

“I dunno, man,” Florian said. “I think it’s pretty weird that you’re hanging around with Ruth fucking Schoen’s kid, to be honest. I think it’s pretty fucking weird.”

“Florian, please,” Frederick said. “Not now.

“Not right in front of him, for Christ’s sake, Florian.

“Herschel and I were just having a pleasant discussion, about . . . some of our shared interests, and, well! Seeing as the lunch period is nearly over, anyway, why don’t we just . . .”

Somehow, it seemed, he could not bring himself to carry even this straightforward notion through to its obvious conclusion. He trailed off, again, instead.

Rage flashed in me.

I thought: Frederick, even if your cowardice did not prevent you from intervening in my defense, I would have no need of your assistance, none WHATSOEVER.

I looked straight at Florian. I made my eyes wide, and freed them from their habitual need to blink.

“Why,” I said to Florian, “do you believe that my Mother, Ruth Schoen, is romantically involved with one Charles Packard, and plans violent acts in conspiracy with him?”

“Wait,” Florian said. For the first time, he seemed to actually be talking to me, rather than simply speaking in my direction as part of a performance whose audience did not include me.

“Wait,” he said. “You didn’t know? Like, seriously?”

His expression showed that he thought I was a pitiful fool. But even this was a vast improvement on the prior state of play. His question was not rhetorical. He had made his move, and now he was waiting for the fool to make his own.

“Like I said,” Madeleine said to Florian, “he’s got a few screws loose.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” she said with mock plaintiveness. “He’s touched, he’s got troubles at home.” She tugged at his sleeve, as some gunslinger’s moll might do while pleading for her man to show mercy.

Everything she did was a satiric pantomime, a joke in which the very notions of acting and existing were trotted out for mockery. She treated us all with the lightness one shows towards the wisps that populate an idle and private fantasy, which configure themselves pliantly to suit each of the fantasist’s successive conceits.

I saw her sprawled out over the dead land, twirling her hair in mockery of Frederick. I saw how her tumbling curls were topped by a paper crown, in mockery of me.

I saw how she seemed to care nothing for the optical devices which roved and rent her innermost parts.

“Won’t it be nice,” I heard her saying, with diffuse and ambiguous lassitude, with a perversely inviting insouciance, “to finally—”

I stared at Florian, and did not blink.

“What cause do you have,” I said, “to believe the outrageous accusations which you have laid down today upon the head of my Mother, Ruth Schoen?”

Florian emitted one of his procedural laughs.

“We have ways of knowing, kid,” he said.

I thought: “We?”

“You don’t seriously think the phone lines are safe, do you?” Florian asked. “That we’re not listening in?”

“I had not thought that,” I said.

“Good,” Florian said. “’Cause we are. The union makes it real easy for us, too, what with Charlie and his shit opsec.

“The guy’s a fucking joke, like, in general. Your Ma sure knows how to pick ’em. Ha, ha.

“And on top of that—large-scale phone tapping is just so much easier than it used to be. Isn’t that right, Frederick?”

I glanced at Frederick. His hands worked madly in his hair, constructing tiered edifices which resembled nothing found anywhere else in nature or civilization, and which might have induced a whole generation of architects to bow down in recognition of a new master and his revolutionary ideas, had they been incarnated in brick or steel rather than in hair.

“I’m so glad your daddy and mine were able to work something out,” Florian said. “And not the old Damien Eggert special, either, where he sweet-talks you, and he strong-arms you, and in the end you get nothing and he gets everything.

“A real quid pro quo. No, a real collaboration. More than the sum of the parts. Our deep investments in audio, his deep investments in foundational tech, all feeding back into each other. Existing capital raising the value of existing capital, over and over, rinse and repeat. Everybody wins.

“I tell you, Frederick, I was worried at first. I mean I’d heard about Damien, about his team of psycho lawyers, about the way he usually treats his sourcing partners—”

“Florian,” Frederick said. “That’s enough.

“The future is being born before your very eyes, Florian. And it’s all because of daddy.

“Do you think anyone’s going to care about what deals he made, or didn’t make, in five years? In one year? Try to think beyond the next five seconds, for once!

“Sometimes, Florian,” Frederick huffed, “I fail to see what makes you and Jeremy any better than the damn rioters.

“Sure, you’re not literally calling for daddy’s head on a platter. But what does it matter? You’ve got your nose to the ground, just like them.

“Worrying yourself over transient phenomena, ignoring the limiting behavior. Willing to throw away the limiting behavior, lower the exponent to zero, throw away the future!—just to make your precious little lives a little easier.”

“Christ,” Florian said. “Jesus, dude.

“Like, fuck you too, man. Whatever. I’m done.”

An uneasy silence ensued.

I looked across the table, at Frederick.

I looked him up and down, taking stock of him, as though I were seeing him for the first time.

I saw a great evil, grown from the seed of a greater evil, and pledging fealty to the greatest of evils.

I saw a man who had set himself utterly apart, so that the cries of abjection pouring from the body of the perishing earth could rouse no feeling in him besides a petulant impatience.

You are marked for death, and yet you spend your last hours wailing and writhing, he complains. It would be more convenient if you were to arrange yourselves in orderly lines, and walk compliantly to the graves which we have prepared for you.

I thought: “Such as are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword . . .” If it is so, then so be it. But one cannot fault a man for weeping, over the fact that it is so.

I thought: who are you, Frederick Eggert? And who am I, to you?

I thought: if a man’s nature is revealed through the company that he keeps, what then is your nature, Frederick Eggert?

I thought: is it true that my Mother, Ruth Schoen, has fallen in with a reckless and violent man, and plans violence in conspiracy with him? Let us suppose that it IS true. Did you know it, Frederick, before I did? Did you know it, and keep it from me?

I thought: your associate, Florian, confesses to a campaign of spying perpetrated upon my Mother, Ruth Schoen, in which he has listened to her most private conversations without her knowledge. With you, among your associates, he speaks of this deed openly and without shame, seeming to expect that no one will find fault in it. What sort of a man are you, Frederick Eggert, that your coterie keeps such customs?

I thought: and what is my Mother, Ruth Schoen, to you? A plaything, to be spied on and mocked, and replaced with a machine when you find it convenient, no matter the cost to her and to her family? And if so, what then do you make of ME?

I thought: I have misjudged the enemy. Witnessing a great evil, I have imagined a greatness of spirit to go along with it, matched to its scale. But I am coming to see things more clearly, now.

I thought: what is it that sits across from me, setting itself against me? Merely a handful of scoundrels, with small and shriveled hearts that no longer know reverence or shame, and an ignorance whose immensity is nearly impossible to overstate. It is not enough to say that they are outmatched at the game board; it is starting to seem as though they are not even aware of the board, or the pieces, or the rules.

The silence was broken, and my rumination with it.

It was Madeleine, who broke it.

“Herschel,” she said.

“Herschel, what is that hat you’re wearing? It is quite the fashion statement.”

Her voice was bright and sweet, with a ponderous pace, like syrup. If the speaker had been anyone but Madeleine, I would have said it was one of the voices that adults often use with children, and left things at that.

With Madeleine, however, things are never so simple as that. She was not talking down to me, or at least, she was not simply talking down to me. She condescended to me, and in the same breath, she mocked the very idea of condescending to me.

“It is my crown,” I said.

Madeleine giggled.

“You’re a funny boy, Herschel Schoen,” she said, and began to rise up from her seat.

“A funny boy, with such a lovely crown,” she said, rising further.

The singsong emphasis which she placed on the words lovely crown was a masterpiece: in the space of a few lilting syllables, it exposed with complete and brutal clarity just how little respect she had for my regal headgear, or for the man who wore it.

She leaned forward, as she rose, and reached out her arm.

I could not see what she was angling to do until it was already over. If I had, I would have moved to stop her.

In one quick motion, she reached for my crown, plucked it from my head, and set it to rest on her own head, instead.

“Stop,” I said.

My arms were not as long as Madeleine’s, and she was much taller than me, as well. In order to reach her scalp and recapture what was mine, I would need to come closer to her, and elevate myself as well.

I began to climb up onto the surface of the table.

“Whoa there,” Florian said. “Hey, now.”

“You have such pretty hair, Herschel,” Madeleine said. “I don’t think it suits you, to have it hidden away under this thing.

“Yes,” she said, not-smiling, “you look much more fetching without it. It is certainly a look, but I don’t think it’s your look, Herschel.”

“Stop,” I said, reaching for her head.

“That is a part of my preparations,” I said. “It is of immense importance.”

Horror filled me, clouding my senses, clouding my judgment.

This was a calamity, of the greatest possible magnitude. This was a whimsical simpleton bringing her toy scissors to bear on the single thin thread from which all was hanging. All lives that had been lived, or were being lived, or would be lived, or could be lived; all light that had ever shone, or was shining, or would shine, or could shine.

The last rite is exacting in its specifications. My crown, and the papers of which it was made, were not fungible goods. I created these things, and placed them as was appropriate, because this was precisely what was required of me, and no substitute could possibly suffice.

I confess: in that moment, I despaired, wholly and utterly.

My crown, if lost, could be replaced by another tape-and-folded-paper construction, fashioned exactly as it was. I was not sure, in the moment, whether or not this act of substitution was in keeping with the last rite’s specifications, but in any event, it did not matter. For the papers of which that crown was composed were truly irreplaceable.

If I regained possession of the crown, there was a chance that the last rite would succeed. But if Madeleine kept the crown, I supposed, the last rite would surely fail. Its specifications are infinitely precise. A failure to meet these specifications in any one respect implies a failure of the last rite as a whole, without exception, without recourse.

“Madeleine,” I pleaded. Hoping to use Madeleine’s perverse designs on me as a point of leverage, I did my best to twist my voice into a form which I imagined might please her. I raised the pitch of it, and lent it a pouting note. I could not hide my despair, but I tried to sound only playfully despairing, as a lover might play at despair in the course of some sick game, in keeping with the sick nature of what is called coupling here among the shadows.

“Madeleine,” I said, “please give that crown back to me. I know you are having fun, but it is immensely important to me.

“I do not think you realize how much you are hurting me, Madeleine. If you did realize, I think that you would stop.”

The very idea of it—!

He breathed the earth and the heavens into being—with an end in mind. The Intercessor emended creation, striding across time and becoming a second breather of being—with an end in mind.

Between that originating moment and the present lay millennia upon millennia of birth and death, health and disease, striving and failure.

Between these bounds, too, lay the sublimity of the Original Creation; the humble poetry of the ancestral earth; the Original Knowledge, dispensing solace even among the shadows, and the later passage of that Knowledge behind the obscuring screen of forgetting; the inexorably swelling mass of the shades in Sheol, and the sad half-life they endure in Sheol’s cavernous depths; temples and termites, trebuchets and televisions; every created thing, every thing, everything!

Creation is an ark fashioned with a destination in mind. The journey has been long, indeed too long for any one man’s mind to properly conceive. But it is nearly over. The light which He and the Intercessor meant us to see, which they made us in order to see, is now cresting over the horizon.

And to think that it was all for naught—and for no good reason!

I reached for the crown, and caught the edge of it. But I did not have enough of it in my grasp to wrest it away from her, and it slipped away again.

Madeleine, perhaps still believing that this was all a matter of play, began to play along. She took the crown away from her head, holding it up and moving it this way and that to evade my grasp.

“I do not think you understand,” I said. “That is an irreplaceable treasure. It is one of my preparations for the last rite.”

“Oh?” Madeleine said, with feigned curiosity.

“What I have written on it,” I said, “is infinitely precious. You must give it back.”

Madeleine brought the crown close to her face, and squinted at it. Due to the folding of the paper, it was not possible to read very much of what was written upon it, but she did her best with what was visible on its outward faces.

“. . . and birthed an epoch HERMAPHRODITIC and FOUR-FACED, to reign over all the . . .” she read.

“. . . by the EATING of this,’ he said, ‘you have BECOME one of us, and have BECOME then the seven thousand three hundred and twelfth of the LESSER SANTAS . . .” she read.

“This is fucked up,” she said.

“Seriously,” she said, “this is some real schizo shit. This is the kind of shit people write when they’re right about to go off the deep end.

“I knew you had issues, but this is honestly kind of freaking me out. I think you need professional help.”

“You can help me,” I said, “by giving that back to me.”

A chord played over the school’s speaker system, indicating that the lunch period had concluded, and classes would soon begin again.

Madeleine smirked.

“Sorry,” she said, placing the crown back onto her head. “But the idea of wearing this to class, man. It’s just too good to pass up.”

She winked, and scurried off.

I looked around me. Frederick, and the rest of his associates, were nowhere to be seen. They had snuck away, it seemed, at some point during the altercation.

I thought: your true colors are showing more and more, Frederick Eggert.

In a haze of despair, I wandered toward the exit.

 

 

In twenty minutes I will have to stop writing. In twenty minutes I will have to leave.

I am sorry, Sister. I am sorry, “Of Birth Pangs.”

I tried, I failed. I am sorry.

Twenty minutes is not nothing. I will write a little more. It will not be enough, but it will not be nothing, either.

 

 

I wandered the streets near Midwood High School, painfully aware of what I had lost. Without my crown, my scalp felt strangely naked. I had not allowed it to breathe the open air for some time.

I wandered, and hope returned to me.

I have said that the strictures of the last rite are infinitely precise. And this is true.

What I have not said—because it is untrue—is that I understood every one of those specifications, at once, holding them all in my mind as a unified whole.

No. In fact, the last rite typically unveils its requirements to me at moments chosen for expediency, and it reveals, in each such moment, only what I need in that moment. I will not stop learning new truths about the nature of my duty until the moment when that duty is fully discharged.

The papers of which the crown was made, and the writing on them? These were required of me. And the construction of the crown? That too.

And the placement of the crown upon my own head? Yes, that too—in the moment, but only in the moment.

I learned, as I walked.

The value of the crown, I learned, derived only from the fact of its fashioning, not from its use as headgear. I had confused the two, in my eagerness to have bodily protection.

The more I reflected, the more sense I saw in these lessons. It was only natural that I wanted to protect my body—myself—from harm. I did not want to be maimed, or to die, any more than anyone did.

And as the executor of the last rite, of course, it was obviously prudent to ensure that I was well protected! A dead man cannot carry out any sort of rite; he cannot do anything at all, unless Sheol allows it, and unless its scope is limited to matters bounded by Sheol’s walls.

But the last rite itself did not require that I be protected.

Protection was prudent, yes, in the name of securing the last rite’s preconditions: that I exist, that I be alive, that I be sound of mind and body, and free to act. But the protections were not part of the rite. A priest must eat, or else he will die, and be unable to carry on his temple duties; it does not follow that his daily supper is, itself, one of those temple duties.

So long as the crown existed, it would serve its function. It was conceivable that Madeleine might destroy it—no act would surprise me, coming from her—but it did not seem likely, and I had much else to do.

Hope returned to me, and I gloried in it.

It was helped along by my recent observation that I had misjudged my Adversary.

The more I considered this, the more significant it seemed.

I was preparing as best I could. I felt good about my odds, provided that all went as planned. But there was a force in the world, actively opposing me, and trying to upend my plans. If I was to fail, it would be through a misunderstanding of this force, and a failure to anticipate its maneuvers.

I thought: who are you, Adversary?

I thought: who are you, Damien Eggert? Do you know what purpose your work serves? Do you know what is coming, on Christmas Day?

 

 

Ten minutes.

No time to cover the rest of my day outside, or how I came home, or dinner, or—any of that.

Just the one thing, now, before I have to go.

 

 

After dinner I lay in bed, thinking.

I had been thinking about the last rite, for a time. And then, I was thinking of something else.

I confess: Madeleine was in my thoughts, just then. And not solely in ways connected with the theft of the crown. But this is beside the point, and there is no time.

The door opened. My Sister, Miriam Schoen, entered the room.

I turned to her.

I thought: she is going away, tomorrow. She is going away, and I can do nothing to save her.

It was painful, seeing her as she was that evening.

I had seen her earlier, at dinner, and spoken to her then. But at dinner, there were other things to distract me from the simple fact of her. Here, in the bedroom, there was nothing else.

She had always been thin, but in December, she—

I do not know how to say it properly. I do not have time.

I could say she did not look healthy, and I would state a truth. But it would not be the truth, the heart of the matter, the source of my pain. That lay somewhere else, nearby, which I do not have time to figure out how to name.

She was trembling.

I do not think she realized that she was trembling.

“Hey, Herschel,” she muttered tonelessly, by way of greeting.

She laid her body down upon her bed. She stared at the ceiling, trembling.

“Sister?” I said.

She made some sort of small motion, which I interpreted as a nod.

“I am worried about you,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said, tonelessly.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “how you and Vincent Vierge are going to support yourselves, in Portland, Oregon.

“From the sound of it,” I said, “Vincent Vierge is already in dire financial straits, and having enough trouble housing and feeding himself. I appreciate that you will be housed with him, free of charge, but there are other expenses involved in a life, and I do not understand how you are planning to pay yours.”

I did not really worry about any of this, of course. On Christmas Day it would all cease to matter. I brought it up because I hoped that she herself cared, and as a way of easing in to my true concerns.

She made some sort of small motion, which I interpreted as an irritable shrug.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It’s not my place,” she said a moment later, “worrying over those things. Over . . . flesh, and . . . walls, and . . .

“These things,” she said, “I surrender to the lords of technocapital, to do with as they please.”

“I just want to be with him,” she said. “To be with him, when . . .”

She performed her hat-tipping gesture.

“Sister?” I said.

There was no reason not to say it.

“I am afraid that you are about to die,” I said.

“That you want to die,” I said.

“I want . . .” she said, and trailed off.

“I am going up,” she said, after a pause.

Her voice had taken on a strange coloration, intent yet vacant, like a version of excitement which had been systematically hollowed out, leaving only a husk.

“I am going up, up, up,” she said.