Of the Father

I must write down what has just happened!

I must!

I already hear prudence whispering furiously in my ear, urging me to put the pen aside. Wayward, it calls me, and willful. It hisses my name in a chiding, reproving tone, wondering rhetorically what is to be done with incorrigible old me.

“There is no time,” prudence insists. I know! I know!

“It is Christmas Eve,” prudence says, redundantly. I know! What, do you imagine that I might have forgotten?

“Behind the formless clouds,” it says, “the sun is already beginning to fall.

“It is Christmas Eve. It is past noon. It is well past noon, and even the afternoon is now starting to die.

“Go on, take another glance at the clock. Tell me what you read there.

“Do not sulk in affected cowardice, pretending that you cannot bring yourself to do it. You are a coward, Herschel Schoen, it is true. But you have a man’s face, sixthmade and blessed. The clock’s lifeless ‘face,’ its mechanical ‘hands,’ cannot possibly strike fear into you. They were fashioned in latter days; you, at the beginning. Go! Look!”

Two forty-seven P.M., says the clock. December Twenty-Fourth, says the calendar.

Christmas Eve, the little children say, raising their voices in song.

“They do not know it,” prudence hisses, “but they are singing to YOU, Herschel Schoen.

“It is you who will bring them gifts, or else bring them ruin.

“Do you hear their song? Do you hear how they are close to despair? How they hold despair at bay, for the sake of singing?

“How they THROW CARES AWAY, when they begin to sing? How they lose themselves, for the duration of the song, allowing themselves to HOPE—in spite of everything?

“Dare you DISAPPOINT them, Herschel Schoen?”

No! Never! I am Herschel Schoen!

“Which shall it be, then? The momentary satisfaction of your momentary whims—or eternity?

“A final moment of senseless play among the dying shadows—or an outstretched hand to guard the little children, and guide them to safety, and show them how they were right to hope, after all, in spite of everything? Which shall it be, Herschel Schoen, last and most pitiful of prophets? Which, which?”

I know! I know!

It is imprudent, yes; I may well pay a great price, yes, if I do it.

But I must do it!

Prudence is a virtue, but it is not the only virtue, nor is it the highest virtue!

I must be very quick. I must race against the despairing, death-craving hours, matching my pace to theirs.

I have written a new heading, just above, for this purpose and this purpose only. “Of the Father,” I shall call this section.

I cannot write very much, beneath it. There is no time.

Goodbye, “Of Birth Pangs.” Goodbye, and take heart. I will see you again, very soon. But there is no time left for you, today.

There is no time left for anything, anymore.

Even if I were to put down the pen now, and spend every moment hereafter with my hands busy in preparation—with my heart wholly open to the last rite, and wholly closed to all other matters—

No!

There is no time, and this does not matter. There is no time, and this is of no consequence.

For I must write down what has just happened!

O sweet silver bells! O halls decked with majesty and excellency, and arrayed with glory and beauty! Do you hear what I hear?

O meek and winsome stars: let my voice reach your place of blushing seclusion, set out above the oblivious city! Hear me! Hear what I hear!

O armies and terrors! O wild and unregulated creatures, made for war, incapable of mercy! Though you are in no way tame, you still know the sound of your master’s voice—do you not? Hear me!

O fearsome sinews, stitched with elfin deftness, and strung together into cedar-high legs! O brass-pipe bones and iron-bar gristles, nourished by the feasting grounds that are laid out within Santa’s polar mill of marvels, and now grown tall and terrible—outstripping all the city’s futile towers, “scraping the sky” as those towers claim to, and yet cannot!

O mighty ones fashioned in latter days, with no creator save for the Intercessor, and no purpose save for the carrying-out of that man’s will! O nutcracker army, massed in your millions among the city’s shadows, and kneeling there in utmost subservience, with your eyes raised up to watch the red-gloved, outstretched hand of your master!

O winsome soldiers, heedless of all human limits, who will not relent from your slaughter until the waters of every river and bay have been painted in your master’s color, and the tip of every last “sky-scraping” tower has been submerged under the rising surface of the blood-red lake! I am your general, and I bear good news!

O monstrous toys that circle ravenously over the open field—you who spread wide your black and measureless wings, obscuring the very stars, only to fall meekly to the ground at Santa’s bidding, baring your soft bellies so that he might play with you as with a pet! Hear what is being raised o’er hill and dale! Hear me!

Hear me, and rejoice!

 

 

Today, a few minutes after noon, I stepped off of the B train, and fought my way through the paste.

The men in the station were more densely packed together—and more unruly—than I have ever known the city’s men to be, in any of the city’s subway stations. But I have learned how to contend with men massed into paste. I sought the open air, and soon found it.

No man can delay me, if I do not wish it. I no longer have any time left whatsoever for matters which are of no significance.

I came out, into the open air, and onto Sixth Avenue.

I walked.

I walked, turning my face to each one of my Adversary’s lampposts, and then to the next.

A proud sneer was upon my lips, then.

Look, Adversary, I thought. Look on my face. See what I make of all your pretensions. See how little stock I place in the rumors that you are mighty, and industrious, and full of guile.

I turned from Sixth Avenue onto Waverly Place.

I walked, and saw my destination emerging from the murk.

I saw the cringing forms of bare and cowardly trees. And around them, a low-set and half-hearted fence, which could be stepped over with ease, if one wished.

Even this, however, was not necessary. Out of the murk, a pair of short, quaint, docile lampposts announced itself to me; between them, I saw that the fence had been broken, allowing pedestrians to pass freely onto a small paved thoroughfare.

I sneered at the crouching lampposts, one and then the next. I passed them by, and went onward, into the ugly and ill-tended thicket which is called Washington Square Park.

My Adversary’s hand must have slipped, when he made Washington Square Park.

Wanting to seem mighty, he has built up mighty edifices all throughout the city he calls his own—but not here, not in Washington Square Park. Here, he lets slip something of his true stature.

Even the name that he has chosen for it bespeaks haste, or foolishness, or both. For it is not by any means a square, and I cannot see any reason why the meager things which are arranged there—the self-effacing branches, the half-finished monuments—should be thought worthy of the proud name Washington, which the Americans hold holy.

It would seem curious, then, that he chose this place for today’s meeting.

It would, would it not?

For the first time, I considered this.

I thought: does my Adversary WISH to appear weak, today?

I thought: can he be GIVING UP, already? Conceding the game? Kneeling at my feet, in recognition of my superior strength, which even he can appreciate—though he understands so little about anything else at all?

I thought: no.

For I knew it could not be so.

Confusion mounted in me, and made me wary, as I walked deeper into Washington Square Park.

I thought: perhaps he means to make some subtle point, which has been lost on me.

I thought: perhaps he is full of guile, after all.

It was not a large place, the one my Adversary had chosen. It could be crossed in the span of a single minute, if that.

And so, I soon came to the clearing that was set out at the center of it.

I saw the homely fountain, there. It was dry, spent up; there was no potency left in it, and nothing at all flowed from it. I saw the dull gray forms that clung to its surface, oblivious to the way that they mirrored the dull gray of the formless clouds above.

It was a shabby thing, hunched low to the ground. It cringed, at the sight of me, and of my sneer. It retreated into itself, pulling itself even lower to the ground, as though it were trying to dig a burrow for itself under the paved tiles of the plaza, in which to secret itself away, and thereby escape my notice and my wrath.

I stared directly at it, showing it my spiteful lips. I opened my mouth to it, and sang a four-note melody, proclaiming to it that its efforts were in vain. My wrath is not a thing that can be hidden from, or escaped in any way; it is the very body of the inevitable, showing itself, and announcing how things are to be.

With the fountain dispatched, I raised my eyes to take in the remainder of the clearing.

Forms wavered in the murk. With a show of effort, the exhausted shadows roused themselves for a final performance.

Gradually, uneasily, the assembled mists arranged themselves into a semblance of human form, and presented this for my appraisal.

I saw the two figures, standing close by to the fountain.

I did not recognize either of them, at first.

I knew who they were, of course, but that is not the same thing. They were limp, spent-up, made up of a substance that was in short supply, and which soon would run out entirely.

I knew one of the two very well, and had seen him nearly every day, in recent weeks. And still, I did not recognize him—not, anyway, until he raised one of his long, gangly arms to wave at me.

After that, there could be no mistaking him. It is inimitable, the way that Frederick has of waving his arms; I do not think any other man could master it if he tried.

So he was here, just as we had arranged. And the man standing beside him—as we had arranged—was his father. Damien Eggert. “Daddy.”

A bolt of fear shot through me, with no antecedent in anything that the day had previously given me.

I quelled my trembling, and thought: no.

I felt the papers that were under my coat, and upon my face and hands.

I thought: I do not come to you without protection, Adversary. Far from it! For I have PREPARED for our meeting, today.

I thought: have you done the same? What armor do you wear, today?

“Herschel!” Frederick cried. His voice was inscrutable; colorless things churned within it.

I nodded, and came closer.

 

 

Today, in Washington Square Park, my Adversary revealed his true stature to me.

I saw his regent, Damien Eggert, in the flesh. I stood face to face with that man, and took stock of him.

I was struck, first of all, by how short he was.

He was no taller than Frederick, in fact. It is proper for a father to tower over his son, as befits his position; in this, as in everything else, Damien Eggert thumbed his nose at propriety.

He paid no heed to custom, for he cared only for his and Frederick’s colorless “future”; his gaze was fixed in that direction, unable to look back at those who had come before him, unable even to imagine why they might be worthy of respect. He cared nothing for the compacts which bound others around him, for he fancied himself superior to them.

Now, now. Every man, it is said, looks smaller in the flesh than he does in a portrait or a photograph. Do not imagine that I have only fallen under the spell of this simple and much-discussed illusion.

No. Even accounting for such differences between paint and flesh, Damien Eggert was simply—what?

In a word: small.

Not small in every way, I suppose. He was stouter than his son, for instance; there is that, and it must be noted. Indeed, he wore an unsightly, garish pair of suspenders—now those were nowhere to be seen in the portrait, that is for sure!—in order to prevent his stoutness from overflowing.

And in this effort, it must be noted, his suspenders were entirely successful. His paunch did not overflow, nor did anything else within him. He was fenced in, contained, regulated. Everything about him was perfectly in order, even the very infelicities of dress and visage, of which there were many.

A pair of beady, bleary eyes nestled in a furrow, somewhere among the well-arranged and hideous wrinkles of the face.

He sighed, without much feeling.

“This is the kid, huh, Freddy?” he said.

Only then, when I heard his voice, did I grasp how truly small he was.

For it is the voice, not the face, which is the surest guide to the true nature of a man. A face might look one way, and then another, under the changing light; a face can even be falsified, through the use of masks or other trickery. But a man’s voice is the fingerprint of his heart. A man’s voice is only his, and wholly his—and the whole of his nature is laid bare, within it.

As for Damien Eggert’s voice, then? It was quick, breezy, casual. There was no heft to it whatsoever.

The question mark I have placed at the end of his sentence, just above, is mainly a matter of typographic habit; he was not really asking Frederick a question, I perceived, but merely—what?

Merely chatting.

Yes, chatting. That is the word for it. Indeed, that is the word for everything that I heard coming out of that futile mouth, today.

He fancied himself above all other men, and above all their cares. And so, having thrown cares away, he had no more need for passion, or for dignity.

Like Madeleine, he peered down at the world from above, affecting to find something mildly amusing in all that he surveyed—and to find nothing else there. But there was no intriguingly doubled quality to his manner, as there was to Madeleine’s. There was nothing of her curious charm in him, nothing to keep one’s attention fixed on him for any longer than was required.

He was so small, and so terribly simple, too. Each of his words and gestures had a single meaning only, and each displayed that meaning plainly, on its surface.

He was forgettable.

Oh, Adversary, you do amuse me so! I cannot forget Damien Eggert, of course; I cannot forget anyone or anything. However, even I can see what you showed plainly to me today: that your regent is forgettable. It is the perfect word for him.

You have prepared him this way, for me, have you not?

You are jocular, Adversary—you have had nothing except jokes to give me, from the start of our game onwards. And go on joking, even today. Only tomorrow will your jokes meet their end, in the final and crowning joke of yourself, and in the amusing ease with which I shall destroy you.

Does it please you to know that I do, at least, appreciate your sense of humor?

Damien Eggert chatted, forgettably.

“I’m just passing through, is all,” he said. He did not seem to be talking to Frederick, or to me, or even to himself.

“Can’t stay and shoot the shit,” he said. “I’m just coming through, on my way in, you know.

“Got places to go, people to see, all that whole kit and kaboodle.”

“I know, daddy,” Frederick said. His voice was low, plaintive, placating.

“I’m just making the rounds, getting the boys all together,” Damien Eggert said. “It’s about time I did some yakking with the boys, you know, Freddy. Gotta get their eyes on the thing, pick their brains, you know, the whole nine yards.

“What with how things are coming along, you know.”

“I know, daddy,” Frederick said again. He placed a tentative hand on his father’s shoulder.

“I’m getting all the boys from down here,” Damien Eggert said, “and then I’m coming back up to the roost again.

“To get ’em all together in a room, and see if we can’t crack some tough nuts, what with all our big bald heads put together.”

He chuckled. No one, hearing him, could imagine that he really found anything funny in his own latest remark. The chuckle was like the rest of it: mere chatting. Thoughtless banter, tossed lightly onto a formless heap of similar stuff, which could all be safely disposed of with the rest of the household trash, later on.

“I’m getting all the fancy boys from down here, rounding ’em all up—so I can show ’em what’s what, ha!

“Getting Peter, from down here, of course, and Kurt. And Yann, too, can’t forget the poor bastard. Yann, and Peter, and Kurt, and . . .”

“Yes, daddy,” Frederick said, squeezing his father’s shoulder gently. “You told me before, remember? In the morning?”

“These fancy boys down here,” Damien Eggert exclaimed, “they sure think they can integrate a system, huh?

“Bet their wives’d tell a different story, though—haw, haw!”

He was, I reflected, perhaps the least funny man I had ever encountered. Things that sounded like jokes came out of his mouth, and he would chuckle, after each one. But the more one considered these emissions, the less one found in them that could possibly justify the chuckle.

“So I gotta round ’em up,” Damien Eggert went on, “and get ’em up to the roost, you know, with the rest of the boys.

“I got both of the Warrens in town today, to see the big show up close. I got Warren and Walter in town, for old times’ sake, you know.

“I got mousy old Claude, up here in town, and Vannevar too.

“Heh, between me and the boys, and Claude’s little mouse, and that toy gizmo the Warrens made—you know the one, Freddy boy, it pretends to speak French, remember?

“And why, with all our heads put together, I bet we can manage to beat some sense into the new girl after all!

“Bet we can break her in good, once we’ve got all the boys together, with their eyes on her. And Claude’s mouse. Haw, haw!”

I stood transfixed, marveling at his unbecoming crudity, his terrible baseness. I stared at him, trying to determine what to make of his surpassing vapidity.

I thought: THIS is my Adversary’s regent? This chatty, wart-ridden churl in suspenders?

Frederick shot me a pained glance.

“He doesn’t really mean a girl, Herschel,” Frederick said. It was plain that he was desperate to reassure me on this point. I watched his eyes, and saw a series of subtle and tactful flickers play across them. I saw how he was reflecting, in his sped-up manner, upon all the many finer nuances of diplomacy, and of decorum.

How Frederick came to his grasp of such things, I do not know. He did not get any of it from his father, that is clear enough.

“When he says he’s going to break in the new girl,” Frederick continued, “he doesn’t mean, girl, you know.

“In the sense of young female human.

“Don’t worry, Herschel. He’s not talking about doing anything to a person. He means—”

“What’d I say about yapping, Freddy?” said Frederick’s father, glaring at him.

I saw that glare, and I was glad. I heard the harshness of his tone—no longer so chatty, so bantering—and I rejoiced. I exhaled, in relief.

So, I thought, there is life in him after all.

“I’m sorry, daddy,” Frederick said, hanging his head. He brought off the gesture perfectly, and I could not help but stare for a moment, admiring him. His grasp of the customary forms of penitence was masterful, as was his grasp of all forms, and their ways of succeeding one another.

“It’s only that . . .” Frederick began again, after a chastised pause which had been masterfully measured out, and which was thus of the perfect duration for the sentiment.

“I don’t want Herschel to get the wrong idea, daddy, that’s all,” he said.

“I don’t want him to think you’re talking about a person. Or, or a . . . or a dog, even.”

The stutter, here, was a masterstroke. A lesser artist might have omitted it, and still produced something well worthy of admiration.

“When you’re only talking about a machine,” Frederick said.

“Herschel, he only means one of his machines. One that’s acting up a bit, that’s all. Not much different from the one I saw yesterday morning, actually, in fact. Except that its wires have undergone twenty-four more hours, give or take, of massively multipl—”

“Freddy,” Damien Eggert said, sounding really quite alarmed, now.

“Zip your lips, boy,” he said, “or I’ll zip ’em for you, you hear!

“Jesus fucking Christ, boy,” he said. “That all’s not your business to yap about, is it now?”

Frederick hung his head, and made a contrite, wordless noise.

I stood in the vacuum left by his silence, and considered my next move.

It was a peculiar challenge. I had prepared well for what I expected to find before me, today. I was well armored. And—coward though I might be—I had gathered together all the resources of bravery that existed within me, and instructed them as to the magnitude of the occasion, and warned them of the uncommon load which I might soon require them to bear.

But I was in no way prepared for what I had found, then, in Washington Square Park.

I thought: has there been some mistake? Has my Adversary sent the wrong man?

But I knew it could not be so.

I raised my face to Damien Eggert. I looked directly into his oblivious, rodent-like eyes. I stared, and did not blink.

I thought: I do not even know where to begin, with him.

“Do you know,” I asked bitterly, “who you are?”

For I was beginning to suspect, in fact, that he did not. That my Adversary, in his mania for forgetting, had made simpletons of his own generals, in order that they embody his own risible ideal as closely as possible.

“What was that, kid?” Damien Eggert said. He peered at me warily, as though he had only just then noticed my presence.

His ignorant eyes looked me up and down, attempting to take stock of me.

“Freddy,” he said, “what’s the deal with this kid, anyway?

“He doesn’t look so good, Freddy, to me. Look, he’s dressed all shabby-like.

“And what’s he got there, on his face? What are those, his class notes?

“He tapes ’em up there on his cheeks, just to be sure he knows where they are, is that it? Real forgetful kind of a kid—is that the deal, Freddy?”

I thought: “forgetful!” Oh, Adversary, you do amuse me so!

“He’s not one of those charity cases, is he?” Frederick’s father said.

“Oh . . . oh, no, daddy,” Frederick said, with an impeccable unease.

“Not at all,” he said. “Why, daddy—Herschel got them all, on Raven! He got them all, too, on Raven!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Damien Eggert said. “Join the club, is what I have to say to that, boy.

“I don’t have time, today, for ruffling little boys’ hair, just ’cause they got a perfect score on Raven. I’m a busy man, today. Got places to go, people to see.

“And I got a new girl, too, back at the roost, who’s real feisty. Needs some loving care. I probably oughta run some tests on her terminals, I think. And check out her insides, too.”

“Daddy,” Frederick implored. “Herschel’s my friend. He’s my friend, all right?

“And he just wants to talk to you, all right? Just for a few minutes, and then you can go. That’s what we talked about this morning, remember?”

Damien Eggert grunted. The noise heralded a return to his usual form. I heard his tonic center, there, re-asserting itself: exhausted, mildly amused, bled dry of all color.

He peered at me, incuriously.

“Well?” he said. “What is it you got to say, kid?

“Be quick now, I’m a busy man.”

I stared him down. I went into the house of myself, waking the powers that slept within me, and calling them up into my eyes and my mouth.

“Do you even know who you are?” I said.

“What’s this,” Damien Eggert said, “some kinda trick question?”

I sighed.

“Do you even know what day it is, today?”

“Well,” Damien Eggert said, “that’d be the twenty-fourth of December, now.”

“Christmas Eve,” I spat. “The fourth Tuesday.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the man muttered.

There is a way that kings are meant to speak to one another, when they convene for the second-to-last time, knowing that tomorrow they will meet in battle, and one of them will be cut down by the other’s blade. I know how kings sound, on such occasions.

Is there such a thing as the opposite of a king? How would he sound, on such an occasion? I ask, but I already know the answer. For it was precisely this that I heard, then, in Damien Eggert’s coarse and cowardly muttering.

“And do you know,” I said, “what is coming to you, tomorrow?

“What is coming to you, and all your forces? What will rain down over them, and lay them low, and grind them into dust?”

“Can’t say,” Damien Eggert averred, with a jocular shrug.

“Dunno what you’re all hot and bothered about, all of a sudden,” he commented, a moment later.

I thought: are these the careful, crafty evasions of a guileful man?

I shook my head. No.

No, I thought, he is precisely as simple as he seems. He is merely a fool, is he not? A fool, who knows nothing at all!

Come now, Adversary, I thought. After all this time? After a month of hiding away, you finally face me—and THIS is what you bring to me?

I sighed, again.

I faced Damien Eggert, again.

“You are my Adversary’s regent,” I said to him, in my FULL VOICE. “And you do not even know it!”

“You deign to speak with ME,” I said, in wingèd quotation marks. “When you do not even know who it IS, that you are speaking to!

“You were sent to contend with ME—and you do not even know who I am!”

“You don’t,” I hissed. “Do you?”

“I don’t think this kid’s right in the head, Freddy,” Damien Eggert said, turning to Frederick. “Gives me the creeps.

“I thought better of you, son. Never thought you’d go keeping company like him, for Chrissakes. The hell’s gotten into you, anyway?”

I ignored him.

“I am Herschel Schoen,” I said, in my FULL VOICE.

“Look closely at my face, now,” I said. “You will not have another chance to do so.

“For when you see me again, the blood will be draining out of you, and your life-breath will be nearly spent up. You will not be able to see me so clearly, then, while you are dying.”

“Herschel,” Frederick said pointedly, and took a step forward.

I waved a hand to dismiss him. I much admired his conciliatory powers, and did not want to see them spent needlessly, on a lost cause.

“I pity you,” I said to them both. “You are fools, and cannot even see your own deaths as they rise over the horizon.”

“Herschel, please,” Frederick said, sounding newly pained, and newly urgent.

“Look,” he said, “I’m sorry if . . .

“I mean, what happened, you know, with Florian, yesterday, and Madeleine . . .”

I narrowed my eyes.

“I admire you, Frederick Eggert,” I said. “I admire you, nearly as much as I pity you.”

“Look,” Frederick said, waving his hands madly in diagrammatic excess. “Look, everyone’s a bit jumpy, these days, all right?

“The . . . the, erm . . . the pace of history, is what’s doing it, Herschel. It’s gotten everybody spooked.

“Florian’s scared, okay? Underneath it all, he’s scared of what’s coming, that’s all, that’s why he can’t contain himself.

“And Madeleine, too. I know Madeleine, all right, Herschel? We talk. We talk a lot.

“She’s so scared,” he said, with a peculiar fierceness. Almost maternal, I want to call it, somehow.

He crossed half of the gap that separated me from him. He looked at me with pleading, half-lost eyes.

“I can tell you’re scared too, Herschel,” he said.

I shook my head.

“I have no fears whatsoever,” I said. “I have put the last of them to rest, finally, just now.”

“Oh, Herschel,” he said. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that, dammit, please. You don’t know, Herschel, you don’t know . . .”

“I know all,” I replied.

“Well, I’m scared, dammit!” Frederick cried.

“I’m . . . scared,” he said, whirling to face his daddy.

“Daddy,” he said. “I’m afraid.

“I’m afraid of the Regulator, the one I saw this morning.

“Something was . . . daddy, it wasn’t right, what I saw, in the morning.”

“Chin up, Freddy,” his father chided. “Don’t be a damn wuss, now, boy.”

“More is different, I know,” Frederick said, “but this . . .

“The way it failed, daddy. The way it failed so strangely, in the laboratory, this morning . . . like it was trying to—”

Damien Eggert made a curt, dismissive gesture.

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “Don’t lose your nerve, just ’cause you saw one of my girls acting up.

“She’s an uppity one, sure,” he said, “but it won’t last. You’ll see. She just needs to be broken in, son, that’s all.”

Frederick’s arms wheeled, diagramming a host of unvoiced objections.

“Are you sure, daddy?” he said.

“I can’t see how you are so confident,” he said. “What if the production function itself is failing?

“What if the trend goes haywire, right around this intensity regime? What if the Regulators have started to get worse, now, the more you feed into them? That’s conceivable, isn’t it?”

Damien Eggert glowered, silently, at his wayward son. I saw shame on his face, and it fascinated me. I would not have imagined him capable of shame, before.

“Or—or maybe the magnitudes have gotten out of whack, again!” Frederick babbled.

“You’ve been feeding it so many different things, daddy. In different mixtures, each time. Maybe the feedbacks they induce are coming in at different scales, and the very loudest signal is drowning out all the others.

“That could be it, daddy, couldn’t it?

“Think about it! The library contract!

“That huge batch of scans they sent us, just the other day. The biggest one they’ve ever sent, completing the lot. That has to be it! Too many books in the transduction bank, they’re upsetting the balance, the other signals aren’t coming through clear!”

“Frederick,” Damien Eggert said, with an inhuman flatness that did nothing to hide his rage. “We are in public, Frederick.

“You’re not to talk about any of that in public, son. Not now, or ever again. You hear me?”

“Wait,” I interjected, turning to Frederick.

For he had made something newly clear to me, whether or not he had meant to do so.

“Frederick,” I said, “you mentioned a ‘library contract,’ just now.

“Is that why the library system has been closed, for nearly the whole month?

“So that it can be yours, and your daddy’s, and no one else’s?”

I looked into Frederick’s eyes, and saw his mute, helpless assent.

“And all the books of the library system,” I said, “which you have taken away from the city’s people—you are offering them up before a machine, instead?

“You are giving them to your cybernetic system? As mere fodder for the ‘negative feedbacks’ of your ‘automatic transduction algorithm’? As yet more fuel, to further stoke the mindless convulsions that wrack its body all through the night, while you sleep?

“And what exactly does your system do with the books, Frederick, after they are given to it?

“What use are books, to a machine? Does it read them, as you or I might? Surely not!”

Terror shone from Frederick’s eyes.

“It . . . it predicts them, Herschel,” he said.

I laughed.

“And how,” I asked, “does one ‘predict’ a book?”

“One word at a time,” Frederick said.

He spoke slowly, in an empty voice. His breath had been hollowed out by terror, preparing him for the despair which would soon come to him, and require lodging within him. It would find an agreeable nest, I thought, in his hollow breath.

“One word, and then the next one,” he said.

“Just like . . . that,” he said, and then he could say no more.

For there was a hand clasped over his mouth, now. It pressed tightly against his lips, muzzling him.

His father held him, with both arms, from behind.

One arm was wrapped around his neck, I saw, with its hand acting as the aforementioned muzzle. The other arm went around his midsection, pinning him to his father’s body.

“Library contract?” Damien Eggert growled. “Transduction algorithm?

“How does he . . . what the fuck have you been telling him, Frederick?”

“You’ve been blabbing,” he roared. “Haven’t you, now?”

“Blabbing!” Even at a moment such as this—when he wished to seem mighty, and to strike terror—the comical element of the man could not fully hide itself.

Still, it was true: his manner had changed. And in something of the way one would hope for, in light of the moment.

He was not breezy, anymore, or casual.

“I trusted you, boy,” he said. His mouth was a dark cavern, cluttered up with the corpses of the books he had consumed.

“I thought you were a good kid, I did,” he said.

“A tad backward, maybe,” he said, ignoring Frederick’s squirming. “Too nervous for your own good, yeah, sure.

“But I did think you were a good kid, underneath. You know that, Frederick?”

Frederick tried to answer, but his mouth was still ably muzzled, and it could produce nothing but a succession of formless murmurs and tepid moans.

“Not a lot of boys get to be trusted, the way I trusted you. You know that?

“There aren’t many boys whose daddies trust ’em with corporate intellectual property. Or with classified state secrets, either.

“And what do I get for my trouble? I send you off to that school, boy, and—what do you do? You go blabbing!

“And not just to anyone, no less, oh no!”

Damien Eggert turned his glare towards me.

I saw his rage, and was unmoved. Even now, he regulated himself; even now, he held his heart back. He allowed himself to burn, within, but only up to a point.

If he were to burn fully, what would then be left to set him apart? What would elevate him above the interchangeable millions, for whom he had such evident contempt?

It was the others, not him, who burned fully, and shone bright, until at last they burned themselves up. He could not allow his heart to run riot as it wished to, and as it ought to have done. Running riot was the business of the other side, was it not? And so he would have to make do with some dimmer, lesser thing, in its place.

I pitied him.

“I trusted you,” Damien Eggert said. “And what do you do?

“You go to that school. You look all around, real careful like.

“You go through all the geeks, all the losers. You sift through ’em real carefully, don’t you?

“You don’t stop until you’ve found a kid so backward, so messed up, that it’s a wonder he got sent to school in the first place.

“Some washed-up, stinking little sack of worthless shit. Who got let in there by mistake, in the first place, probably. And nobody’s got the heart to tell him to go home.

“Who couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it, probably.

“That’s your guy, right there.

“That’s the one you’re gonna blab to.

“Christ. Jesus fucking Christ, Frederick.

“I don’t have time for this, all right? I don’t have time for you.

“I got places to be. I got a future to make.

“As for you? Seeing as you don’t appreciate how your actions can have consequences, well. I guess I’m gonna have to teach you that lesson over again. Teach you right, this time around.”

The muzzling hand had loosened its grip enough for Frederick to speak, slightly.

“Do I get to . . .” he coughed.

“I want to go home,” he managed.

“Oh, yeah,” his father said. “Sure, sure. You can stay, as long as you don’t make trouble.

“No more peeping around in my lab, naturally. But if you can stay out of trouble, sure, you can stay around.

“I’ll let your old nanny know what you’ve done. She’ll know what to do with you.”

Frederick shuddered.

I wondered, suddenly, why Damien Eggert thought I was worthy of witnessing this sordid family spectacle. He thought so little of me, he claimed. And yet here he was, baring his shame and his son’s shame, in plain view of me.

“You won’t be going to school any more, of course,” he said. “Or anywhere, really.”

Frederick shuddered, again, with greater force.

“Not until your old nanny and me have figured out what to do with you, anyway.

“Maybe, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some special kinda school that’d be just right for you. One of those schools that’s just for delinquents, and charity cases.”

For some reason, he glared at me again.

“You know,” he said.

“Your little friend looks kinda familiar, Freddy. Feel like I’ve seen him before.

“Didn’t notice it at first, with all that paper on him. But he looks just like the Schoen kid.

“The boy, I mean. Ruth Schoen’s boy!

“You know. If I didn’t know better.

“If I didn’t know better I’d almost wanna say that he . . .

“But no. No way.

“It can’t be the fucking Schoen kid, Frederick. Tell me it can’t.

“’Cause if it were? Then we’d be in a whole other world, you and I. A whole other world of consequences.”

“Daddy,” Frederick mumbled, weakly. “I want to go home.”

“Yeah, yeah,” his father said. “Eventually. But I can’t let you go off running away on your own, now, can I?

“You’re coming with me. I’m gonna round up the boys. And you’re gonna wait in some nice empty classroom, in the meanwhile. All by yourself, with the door locked.”

 

 

I met Frederick’s eyes, as he was dragged away. I watched him, face to face, as he receded finally into the murk.

I saw the terror that was in his eyes, and I saw how there were many other things behind it.

I saw the layered, colorless forms in my friend’s eyes. There was something for me, I knew, laid out there among the other parts. What it was, I cannot say. It was a shadow’s shadow, a tuft of mist obscured behind a further and deeper mist.

“Goodbye, Damien Eggert, regent of my Adversary,” I said.

“You are a fool,” I said to him, “and a bully. I think that I shall enjoy watching you die, tomorrow.”

He paid me no mind, of course. His ignorance was complete, and beyond my help.

I turned, again, to Frederick.

“Goodbye, Frederick Eggert,” I said.

“I admire you, still,” I said.

“And if it is any consolation,” I said, “your troubles will come to an end much sooner than you are probably expecting.”

His free arm flailed, and then the mists covered it over, and it vanished.

His eyes quaked, and were covered over, and vanished.