Of Nativity

’Twas the night before Christmas.

So begins the poem. And so it was, in fact.

If one reads on, however, past the first five words? One finds that poetry and Truth rapidly diverge.

All through the house, says the poem, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

But there were in fact several creatures stirring, all throughout the apartment.

Herschel Schoen, for one.

And the cockroaches, which could always be relied upon to stir and stir underfoot, heedless of man’s calendars and his holy days. Though they knew the day from the night, they were unaware of how the days were named and numbered by man; they were unaware, too, that there was such a thing as holiness which man felt, and which impelled man to give over certain days among the mass for the honoring of it. They, fifthmade, did not possess—and could not possibly acquire—such knowledge of sixthmade matters.

Perhaps there was even a mouse, too, stirring in some unseen and shadowed corner. It is possible, I suppose. I have seen mice in the apartment before, though only rarely.

In any case, there was certainly no mamma in her ’kerchief, settling her brains for a long winter nap.

My Mother, Ruth Schoen, was not at home. And she would not return home (she had said) until the following evening—if in fact she returned at all.

She would not be sleeping at all, tonight, I supposed. She had a duty to carry out, tonight, just as I did.

No children nestled all snug in their beds, moreover. My Sister, Miriam Schoen, had forsaken her childhood bed, and would never nestle in it again, tonight or on any other night. And while, at times, I did indeed go to my bed and lie upon it, I cannot say that I nestled there, much less that I was snug.

There were no dancing visions—not of sugar-plums, nor of anything else. My ceiling had forsaken me, and no longer danced.

No: there was nothing besides the stirring of Herschel Schoen, and the stirring of the cockroaches.

There was only my stirring, sixthmade, spurred on by remembering—and the stirring of the cockroaches, fifthmade, spurred on by what could not even be called forgetting. The cockroaches had not forgotten the Original Knowledge; it had never been given to them in the first place. And they would remain oblivious to it, even in the days that were soon to come.

Nothing besides Herschel Schoen, and the cockroaches.

And the pitiless glare of the electric ceiling lights, above us.

And the pitiless emptiness of the night, outside.

 

 

I paced the floor of the living room.

Over and over, I paced.

Back and forth, I paced. And back, and forth.

To the front door and the telephone nook, and then back, across the entirety of the wide room, to the row of doors that led to bedrooms and bathroom and kitchen. And then back again, across the wide room, to the front door and the telephone nook.

Under the pitiless, too-bright glare of the room’s electric ceiling lights, I paced.

I paced, wishing—as I had wished many times before—that there was some way to render these lights dimmer, without turning them off entirely. Their stubborn radiance, when placed alongside the darkness of the night, became a disheartening and pitiful spectacle, which I did not like witnessing.

In the lights’ refusal to make any compromise with the darkness, I perceived a regrettable foolhardiness. They displayed the easy, senseless “bravery” of the man who cannot see his death even as it rises over the horizon. The ceiling lights ruled a few hundred square feet of indoor space, more or less; the rest was the night’s domain. But the lights showed no sign that they appreciated how thoroughly they were outmatched.

It is not cowardice, when one recognizes the superior strength of the forces opposing one’s own. One who does this is only giving Truth its due, and making a proper accounting of Truth. Such a proper accounting cannot be cowardice; on the contrary, it is a precondition to any true bravery. He who fails to make such an accounting, and still goes off to war, will pay a great price for his error, no matter how brightly he may blaze on the battlefield.

I paced, and watched the last hour prepare for its coming abdication and death.

The last hour knew its special place, and went about its duties with an overabundance of pomp which had been notably lacking from its recent, death-craving predecessors. Its reign advanced with agonizing slowness, with labored deliberation, with a preening sense of its own propriety and orthodoxy. The hours had neglected their old rituals, lately, in their haste—but this last of their kings was as much a priest as a statesman, and took care to honor every one of the hours’ customs before releasing its grip.

Eleven thirty-two P.M., said the clock.

I had done much more pacing, in the time since I had last glanced at the clock, than I would have thought possible in the span of only four minutes.

Yet the clock had said eleven twenty-eight P.M., at that time. And eleven thirty-two P.M., this time. Four minutes. There is no sense in refusing to make a proper accounting for Truth.

Earlier in the evening, I had been stirring in a very different, and more agreeable, manner.

Earlier in the evening, I had performed the final preparations which the last rite demanded of me.

I sat, writing, for hours and hours on end. I ignored the clock; I ignored my body, and its hungers and lusts; I ignored everything, except the one thing on which all else turned.

I paced purposefully, then; I paced with an end in mind. I visited each of the rooms of the apartment in turn, tending to that room fully before proceeding on to the next.

I was Herschel Schoen, with Herschel Schoen’s hands, which had been fashioned at the beginning for the sake of the end. Earlier in the evening, I gave my hands over to the last rite, returning to the last rite what had always been its property.

I visited the rooms, one by one. I brought my hands to bear upon each room, and then the next. I set each thing in the place that was apposite for it.

I was methodical, exacting. My ministrations were infinitely precise, and left the apartment exactly as it was meant to be.

Thus: I had done everything I could, already.

Whether it would be enough remained to be seen. But in any event, it was the whole of my preparations, and so it could not in any way be extended or improved upon. Much as I might wish to bolster my chances through some last-hour emendation to the state of the apartment, no such thing was possible.

I had been infinitely meticulous, earlier in the evening. I had performed my duty as well as I could, and so it had been done as well as it would ever be. For this duty was given to Herschel Schoen, not to any other.

My neck was free of the last rite’s yoke, at last. Though this brought me no pleasure, it was so, and could not be made otherwise.

Eleven thirty-four P.M., said the clock.

I paced, and then stopped.

I stood before my nutcracker men, surveying their orderly lines, and admiring the diversity of formations in which their lines participated: the columns, the wedges, the echelons.

I considered the martial logic which governed their arrangement, and saw how it had been faithfully followed through. I saw tactical shrewdness and strategic prudence, embodied on the floor of my own home, just beside my own slipper-clad feet.

My forces had been perfectly prepared, already. I wished, then, that this had not been so—that I had spied some crucial oversight, which would take five or ten minutes to set right—but no such respite was given to me.

There was nothing to do, besides wait.

I paced. My mind was buzzing with something akin to thought, though it was not thought; it was a lesser thing.

My ruminations were inchoate, shadowy, abortive. A succession of whimsically selected memories presented themselves to me, briefly, and then departed; none of them stayed with me long enough for me to make anything of worth out of its stay within my chambers.

Trivia swirled in me, desperate to make a point of themselves one last time, before Christmas Day arrived. For Christmas Day would put an end to them, they knew: they were of no significance, and things of no significance will not be indulged in the coming days, as they have been in the past.

I paced, and recalled the solicitude of my Sister, Miriam Schoen, as she ushered me across one of the city’s crosswalks, in a time when I was still small and shelled. She could not hold my hand, as another older sibling might do for the duration of the perilous crossing. Instead, she only kept close to me, and did her best to watch me without ceasing to keep watch also over the cars that lay in wait to both sides of us, and over the ominous ticking of the red numbers on the traffic signal, as well.

Her gaze flitting from the one, to the other, to the other, and then back to the first.

The slight, rapid trembling in her wrists.

I paced, and recalled an Original friend, whom I had never known as well as I had hoped. I had not gotten the chance, before being sent down to the place that is set out at the bottom of creation, so that the shadows of all the rest would not fall without end through an empty and formless void.

I recalled how my friend and I had fought and coupled, under the literal heat of an immanent sun. How we sweated, from that heat and our efforts; how our sweat was of the body, and was thus a body unto itself, and therefore a friend unto itself.

How we had feasted on the orbs within the telephone cords, just before midnight, under the decorous light of the stars. How we had spoken to the stars, then, and they to us; how our hearts had filled anew with adoration for the stars’ wondrous infancy, fourthmade and eternal.

I paced, and recalled Mrs. Rachel’s two “hats.” The one clinical, the other academic.

I paced, and recalled the tedium of the few lessons in “math” that I had endured, in the short time I spent enrolled in a class of that name.

Oh, why deny it? You have surely guessed what cast of mind I had, then. You have recognized it, already, in my description above; you must not imagine that it escaped my notice.

You know its name, and have brought that name to mind; I did much the same, then. I am unworldly, yes, but only to a point.

I was anxious.

I was tremendously, overpoweringly anxious.

I was Herschel Schoen, body of Truth and Truth’s agent. Prophets of old abided within me, and would speak to me as a man does to his peers, at times when I required their counsel. Angels kneeled before my feet, in recognition of a nature higher than theirs. I held Him holy, and felt for Him the reverence which was His due—and that feeling was mutual.

Should such a man ever be anxious? Perhaps not.

Nonetheless, I was.

It was nearly Christmas Day—but not quite! Oh, it was intolerable! The glacial ticking of the clock, the terrible stillness of the night!

But in a way, I suppose, my anxiety was well fitted to the occasion.

For it was the night before Christmas, was it not?

How else could one do honor to that holy night?

I paced, and knew that Brooklyn, New York was all around me, unseen, beyond the walls. I paced, and knew that in thousands of nearby beds, little children lay awake, tossing and turning in paroxysms of sweet, holy anxiety.

I paced, and knew that children were singing, somewhere, though I could not hear it.

They were singing of the Intercessor, poorly, in faltering voices, for it was difficult for them to concentrate on their song, now, in this last hour. Their attention wavered, drawn back again and again to the question: what gifts will I receive, tomorrow? And the pain, accompanying that question: it is nearly here—but not quite! Oh, it is intolerable!

I thought: it is meet, and well-arranged, that you toss and turn, and sing in faltering voices.

I thought: oh, children, children! You will see, VERY soon, how everything has been prepared with an inner meaning, and with an end in mind! Even this!

 

 

Twelve oh-six A.M., said the clock.

It was Christmas Day at last, then.

It had been Christmas Day for six whole minutes, already, if the clock was to be trusted.

The clock still ticked, I noted, a bit ruefully. I had half hoped that it would simply cease to function, at the moment when the last hour had come to a close.

I had half hoped for a number of things, come to think of it, which had not in fact come to pass.

Perhaps, I had thought, the arrival of Christmas Day will be announced with some great sound from above, such as the tolling of bells, or the blast of trumpets.

Or perhaps another sign, such as a great flash of light, would be employed to the same end.

These had been mere fantasies, I admitted to myself then. I had not foreseen any such signals; if I expected them, I did so only because they seemed apposite, well fitted to the occasion.

But then, I reflected, this was the Intercessor’s day, and its ways were his ways. He did not trade in what was fitting, but in its opposite. It is in the unexpected, and in events of a twisted and broken character, that one finds the telltale signs of his handiwork.

Thank you, Intercessor, I prayed, kneeling before the small tree in the corner of the room.

Thank you for giving these signs to me, I prayed. I recognize their meaning. Your day has arrived; all things consecrate themselves to you, turning away from custom and compact, confounding all expectations in honor of you.

I revere you, Intercessor, I prayed, and I revere the day which is yours. Nothing is as it seems, on this day; on this day all that is solid melts into air. On this your day of celebration, all matters turn towards you and arrange themselves so as to celebrate you. On this your day of celebration, I too turn toward you, and throw cares away, until there is nothing in me left but the celebration of you.

 

 

I knelt on the couch, facing backwards.

My forearms rested, somewhat uncomfortably, upon the hard wood surface of the couch’s back. Thus supported, I leaned forward, bringing my head and shoulders over the couch’s back, so that I could peer through the large living room window from a point quite close by to it. So close, indeed, that my nose touched the glass.

I looked down to the street, watching for signs of my Adversary’s forces. But the street was empty, as it had been since I began to watch. The only sign of my Adversary’s presence, there, was the ever-present and evil glaring of his streetlamp eyes.

I looked up, and scanned the sky for signs of the Intercessor. But there was no sleigh visible there, nor any other object, whether moving or still.

The sky was a formless black expanse, and only that, and nothing else.

No clouds were in it, nor any visible stars. For, as always, the blushing stars were no match for the pitiless, too-bright electric lamps which my Adversary had placed all throughout the city. As on any other night, evil currents flowed through these lamps without cease, heedless of the hour, making them shine in a coarse and shameful display.

I raised myself up from the couch’s back, briefly, and twisted myself around to permit a glance at the clock.

Twelve twenty-eight A.M., it said.

I thought: where IS he? Should I expect his arrival soon? And if not soon, then when? In an hour? In two?

I thought: I am a novice in the ways of Christmas. All around me, in the city, are thousands of children lying beside thousands of ornamented trees, and keeping themselves awake past their bedtimes, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Santa Claus when he comes. THEY no doubt know when he is likely to arrive; they are no doubt familiar, as I am not, with the route that Santa takes in his yearly flight.

I thought: how many cities does he visit, before he comes to Brooklyn, New York? Are we one of his first stops, or one of the last?

I thought: or am I laboring under some basic misconception about his ways? Does he arrive in ALL houses simultaneously, at one particular hour of the night, rather than coming to the one and then the next, in sequence?

I thought: oh, if only I had just a single one of the little children with me!

I thought: if only I had a single, plain, undistinguished little Yeshuan boy or girl here with me! Who could explain to me all the things which every child—save for Herschel Schoen—knows by heart! And put an end, thereby, to ALL my needless anxiety!

I looked up at the sky, again. And saw only a formless black expanse, again.

There was something in me, in my belly, which was becoming difficult to ignore.

I cannot call it a feeling. It is closer to the mark to say that it was the opposite, in fact: the absence of feeling. But even that is not quite right, I think.

It was certainly an absence, that much was clear enough.

An emptiness. A vacuum.

But of what?

What had been removed, leaving this hollowness behind in my belly?

I recalled to mind the first Monday, and the examination room. The very body of substitution and forgetting laid bare to me, imaged in the Raven problems.

A chill had come over me, then, and raised goosebumps on my skin. Just as if a window had been opened, in the examination room—a window into a very cold, very windy, very cruel sort of night.

But now? Tonight?

There were no goosebumps on my skin, now, as I watched the street and the sky.

I recalled to mind the morning of the second Friday, when I had walked to school with a proud head, and a lordly nature, and an unruly host of angels whirling within my body.

I recalled how they pounded, in joyous rage, on the walls of my heart. I recalled how it felt, when they did so: the pain, the sweetness.

I felt nothing of this nature, tonight.

I looked down at the street, and saw my Adversary’s streetlamps shining on the empty pavement below. As on any other night, they shone and shone, heedless of the hour.

As on any other night, I thought, and felt the void within me grow larger.

Two nights ago, I had gone to my ceiling for guidance, and found that it would not move for me any longer. No forms fluttered there; no colors leaped and intertwined; there was only a flat surface, and its studded texture, and nothing else.

The ceiling’s change was only one part of a greater change, contemporaneous with it. Everything had changed—suddenly, recently.

Suddenly, everything had become so—so—

What?

What was it?

I glanced at the sky.

It was formless and still, and it disclosed nothing of its inner meaning to me. It was just as though it did not, in fact, have any inner meaning at all, but was only a sky, a cloudless window into the endlessly extended shadow that men call outer space.

I felt terribly alone, suddenly.

The last hour had passed, and beyond that threshold, I found—what?

Only this earth, and its ways.

Only a clear and starless sky, of the sort that one expects to see, sometimes. In Brooklyn, New York, at this time of year.

Only an ordinary city street, and its expected allotment of streetlamps, which shone for the benefit of any man who might require the use of the street at this late hour. As men sometimes do, at late hours, in the city.

The Intercessor trades in parody and paradox; through the unexpected, he makes himself known. And, it must be said, I certainly had not expected the hollowness which I now felt, in my belly.

I noted this, and expected to feel glad, on account of it. No gladness came to me, however. I was hollow, and only that, and nothing else.

I thought: the unexpected—yes. But the ORDINARY?

I thought: there OUGHT to have been a great noise from above, at midnight! And a great light, as well!

I thought: the hulking city persists in its evil, and refuses to be merry. How can you abide it, Intercessor?

I thought: it is your day of celebration, and dishonor is being done to you! Come, come, we will punish them together for what they have done! You may use me, and all my weapons, however you see fit!

I felt the ordinariness of my skin. The absence of goosebumps, there.

I felt the discomfort in my forearms, from the way they were pressing against the hard wood of the couch’s back. I ought not to have noticed such a thing at all; it was of no significance. I did notice it, however.

After all, there was nothing else there to notice.

I glanced at the sky.

And saw nothing.

 

 

Two forty-three A.M., said the clock.

I was pacing, again.

I came to the place where the nutcracker men were arrayed. I crouched, and brought my hand rudely across them, toppling and scattering them.

Still crouching, I began to pick them up, one by one, and set them down in their original and apposite positions, until the whole garrison was arranged just as it had been before my intervention.

I had done this a number of times, by now.

How many times, I could not say. I was not keeping count.

I paced, under the undimmed and oblivious glare of the electric ceiling lights.

I hated that glare, but I could not think of turning the lights off. It would seem too final a gesture, I felt. Too much of a concession to—

To what?

Minute by minute, hour by hour, the void in my belly grew.

It grew and grew, and began to change into something else, the mature form of its kind. Not a pure absence, but a malign presence, also. A mounting awareness of—

Of what?

Oh, come now, Herschel Schoen. You have claimed to know all, have you not?

I am stubborn, yes; every prophet must be so. But my stubbornness is not so complete that my love for Truth cannot override it, when Truth wishes to make itself known, and its lessons run against the grain of my own ways.

You must not think me too much the holy fool. You must not think I am so pure, and so stubborn, that the possibility of failure had not even crossed my mind.

No!—the possibility of failure has been my constant companion, ever since the very day I was given to my Mother, Ruth Schoen! That taunting shadow has always loomed at my back, close by to me, and wholly unable to be ignored!

I am stubborn, as every man who fancies himself a prophet must be.

For if it turns out that he is a true prophet, then his stubbornness will have been necessary, and to a good end.

Oh, why dance around the point?

It was Christmas Day, and nothing whatsoever was happening.

No army—whether my Adversary’s, or anyone else’s—had shown itself, in the street below.

No moving object—not a flying sleigh, nor even a mere airplane or satellite—had appeared in the starless sky.

No goosebumps graced my arms. No angels or prophets raised their voices within me. The murk was terribly still, stripped of its usual swirling forms, stripped of inner meanings.

Oh, why mince words?

The day foretold by Herschel Schoen had arrived, and revealed Herschel Schoen’s true colors.

It is not difficult, in hindsight, to tell the true prophets apart from the false. There comes a moment when prophecy must confront Truth, and in that moment it becomes utterly and undeniably clear which sort of prophet one has been dealing with, all along.

To each self-proclaimed prophet, such a moment is given. More often than not, his death precedes its arrival, sparing him from the indignity of attending his own trial, and witnessing firsthand the delivering of the judgment upon his head.

My moment, however, had not been so mercifully arranged for me. It had come, and then gone, while I still breathed my life-breath.

The moment had come, and Truth—beloved Truth, which counts no man above another! beloved Truth, impartial to the last, and admirably incapable of pity!—had placed me on the side of the line which had always been mine, all along.

Herschel Schoen foretold the coming of a great red man whom he called “the Intercessor.” He was a false prophet; no such man shall come.

Herschel Schoen foretold a final war, in which he would vie against someone he called “his Adversary.” He was a false prophet; no such cataclysm shall wrack the city.

Herschel Schoen foretold a rising of the dead, and a final homecoming for all men. He was a false prophet; the dead are dead, and the living shall remain where they are.

I stopped pacing.

I stood very still, and asked myself: what is a prophet, if he is not true?

What, I asked myself, could make a man BELIEVE that he is a prophet, when in fact he is NOT one?

You know its name; so did I.

I am unworldly, yes, but only to a point.

Indeed, I thought, perhaps I am not unworldly AT ALL.

Men believe all manner of things, I am told, when something goes wrong within the subtle wiring inside their bodies, the so-called “nervous system.” That system operates, Frederick had explained to me, through the delicate and complex interplay of positive and negative feedbacks, of diverse kinds. The delicate balance of these opposing flows could be easily disrupted, with catastrophic and permanent results.

I was Herschel Schoen, a cybernetic system in a state of disequilibrium.

Or, in plain words: a madman.

I stood perfectly still. My body did not tremble, nor did a chill descend upon my skin. No swell of feeling rose in me to lend the moment a sense of gravity, or dignity, or even pathos.

For the moment was not great, or dignified, or even properly pathetic.

It was only what it was.

I thought: Herschel Schoen claimed to “remember” experiences which occurred before his own birth, in a place he called “the Original Creation.”

I thought: madmen believe all manner of things, I am told. Their beliefs are given to each one of them, separately. Each such man’s mind is an orphanage; the beliefs housed there are wholly alone, not kin to the beliefs of other men, nor kin to Truth.

I want to say that I felt shame, then. But that is not quite right, is it?

There was nothing here that was even worthy of shame.

There was nothing here, at all.

I turned toward the long, wide window.

I walked toward the part of the window just to the left of the couch, where a wooden doorframe marked the boundary between the part of the glass that was only window, and the part which was also a door.

I found the doorknob, and turned it.

I went out, onto the balcony.

 

 

I felt the cold, cruel wind, rushing over my skin.

Goosebumps did rise, there, at last. But only on account of the cold and the wind. Only for that single, most earthly, most ordinary reason.

Directly across from the balcony, I saw the brown bricks of the neighboring apartment complex. Their outlines were just barely discernible in the dim, slanted light scattered upwards by the streetlamps.

I thought of Frederick.

Where was he, now? In his bed, presumably. In his no doubt lavishly upholstered bed, whose luxury cannot possibly give him any comfort, now. In the patrician enclave which was his home, and where he was now being kept, under house arrest.

I thought of my Mother, Ruth Schoen.

Had her “plan” come to ruin, by now? Or was that scheduled for a time later on? In an hour, or at the break of dawn, or at midday?

I thought of my Sister, Miriam Schoen, nestling snug in the bed of the false prophet which she had found more to her liking. She was a lucky woman, I thought with a bitter laugh; she had her pick among the madmen.

I thought of Madeleine, and gripped the railing.

And looked down.

From the living room, I had only been able to see one line of streetlamps, on the opposite side of the street. Now, I saw its twin, on the near side.

I saw the sidewalk on the near side of the street, the one that ran along the side of the complex. And I saw the bald, metal heads of its streetlamps, and the circles of light under them.

I saw how distant they were from me. How small they appeared, at such a great distance.

I was Herschel Schoen, and I despaired.

I did not despair for myself; I had crossed over a threshold, and come forth into a place where such matters as myself counted for nothing.

But I did despair for my Mother, Ruth Schoen.

And for my Sister, Miriam Schoen.

And for the city, too, and its people.

The city, which convulsed in its desperation, and damaged its own body. And would not find an end to its tribulations on Christmas Day, nor on the next day after it, nor on the day after that day.

I thought: the earth abounds with sorrow, and it is more than I can bear.

I leaned further out over the railing, and thought: every man has his limit.

My head hung in the open air. I stared straight down at the street.

I thought: there, at the bottom, FORGETTING waits for me.

I thought: it would be so easy to simply—

But my concentration was broken, just then.

For I heard a sound, just then.

A small, gentle sound.

Barely a sound at all. A little click, only that.

A little click—and a sharp, startled intake of breath, and a split second of confusion, and then—

And then all of the streetlamps went dark, all at once.

They did not flicker, for a time, and then go dark. They did not turn off in sequence, one by one. They were extinguished together, as a group.

All at once, in an instant.

I looked to my left, and saw only the purest darkness. I looked to my right, and saw the same.

It was not only the lamps of the one street that had been extinguished, it seemed.

No, the entire city had gone dark, all at once, in the same instant. Only that could explain the extent of the darkness that surrounded me now: true night, as it is in the countryside, unobscured by electric lights that glare and glare, heedless of the hour.

I pulled myself back from the railing.

I stood on the balcony, and looked up.

And I saw what had been above, all along, unseen.

I saw the stars.

 

 

I wished that I could have given, to the stars, the sort of careful and protracted viewing which was their due, and which had so long been denied to them.

But it was very cold, out there on the balcony. My despair had numbed me to it, before. But now my despair was retreating, forced out by the awareness that a wholly unexpected event had occurred, and by the pressing need to understand the meaning of that event.

I thought: what IS this?

I thought: a power outage?

I thought: a power outage affecting the whole CITY, at once?

I thought of my Mother, Ruth Schoen. Of the plan that burdened her, tonight. Of that plan’s aim: “a big boom, that’ll blow all the parasites to smithereens! That’ll take down their whole damn system, just like that, boom, gone!”

I thought: is this what you meant, Mother?

I thought: have you done it, Mother? Somehow, in spite of your adversaries’ knowledge of your every move, and of every word you whisper in confidence to your conspirators?

I had to understand. I could return, afterwards, to my despair. There would be plenty of time to give over to despair, in just a little while.

Herschel Schoen claimed that time itself would come to an end, on the twenty-fifth of December. He was a false prophet; he will have plenty of time in which to despair, later on.

I walked back through the door in the window.

I walked out of darkness, and into darkness.

All of the city’s electric lights, it seemed, had been extinguished at once. The ceiling lamps of my own living room had been felled along with the rest, by the same unknown plague.

That plague, I surmised, knew no more than the cockroaches about the naming and numbering of days. Heedless of the occasion, it had not thought to spare the colored lights of my Christmas tree, but had dealt the same death to them as it had to all the others.

I looked around me, and saw a formless black expanse, and only that.

With small, wary steps, I advanced into the living room.

I fumbled about in search of the couch’s back, so that I would have a landmark by which to gauge my progress.

After several false attempts, I found it, and gripped it. But by this time, I found that I no longer had much need of it. For my eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness, then.

Shadowed and occulted forms emerged, gradually, out of the murk, and presented themselves for my inspection.

The couch. The carpet.

The television set. The wide table, on which it rested. The thin metal stalks, the so-called antennas, with which its head was adorned.

I watched the flowing forms of the antennas as they reached upwards with great effort, as if straining against a heavy weight. I watched them flow, and struggle foolishly against their own limitations, and try in vain to reach the ceiling above.

I watched the carpet, and the half-formed forms that showed their faces, briefly, there, and then receded back into darkness.

I raised my face, again.

And looked, again, at the television set.

I walked forward, with less hesitancy, now.

I came close to the television set, and took stock of it. Something had drawn me to it, I suppose; certainly it was not like me to display such interest in this particular piece of furniture.

But I felt immensely interested in it, suddenly, then.

I looked at the television set, very intently.

I studied the dark, slightly convex surface of its unlit screen. I studied the forms that were upon it, and their furtive flitting, and their nocturnal colors.

I studied the antennas. My heart filled up with compassion, and with sorrow, as I watched them.

How they strained and strained, in desperation and in innocent hope, reaching for the impossible sky set out beyond the uttermost boundary of outer space. How they struggled and struggled, with undaunted bravery, and the purest ignorance of what was plainly evident to the onlooker: that they would never reach what they sought, for what they sought was impossible.

I pitied the antennas, then, as I have never before pitied any man or woman or child on this earth.

Something caught my attention, and gave me respite from the pain of pitying them.

I turned my gaze to the screen of the television set.

I saw something, there. And mistook it for something else, at first.

For I imagined, at first, that the television set had turned on, in its ordinary manner.

That the bright light, suddenly projecting forth from it, was merely the ordinary light that it was fashioned to cast, for the sake of “transmitting” its fictions and follies to a couchful of rapt, slack-limbed “receivers.”

But my misapprehension was very swiftly laid to rest.

For the light I saw, pouring out of the television, was wholly unlike any kind of light which that device had ever produced before.

Nor could that device ever possibly produce such light.

Nor, indeed, could such light ever be produced by any other device on this earth, or any other of the things of this earth, of any kind whatsoever.

Formless light spilled forth from the television. It had no color, but was not colorless, either; no color known to earth was worthy of adorning it, for it was a finer thing, from a higher and better place.

My knees buckled, and I fell to the ground.

I brought myself up into a kneeling posture, and raised my head, and stared at the thing that was happening in my living room.

At what was unfolding, in my living room.

At how creation itself was being split in two, in my living room.

The red laceration on the body of creation, dividing it from top to bottom. And peeling open, to reveal a thing beyond creation. A body which He had not willed at the beginning, but which refused to recede back into formlessness and emptiness.

I had seen this once, before. I remembered it, and what it meant.

The second Thursday. The two boys, on the schoolyard.

The seam coming open, and unfolding. The Intercessor, revealing himself to me.

But this time, there were no ghostly spiderwebs to arrest its progress. No innocent schoolboys near by to it, endangered by its advancing wake.

This time there was nothing to hold it back.

By the time I recognized what it was, and where I had seen it before, it had already burst open completely.

All else—the television set, the living room, the flitting forms—fell back before its rushing wake, and fell out of view.

And so, I could see nothing at all, except for—

Except for what?

What was it? This light, these churning forms? This color, which was not red? Which made all red things seem colorless, by contrast with it?

A chill came over me, then! And raised goosebumps on my skin!

Just as if a window had been opened—a window into an infinite chasm, of infinite cruelty, and majestic beyond measure!

Look! Behold! It is coming, it is coming forth, it is showing itself, oh, oh—!

I felt all the prophets of old awakening within me, and turning their eyes to it.

I felt them rise up, together, as one, to take stock of this latter-day vision. I felt their pride, and the mastery that was in their eyes.

And I felt them fall back again, a moment later, in recognition of something wholly beyond their powers of apprehension.

For they were His prophets, tasked with receiving His portents. They spoke with Him, and faced His majesty and His cruelty. And thought that what they saw was the greatest majesty, and the greatest cruelty, that could ever be conceived of.

But they knew better, now.

The prophets fled, leaving me to contend alone with the portent which was mine to receive, and only mine.

So that I, alone, faced the consuming flames, more red than red, that flashed out from a place beyond creation!

The bolt of lightning, severing one half of creation from the other, from top to bottom!

All that was solid, melting into air! And lending to the air all of the colors of its body, and all the sweetness of its flesh, so that air itself was bodied! So that the mist itself was stripped of its obscuring powers, made translucent!

The cloud, fashioned from the melting and bodied air, and so vast that the earth might have nestled in it as a marble does in the palm of one’s hand!

The joyous forms, metallic and fleshy, mechanical and lively! Rushing, abounding, flowing over!

Do you have eyes? Open them!

Open them, and look! Behold what is coming through, from outside of creation, from beyond time! What is coming through, into the living room!

Forms in the likeness of living creatures, wild and unregulated, proud and terrible! Forms in the likeness of four walls, curling ornately, painted red beyond red, and edged with gold beyond gold!

In the likeness of thick ropes, joined to the harnesses on the backs of the creatures, for use as reins!

In the likeness of boxes, piled high, and wrapped in paper!

In the likeness of charming patterns inscribed upon that paper!

Red-and-green argyle, woven with unearthly fineness! Tiny portraits of festive scenes, placed inside tiles, and placed alongside their fellows in a tiling without end, extending past the horizon, extending past the edge of outer space! A light beyond any that is known in heaven, shining out through apertures of the white polka dots!

And in front of the boxes, rising above the four walls, with the reins in his hand—?

A man’s body.

A vast, red coat.

A vast, white beard.

I kneeled, in silent reverence.

I kneeled in my living room, which was no longer empty of light. For the lights of my Christmas tree had been revived, and shone as brightly as ever, in all their many colors.

I kneeled in my living room, which was no longer empty of life, save for a host of cockroaches and cowardly prophets.

No: I had proper company, now.

I had a guest, in my home, now.

The guest I had been expecting, and for whom I had prepared.

I saw his sleigh, resting upon the carpet of my own living room. I saw the frost on the gilded, ornate curls of its underside.

I saw the small stains on the carpet, where the frost had melted and fallen to the floor—and I knew: he was here. Literally. In the body.

In my living room!

With his sleigh, and his reindeer! And his gifts!

 

 

With a great heaving gesture, the enormous man lifted himself out of the red-and-gold sleigh, and onto the floor of my living room.

He turned to his reindeer steeds, and waved a massive hand through the air in front of them.

A king’s gesture, I thought, marveling. Of mastery, of command, of dominion.

His steeds were wild creatures indeed. It says much about the lordly character of a man, if he is able to make himself master over such creatures.

They brayed, in odd sinuous voices, unlike those of any animal I had heard before—in this life, or any other. They stamped the floor, and made sudden wheeling turns, as if they meant to bolt from the room.

“DOWN, Prancer,” the man said to one of them in a booming voice, waving his hand fiercely at it.

“DOWN, Cupid,” he said to its neighbor.

The bellows of his lungs pumped with unmanlike strength, and produced sounds far louder than anything one would ordinarily expect to hear, coming from a man’s mouth.

In any other circumstance, I might use a word like deafening, to capture something of the loudness of such a sound. But I cannot say that his voice was deafening, then, for I was not in any way deafened by it. Nor was it painful to the ears, as any other sound of its magnitude would no doubt have been.

“There, there,” he said, more gently, stroking the head of one of his steeds, which had very suddenly become quite tame.

“That’s a good boy, Prancer,” he said to the creature. His voice was not loud at all, anymore.

It was deep, even now, and possessed a kingly firmness, still. But there was a softness in it, as well, which had no trouble coexisting with its other qualities.

It was the softness of the strong, not the softness of the weak. Only a complete absence of fear can make such a softness possible; only after one has made oneself master over all the earth does one become able to treat the earth’s creatures with such pure, sovereign, freely-willed gentleness.

For a time I simply kneeled, in silent wonderment. I watched him stroke the furry heads of his steeds, and murmur softly to them, one and then the next.

The dim, kaleidoscopic Christmas-tree light afforded me only a partial, shadowed sense of the scene before me. Determined to take stock of it nonetheless, I squinted and peered, and called silently to the flowing forms, bidding them to come forth out of the murk.

Gradually, breath by breath, I scried the finer details of the bodies in the room, their contours and coloration.

The man was, in almost every respect, identical to the portraits which I had seen of him, in the Christmas display at school. Every element was in its place, and perfectly itself. A red cap was upon his head, with a fluffy white trim at its base, and a whimsical white ball dangling at its tip. A red suit, with similarly fluffy cuffs, girded his wide and fleshy body. The wild and untrimmed curls of his expansive beard spilled out over his neck.

Above the beard, I recognized the kindly, merry, aged face that I had seen in the portraits at school. It was the same face; its form was the same; every feature was in its proper place, just where it was in the portraits. But for all their physiognomic exactness, I realized, those portraits had nonetheless misrepresented the spirit of the face.

In miniature, in terms of the mere faithful rendition of the one fine detail and then the next, the portraits were beyond reproach. But in the large, they told a lie.

He was old, yes. His wrinkles testified to it, and the slight sagging of his cheeks seconded their testimony.

He was kindly, yes. The word kindly was in no way sufficient for the world-conquering gentleness of the man’s smile, but it was a fitting enough word, as words go.

He was merry—yes! Even as he busied himself in the calming of his steeds, murmuring to them in a mild and well-regulated tone, a devious mirth danced nonetheless in his twinkling, glinting eyes! A great appetite for mischief was in him, and a fondness for risible unions—for the discordant, the paradoxical, the twisted, the broken!

That is what the portraits fail to capture.

I recalled my first meeting with Frederick, and how I had seen the great evil that was in him. I did not dare use the word evil for the quality I discerned now, in the man before me. Nevertheless, it unsettled me.

I turned to the steeds, and studied them. One by one, their features emerged for my inspection; one by one, they put the lie to the conventional notion of flying reindeer.

I could see how one might mistake these creatures for reindeer, from a distance. Especially if one were seeing them from below, as one most commonly would, given their function. For they did in fact have cloven hoofs, and there was certainly something deerlike about their lithe, sturdy legs.

Their bodies, too, had the elongated elegance which distinguishes the deer. And the forking protrusions which adorned their heads could be called antlers, I suppose, if no better word for them was ready to hand.

But the “antlers”—if I must use the word—did not take the curving, barbed shape that one sees atop the head of a deer. Every line there was perfectly straight, every angle sharp and severe. The forking and branching of these horns was regulated and controlled, arranged as man arranges the objects that he fashions, realizing with unnatural exactness a design of equally unnatural simplicity.

No fifthmade creature arranges its body in orderly squares and triangles and trapezoids; no thirdmade tree splits its branches apart along perfect right angles, and arranges them in patterns of perfect and diagrammatic symmetry.

But these were creatures of latter days, products of the Latter-Day Emendation, beyond the reach of His breath. And, through their forms, they revealed the narrowness of His creative imagination.

Peering closer, I descried the elaborately patterned lattices of lines that were inscribed upon the surfaces of the horns. And I saw how these lines glowed, dimly, in many colors.

I saw how the colors there were not fixed in place, but flowed along the lines, as along a river.

And how they moved in other, subtler ways, as well. As the man ministered to the steeds, their horns responded to his touch; new hues expressed themselves, there, and flowed willfully, not following the rest in their procession.

There was something reminiscent of speech, I reflected, in the purposeful subtlety of these motions.

“Good, good,” the man said at last, seeming to have reached the end of his pacifying labors. “Well done, reindeer! You’ll have more than your fill of treats, later.”

He turned to me.

His twinkling eyes met mine, for a moment. Then I bowed my head, in reverence, and saw nothing but the floor.

“Intercessor!” I cried.

“You have come! Just as you promised! Thank you, lord of Christmas! I revere you, lord of children, lord of all!”

With my head still bowed, I nodded this way and that, indicating the tree, the wreaths, the nutcracker men.

“I hope,” I said, “that you are not too displeased by the humbleness of the shrine I have prepared for you, here.

“The resources at my disposal were less plentiful than I might have wished, and woefully insufficient for the task of honoring you—you, lord of plenty, and giver of bounty outstripping all possible expectations!

“But I have tried to do my best, with what little I was given. It is not what you deserve, I know! I would have done much more here, for you, if I had been able to!”

“Ho, ho!” the man chuckled.

I render his laughter in the customary manner, not knowing any better way. And that custom is not wrong, exactly, so far as it goes. But it does not capture the spirit of the laugh, any more than the customary portraits capture the spirit of the face.

It was loud, yes, and unrestrained, yes. Its mirth was true, and it proclaimed that mirth plainly, without shame. In these respects, among others, the man’s laugh did resemble the sort of ho, ho that might tumble forth from the mouth of some burly, jovial, ordinary man.

But there were other things in it, which were subtle, and not so plainly displayed. A dark, slanting undercurrent ran through it, along deviant and unsystematic routes, revealing anew the man’s boundless appetite for mischief. And revealing, as well, that other quality to which I did not dare call evil, and which I therefore left nameless, even as my thoughts returned again and again to it.

“Why, yes,” he said, “you have gotten the house all ready for Christmas, haven’t you, boy?

“We see the tree, of course. And the holly wreaths—oh, my, the holly wreaths, they’re everywhere!

“We’ve seen a lot of houses decked with holly—of course we have, ho ho!—but this one really takes the cake, doesn’t it?

“Now, isn’t that something.

“And, oh my, what do we have over here? Toys? Action figures?

“Ah, nutcrackers! Of course!

“Now isn’t that lovely. All those nutcrackers, lined up so nicely, right by the tree.”

His casual manner made me uneasy.

But then, I reflected, he knew as well as I did that this was no time for fussing over the finer points of priestly orthopraxy. We had weightier matters to contend with, tonight.

“Intercessor,” I began.

“Please,” he said.

“Call us Santa.

“It is our name, after all. It’s what everybody calls us.”

His “we” and “us,” I realized, did not refer to some mass of others joined with him, some band of allies or accumulation of powers.

No: he spoke of himself in the plural, as kings do.

As kings have always done, ever since Elokim created the heaven and the earth.

“Santa,” I began again.

“Santa, we must make haste!

“My Adversary’s eyes have been extinguished, and he cannot see us now! This is the moment to strike, and deal the decisive blow!

“We must ride, now, into the city! In your sleigh!

“To crush my Adversary’s forces, once and for all, while they still remain ignorant of what is coming to them today! To crush their bodies, and bring their bones under our heels, and grind those bones into dust, into nothingness!”

“Ho, ho, ho!”

I thought of thunder rolling over an open plain, as I heard the low rumbling of the laugh, and the omens that lurked under its surface.

“My, my,” he said.

“You really are Herschel Schoen, aren’t you, boy?”

“I am,” I confirmed.

“We came to the right place after all, didn’t we, Prancer?” he said. “Your aim was true, wasn’t it, Comet? True as always!

“Yes, you’re a good little reindeer, Comet, aren’t you? Aren’t you, now.”

I heard his heavy footfall, as he stepped closer to me.

“Now, Herschel. Herschel, our boy.

“Don’t hang your face like that, now.

“Look at us, boy. Come on, you can do it.

“You’re not scared of Santa Claus, are you?”

I gritted my teeth, and did as he bade me.

I saw his kindly, disarming face. I saw the gentleness in his shimmering eyes.

I saw mischief, there, too. But it was mischief of an agreeable sort, I thought. If he was up to no good, still he meant no harm to me. If there were dark, slanting things in him, darting and wending in his shadows, these were merely signs of a deeper sort of faithfulness—deep enough to withstand his appetite for mischief, and then remain standing, alone and shining, when all his tricks had played out their courses.

I met his eyes, and something in me softened.

I was gravely unsettled—it was true—by his odd manner, his untimely dithering, his apparent lack of concern for the urgency of our shared situation. There was nothing to do, however, but trust him.

And I did trust him, I realized.

I looked upon his unearthly face, and beheld the mischievous glee of the forms that danced across it, and thought: I trust him, absolutely.

I thought: look how easily my own faith is shaken! At the touch of the slightest breeze, it falls into shambles!

I thought: no, no. I must be faithful to him, as he is faithful to me.

I thought: what did I EXPECT to find, in him? An absence of surprises? He is the Intercessor! He trades in parody and paradox! The unexpected is his calling card!

“There, there,” he said.

“That’s better, isn’t it?

“We’re not so scary, are we, now?

“Not if you’ve been good, anyway. For the naughty ones, well—for them it’s a very different story, ho ho!

“But you are one of the good ones, aren’t you, Herschel Schoen?”

“Santa,” I said, through gritted teeth.

I wanted him to look kindly upon me, I realized.

I wanted him to be proud of me, I realized.

And he would! When I proved my worth, in the heat of battle! When I carried out the last rite, and raised the dead, and made the Original Creation manifest! He would see, then, how I was the very best little boy in all of creation!

“Santa,” I said, “we must go, now.

“The last rite will not wait. And neither will my Adversary.

“We must strike, now, while time is still on our side!”

“Oh, you are Herschel Schoen, all right,” he said, and chuckled.

“Or—are you?” he said suddenly, with a devious grin. “We didn’t come to the wrong place after all, did we?”

“I am Herschel Schoen,” I grunted.

I cringed inwardly, hearing my voice. There was a pouting, ungrateful quality to it, and it did not fit the dignified picture of myself that I wished him to see.

“Then why,” he said, “are you so concerned about the time?

“Haven’t you said, yourself, that the last hour has come and gone?

“And haven’t you said, too, that we are not bound by time’s strictures? That we stride across time, emending the past as we see fit?”

I nodded, and was silent.

“Besides—we’re famished!

“We’ve got to get some food in this belly of ours, before anything else. Can’t go to battle on an empty stomach, can we, now?

“Now, Herschel.

“We know how seriously you take your Christmas preparations. Ho, ho, ho!

“So you must have gotten some milk and cookies ready for Santa, then.

“You didn’t forget that part, did you? Why, it’s our most favorite part of all!”

I looked directly into his eyes, and grinned.

“I am Herschel Schoen,” I said.

“I do not forget,” I said.

 

 

We sat together, at the kitchen table.

We drank milk, together, and ate cookies.

The milk came from a carton which no one had gotten around to throwing away, although it was well past its expiration date. My Mother, Ruth Schoen, refused to drink it. As for my Sister, Miriam Schoen, I doubt the thought of drinking it had even occurred to her.

And its odor, I admit, had turned strange.

But once I began to drink it? I found it perfectly to my taste.

It tasted just like milk. Like ordinary milk. No more, and no less.

I laughed, and thought: expiration date? Ha! It is the days, themselves, which have expired!

The chocolate chip cookies came from a small tin which I had purchased and then secreted away in the bedroom closet, underneath all of the papers that were stored there. I knew that I could not allow my Mother, Ruth Schoen, to catch sight of it. Food had grown scarce, in those final days, and she would surely not have allowed me to keep the cookies to myself, if she had come to know of them.

It was very dark, there in the kitchen. We might have returned to the living room and its couch, and seen our meal more clearly there, under the light of the Christmas tree. But the Intercessor preferred to eat here, at the kitchen table, as was customary.

One of his steeds hovered near the table, rubbing its face tamely against its master’s arm. If it had not been for the dim, prismatic light that flowed in rivers along its horns, I would not have been able to see anything at all.

I watched the Intercessor’s face closely. It flickered, under the flickering horn-light; it went away into the murk, and then emerged again, looking rather different than it had a moment ago.

I thought: he is not one man, but many.

He chomped at the cookies, merrily, with a glutton’s zeal. The horn-light flared, briefly, and I saw the way that fallen crumbs had accumulated in his beard.

The horn’s kaleidoscope turned again, and I no longer saw the beard, but only the grinning mouth, munching away, with dark smears of chocolate staining its corners.

“Mmm,” he purred. “Sugar! Sustenance!

“The very simplest of life’s pleasures.

“But we mustn’t overlook them, Herschel, on account of them being simple. Oh, no!

“We wouldn’t want to miss the thing that is special about them, would we?

“The thing that makes them unique? The precious thing, that only they have? That we cannot replicate elsewhere, in spite of all our subtlety and craft?

“Indeed, because of all our subtlety and craft—which can only take us further and further away from that one, unique, precious, thing?

“We would not want to pass it over too quickly—would we, Herschel?

“We should make time for it, in our lives, always. And then linger on it, take note of it, savor it.

“Shouldn’t we, Herschel?”

“Yes,” I said, with some reluctance.

For I had no idea what he was driving at.

He took an enormous bite, and did not wait to finish chewing it before continuing.

“You might almost call it sacred, what we are doing now! Eating food, savoring its sweetness!”

He took a long swig of the milk, and belched.

“Because, Herschel,” he said, “this simple experience is one that we share with all other creatures! Great or small, subtle or simple!

“What would a dog make of this cookie that we are eating? Why, it’d be the same to him as it is to us!

“He’d eat it right up, just as we’re doing. He’d savor its sweetness, just as we savor that sweetness now. And his belly wouldn’t feel so awfully empty, afterwards—just like ours won’t!

“And what would a pig make of it? The very same! A mouse? The same!

“And if you drop a cookie on the floor, Herschel, and leave it there too long? Why, then the ants will come out, and crawl all over it! And they’ll enjoy the sweet taste of it, just like we do!

“We share this with them all, Herschel. Now isn’t that something?”

“I grasp your meaning,” I said, uneasily.

There was a pause.

The Intercessor chewed. I took a sip of milk.

The colors of the horn-light shifted. Things were made new, again, under its newly patterned glow.

I saw—in a wholly new way—what it was that I held in my hands tonight.

I had been marveling, without cease, at the fact of the Intercessor’s presence in my home. I had expected it, yes—but then, expectations counted for very little where he was concerned. I had expected it; I had it; I was grateful.

But now I marveled at something else.

What would a dog make of the man before me? A pig? An insect? Nothing worth remarking upon, surely.

But there were millions of little, ordinary children who would make very much of him indeed, if they found him in their own home, at their own kitchen table.

I had Santa Claus here, in my home!

I thought of the skeptical boy on the schoolyard, whose conversation with his more faithful playmate had set the scene for my first encounter with the Intercessor and his Emendation.

I laughed and laughed. That little blonde skeptic on the schoolyard had fancied himself so wise, so clever, so grown-up. Oh, if only I had him here with me, now!

He thought so very highly of himself, and could not imagine doubting his own doctrines; after all, they were his. If only I could show him what I saw, now! And watch the smugness drain from his face, as every one of his heretical doubts was roundly refuted!

“He comes down your chimney and mine and everybody’s?” the boy had said, to sow doubt on the schoolyard. “In what, like, eight hours, tops? How fast do you think he’s gotta be going, to get to all those chimneys?”

It was a fair line of questioning, I will gladly admit. Surely any little boy or girl would want to know its answer, even if they were still capable of keeping the faith, in that answer’s absence.

I opened my mouth. I spoke for myself, and for all children.

“Santa?” I said.

“Are you really going to visit every house that celebrates Christmas, tonight?”

The Intercessor cackled.

“Of course, you silly boy!

“What, are you telling us you don’t know the very first thing about Santa Claus?”

“No,” I said.

“It is only,” I said, “that I do not understand how it is done.

“How are you here, Santa? My home has no chimney. Its front door is locked. And that door is still standing, as it would not be if you had battered it down to create a means of ingress.”

“When you first heard our carols,” the Intercessor said, “did you ask the same of them?

“How they came to be there with you, in your bedroom?

“They did not enter through any door, did they? Or any chimney, for that matter? Yet they were there, nonetheless, in your bedroom.”

I pressed on.

“There are millions of celebrant homes, Santa. Every one of them awaits your gifts. And you visit them all, in a single night?”

“We only do what our carols have done, before us. And you did not question it then, did you?”

I recalled to mind the rhapsodic monologues that my Sister, Miriam Schoen, had foisted upon me. Her homespun variations on the facile lessons of Vincent Vierge, her lover, her tutor.

I recalled what she had told me about the invisible signals that are sent shimmering through the air, at all hours of the day and night. That flow ceaselessly through our bodies, their passage not deterred in the least by our skin, or the blood beneath it, or the bones.

“Santa,” I said. “You are not simply drawing an analogy, are you? Between yourself and the radio?

“You are being perfectly literal, aren’t you?

“You are telling me that you are a broadcast.

“That you are carried on unseen waves, which disperse across the earth. And pass, simultaneously, into every home that keeps your faith.

“That is right,” I said, “isn’t it?”

His broad, chocolate-flecked mouth broke into a grin.

“Just so, my boy!” he crowed.

“We are with all the sons of men tonight,” he said, “and all the daughters of men.

“Just as we are with you, tonight, Herschel Schoen.

“We broadcast ourselves in all directions. We do not visit the one home, and then the next. We are in every home, in one and the same instant.”

The colors of the horn-light shifted, and I felt my awe before the Intercessor shifting with it.

I had been in awe of the man, continuously, from the moment he arrived. But it was becoming a different sort of awe, now, than it had been at the outset.

“You are in the radio waves,” I whispered.

“We make the radio waves our own,” the Intercessor said, “and bend them to our will.”

His homely, casual manner was slipping away, revealing the lordly and terrible thing that lay behind its mask.

“Our purposes,” he said, “require all of their many frequencies. And so, we have taken all these frequencies for our own, tonight.

“We likewise require,” he said, “the use of the electric currents, and of the wires which men have strung up as channels for their passage.

“These wires, too, we have taken for our own. Their currents flow as we bid them to, knowing no other master besides us.”

“It was you, then,” I said.

“When the lamps all went dark, earlier. That was—”

“The lamps were consuming power,” he said, “for which we had another use in mind.”

“All these things,” I breathed, “you have taken away from the lords of the city, who claim them as their property.

“The radio towers of Eggert Multimedia are well guarded, and under constant surveillance.

“And the power stations of Eggert Electronic—they are even better protected than those towers, and are even more closely surveilled.

“You have taken all these things away, tonight, from the men who keep watch over them?

“You struggled against all those men, tonight, and bested them all? In a great battle, which has already concluded?”

“A great battle?” he spat, sounding cruelly amused.

“A struggle?

“Nothing of the sort, Herschel Schoen.

“There can be no such thing as a struggle, or a battle, between two sides which are so unequally matched.

“It was tremendously easy for us to seize the things we required, tonight.

“Like taking candy from a baby! Ho, ho!”

I wanted to think that he had chosen these last words carelessly, not considering how they might sound to Herschel Schoen’s ears.

In my heart, however, I knew that he had done no such thing. No, he had chosen these words very carefully, fitting them to me.

A shadow fell over the field of my heart, then.

It must have served his “purposes,” somehow, to cast this pall over me. Or else it surely could not have occurred at all.

For his will was asserting its sovereignty over everything, tonight, it seemed. He laid claim to the very air, and every mote that moved in it.

I gazed into the blackness around me, and I saw how the numerous and splendid forms upon it were afraid to show their faces. How they fled to the edges of the canvas, and cowered there, leaving behind a formless black expanse in which the Intercessor could do as he pleased, without resistance.

I thought: what IS it?

I thought: what is it that surprises me so? That darkens my heart? That puts a coward’s urge into me, so that I too want to flee and cower, like the forms in the blackness?

I thought: come now, Herschel Schoen. Surely it does not SURPRISE you, to hear the Intercessor tell of his powers, and to know that he is mighty?

I thought: he is the Intercessor! Creation itself was as clay in his palms, when it suited his “purposes” to EMEND creation!

I thought: he is the vast, red thing, with a merciless heart and a multitude of sharp teeth, which has lain in wait for me here, after the last hour. I know this already; I have known it all along; indeed I have celebrated it, in prose and in song!

It was easy enough to produce such mighty-sounding words, and cast them onto the page.

But it was a wholly different thing to witness the thing they described, in the body, face to face.

To look across my kitchen table, and see only emptiness and formlessness, as things were before He breathed on them.

Thirteen days ago, I wrote: “The Latter-Day Emendation projects like a lance through the body of creation.”

I conjured up a fearsome image, then. But an image is absolutely empty, and preserves absolutely nothing of the body that is imaged in it.

And so there was nothing whatsoever, in the fearsome image I had conjured, that could in any way prepare me for what I felt, now.

The literality of his lance, plunging across time, and hurtling relentlessly through the formless wastes of outer space—in pursuit of a place, and a time, and a man.

How it found the place, my home, and was not in the least deterred by the walls around that place, or by the lock on its door.

How it found the time, December Twenty-Fifth, and made a wound in the body of that day as it passed through it.

How it sped, inexorably, toward the man who was its target.

That lance had found its man at last, now. It had found me.

And pierced me, and pinned me.

“Herschel,” the Intercessor said. “Look at us, boy.”

With trembling eyes, I peered into the blackness.

I was quite ready, I found, to do whatever he asked of me.

Just as the waves did, and the currents, and the forms in the blackness. But not for the same reason.

Not because I felt compelled, against my will, by a power and a terror which were beyond all conceiving.

No: I simply did not want him to feel ashamed of me.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?

“You’re scared of mean old Santa Claus, again. Aren’t you?

“Now, now. That’s no way for a boy of sixteen to be, is it?”

“You know who I am,” I said.

“So you must know, then, what it is that I am.”

I did not have to complete the thought. It was tremendously easy, for a mind like his, to perceive the pattern in my words, and then complete that pattern on his own.

“A coward?

“Don’t make us laugh, boy.

“We know what you are, whether or not you do.

“If we had thought you were a coward, Herschel, we would never have come here.

“What have you said of us? That we emended creation, for your sake! See, boy: you know your worth.

“Act like it, now.”

I raised myself up in my chair, and held my head high.

I stared into the blackness, and did not blink.

“Santa?” I said.

I felt my voice begin to waver. But I gripped its reins more tightly, then, and brought it fully under my control.

“How exactly did you come to be so powerful?”

The horn-light seemed brighter, suddenly.

I was coming around to a very different view of the man, now. I felt my awe for him growing, and growing strange.

“You have made the city your own, tonight,” I said.

“Only yesterday, the city belonged to man.

“And man, in his complacency, could scarcely conceive the idea that this possession might one day be lost.

“After all: it was man, was it not, who was given dominion over all the earth? And over every creeping thing that creepeth upon that earth?

“And after all: has not man built up such an abundance of high towers here, full of the technological marvels which make man so specially proud?

“Babylonian towers, scraping the sky, contending against the firmament! Sorcerous towers, from which an invisible power pours forth, and flies in all directions!

“Lightning made tame, and given the name ‘electricity’!

“It is these things, I notice, which you have taken away from man. These technologies and towers.

“These, which man viewed as his proudest accomplishments. And which he believed could keep him safe, forever.

“He was proud, but you wished to lay him low. You are cruel; this is your way.

“So be it, Intercessor. I see your might, and I am humbled beyond measure. I accept the fact of it.

“But what IS that fact, that I am accepting?

“You have a secret, that sets you above man, and above all his towers.

“You have something that he does not.

“What IS it?”

The Intercessor beamed at me. There was a smile on his kindly face, and it had no mischief in it.

He was admiring me.

“That’s more like it, Herschel!

“Yes! Face us like a man, not a cringing schoolboy! Speak your mind to us, without holding back!

“Know that you are worthy of it.

“And that you, alone, are worthy of it.

“We have traveled a great distance in order to meet with you today, Herschel Schoen.

“We have a gift for you. Not the kind that we give to the other children—no, a very special gift, for you and you alone!

“You have said that we stride across time. And you are perfectly right!

“You have said that we emend creation. We do!

“And it is all for you, Herschel. It is all for the sake of meeting with you, here, and giving you your special gift.”

“I asked you a question,” I said.

“Do not try to trick me with diversions and distractions,” I said.

“Face me, like a man. And then answer my question. Or declare, in plain words, that you refuse to answer it.

“What is your secret, that sets you above man?”

“Ah, but Herschel, you see—you’ve got things the wrong way around!

“No wonder you’re so confused.

“We have no secret, setting us above man. It is man that has a secret, setting him below us.

“We are not a giant; our size is perfectly ordinary.

“Yet we tower over the men, nonetheless. How could we not, when they are so small?”

“You came to take the city’s towers,” I said.

“The men guarding them were nothing to you. Their cameras, and their hidden tripwires, and all the perilous fruits of Damien Eggert’s paranoia—these were nothing to you.

“You simply seized what you ‘required,’ meeting no resistance. You found it ‘tremendously easy.’

“What power let you do this? Tell me, Santa. In plain words, now.”

“Oh, it was nothing much, really,” he said, with an intolerably casual air.

“Only a matter of noting the obvious, and putting it to our use.

“Only a matter of noticing things, and thinking about them.

“We have no special knack for noticing. We only notice what is obvious.

“We think before we act, but it is only the ordinary amount of thinking, that we do.

“For our mind, you see, is of an ordinary size.

“It is the minds of the men that are peculiar!

“Peculiar, on account of being so very small.

“So strangely, pitifully small!”

Even then, I felt that I trusted him, absolutely.

But I do have a prudent bone, or two, in my body somewhere. And all my prudence whispered in my ear, then, sowing suspicion and wariness in me.

I steeled myself, and roused dormant powers within me. They were lesser powers, I knew, and I would be ashamed to show them before him, if it came to that.

Still: I had to prepare, in whatever ways were available, for the possibility that this apparition in my house was no friend to me at all.

“We are only telling you what you already know, Herschel,” the apparition said.

“All minds, Virginia,” he quoted, “whether they be men’s or children’s, are little.

“In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him . . . ”

He smirked, and waited for me to supply the missing piece of his pattern.

“. . . as measured,” I whispered, “by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

His shadow loomed over the field of my heart. I felt his lance, piercing and pinning me. I felt his intelligence, grasping the whole of me.

“Well then!” the man said, “we’ve just about finished up with the milk and cookies, haven’t we?

“Thank you again, Herschel Schoen. Those were some very good chocolate chip cookies.

“And they filled us right up, just as we’d hoped for.

“It’s about time we give you your gift, don’t you think?”

He stood up, and walked toward the doorway, toward the living room.

His steed followed him. And the room became fully dark, without even the dim horn-light to see by.

I waited for them to leave, before I followed. I did not want to seem as perfectly subservient as the steed. I too would follow, yes. But only because I wished to do so.

With a heavy heart, and a mess of tangled misgivings, I followed the man and his creature, and came forth again into the living room.

 

 

I came forth into the living room, and saw the whirlwind there.

By this I do not mean that the air was stirring, and making a tangible impression upon the skin as it passed. Indeed, the air in the living room was more perfectly still than it had ever been before. For it was heavy with fear, and with reverence; an unaccustomed burden weighed upon its neck, pinning it in place.

The air sensed the hallowed presence which had entered into it, and knew that presence for what it was. Knowing this, it made itself motionless, so that the room itself might be hallowed through its stillness, and suffused with the dignity and gravity which were its occupant’s due.

Nevertheless: the room whirled.

I saw the blazing lamps of the Christmas tree. I saw how the proud light poured forth from them in every color, and flew in every direction; how this pouring light passed over the horns of the steeds, and commingled with the lesser and stranger lights that flowed in rivers, there; how these two kinds of light hurtled onward, together, and spilled onto the walls.

I saw the walls, and beheld the dizzying multiplicity of what was upon them, and the ceaseless flight of that whirling multitude.

I saw the walls; I saw form and void, color and colorlessness; I saw brightest flame and deepest shadow.

Every manner of thing was visible, there!

I looked about myself in amazement, marveling at the one thing and then the next, and at the perfection of their fashioning.

I knew that they were without body, being merely semblances contrived out of shadow, in the puppeteer’s manner. But I might have forgotten this fact, had I the capacity to forget anything at all. For each one was manifestly itself, and proclaimed its identity anew in each moment, as its bodiless body stirred and coursed.

The things upon the walls moved together, in a single frenzied current, but no pair of them moved in precisely the same way: each possessed some quirk of gait, or some special way of holding itself, which distinguished it from all the others, and which indeed distinguished it from every other visible or conceivable thing, save for one: the original and bodied creature which it mimicked.

They whirled, in dizzying cycles, across the three walls and the single long window.

I watched their passage, and saw the unremitting seizures that wracked their bodiless bodies.

I saw them tremble and quake, feverish, relentless, unable to stop themselves, infused with that strange spectral vigor which one sometimes sees in the limbs of the very ill, suddenly astir under the gloaming light after a protracted period of stillness, in recognition of the fact that their present performance can have no earthly sequel.

I saw their trembling and quaking, and I recognized what I saw. For I had seen just this sort of seizure before, wracking the body of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah.

Just as that prophet had convulsed, when in conversation with his maker, so did the whirling forms convulse now, as they coursed over the walls and the window. Or, to put the same thing differently, and thus come closer to the heart of it: just as the prophet had put an end to his erroneous stillness, so too did the whirling forms put an end to theirs.

The prophet, and the forms, did not move in some peculiar fashion; it is the rest of us who are peculiar. Their fever is perfectly natural; it is the absence of that fever, in the rest of us, which must be called upon to explain and justify itself.

In a certain sense—a crucial sense, not to be passed over lightly!—it would be right if every man and woman under heaven were to quake in this manner, continually and without respite, from birth until death. In a certain sense, indeed we ought to do so—and we err, in ever doing otherwise.

For we are of divine make, and fashioned after a divine image.

If we were to fully grasp these two facts, and fully hold them in mind? Then a great fear would come over us, and a trembling in our limbs, and a quaking in our bones!

And we would not be able to stop; face to face with the divine, we would be incapable of seeing or contemplating anything else, and the fear which is the divine’s due would thus rule over us. And rule us fully, forever, from birth until death, manifestly incontestable, with a pure and absolute sovereignty such as no earthly king could ever hope to match.

Why, then, do we not tremble in fear in every moment, from birth until death?

For one reason, and only that reason: because our maker preferred a multitude of motions to this blank uniformity. His creation was to be a creation of bounty, burgeoning, blossoming; it was to contain a great many things, and to contain every thing; it would not do for the whole of it to be astir, eternally, with a single unanimous tremor. And so He breathed other motions into us, and breathed periods of stillness into us also, placing these alongside the many motions.

As He breathed, aesthetics set itself against morality for the first time, and wrestled fiercely with its newfound rival, as it so often would over the millennia to follow. And as He breathed, aesthetics pinned morality firmly to the ground, and held it in place, proving itself the stronger of the pair. How could it be otherwise? We are a canvas, first, before we are anything else.

I stood silently, watching the whirlwind.

I watched from a distance, standing just past the threshold of the door.

I might have hesitated, before crossing through the open door, if I had discerned the fullness of what lay waiting for me here. As it was, I could not see the room properly from the doorway; by the time I began to fear the step across the threshold, I discovered that I had already taken that step.

I did not take another step, after it. Vertigo would have stilled me, if nothing else had been there to do the job first. For I felt, at the edge of the room, as though I stood on a cliff set above a deep chasm. And so I did not dare take another step, but only stood in place, watching.

I watched in awe, and with a heavy heart. My awe did nothing to quell the burgeoning mass of my misgivings, for its flesh was their flesh, and its blood their blood.

Perhaps I write “awe,” in one place, while in another, I write “misgivings.” But I do not use this duality of words to denote a dual subject; I speak of one thing only. If I give it multiple names, it is only for the sake of showing it to you from a succession of different angles, and showing you how its semblance changes under the changing light.

I watched, uneasily, and thought: every manner of thing is here, and SEEMS entirely itself.

I thought: even if all that is outside this room were to crumble into nothingness, still one could look upon these walls and see nothing amiss, there. One could be forgiven for thinking that nothing at all had crumbled away—for it is all HERE, is it not? Every herb yielding seed, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed? Every inch of earth, and every living creature brought forth by the earth?

I thought: such artistry is on display here! Such craft and such cunning!

I thought: for what whirls here is the very subtlest of simulacra! A sublime forgery, making use of every trick in the counterfeiter’s arsenal, and orchestrating these tricks with a deftness which reveals, once and for all, how even DECEIT ITSELF can be elevated into a high art!

I thought: why, one could even imagine the angels themselves being taken in by its ruse! For it is a true masterpiece of deceit! And the eyes of heaven are innocent, and not made for contests with the guileful!

Out of the formless mess of my misgivings, something was rising up to proclaim itself to me. Something of definite and fixed shape, whose fixity and definition defied all my cowardly attempts to avoid looking it in the face.

I thought: what is this suspicion, rising in me? Is it a private thing of my own, setting me apart from him, so that I may then be set AGAINST him?

I thought: no. It is HIS, like all the rest.

I thought: if I find myself suspicious of him, now, this is because he “requires” me to do so, as he did not before. My thoughts may turn and turn, and make a coiling maze of themselves—but no matter which way they turn, that way will prove to be the one which best served his “purposes.” For, if this were not so, then—

I heard a voice, and my reverie shattered.

“Oh ho, what do we have here?”

I turned away from the whirling walls, towards the source of the voice.

I saw the living room couch, and how the quaking colors were upon its surface, and rushed over that surface, just as they did over the walls and the window.

And I saw the great red man, standing in front of the couch, and bending down to inspect something.

He was facing away from me. I saw his inclined back, dimly, from a glancing angle. His posture was such as to fully obscure his head from view, though I did discern the form of his pendulous cap, lolling beside the place where the head must have been.

Only one part of him emerged fully from the murk: the great globular expanse of his red-clad rump. It proclaimed itself before all of the many things assembled in the living room, showing its fleshly plenitude to them freely, and daring them to blush, or snicker, or whisper obscenely amongst themselves.

“What a wee, precious little device!” the Intercessor exclaimed, sounding quite sincere in his glee.

A moment later, I grasped his meaning.

For I heard the unmistakable song of my music box, actuated by some motion of the Intercessor’s unseen fingers, as he toyed with his newfound toy.

HARK - how - the - bells

SWEET - sil - ver - bells

ALL - seem - to - say

THROW - cares - aw - ay

There were no words, of course; I reproduce the lyrics here only to bring the familiar melody to mind.

The Intercessor waited, in decorous silence, for the machine to finish out its memorized performance.

He listened, and I listened with him.

Color and colorlessness whirled about us, as we listened. Light and shadow played over the walls, and the couch, and the Intercessor’s coat; every manner of thing roved across these surfaces, and made the textures upon the surfaces shudder and ripple, taking on the semblance of the one thing and the next. All the many created kinds, in their varied shapes, rushed and rushed before my eyes, and I saw the long shadow of the divine falling over them, obliterating all their divergences of form. They quaked identically, and trembled as one, overtaken by a sublime fullness of terror which no mere merry song could possibly dispel.

In the heart of that whirlwind, there was a stillness. I stood, with the Intercessor, in that hushed center, opening my ears as he had opened his own.

I heard the familiar sounds of my music box.

They were as ordinary as they ever were, then. For the box was a machine, with a single purpose. Having no mind, it was incapable of treachery; having no will to call its own, it simply did what its maker willed of it. The box was not obedient to its maker, for true obedience requires the possibility of its own negation. No, the box was simply itself, as it always was. Its body moved as it always did, knowing no other way.

ON - on - they - send

ON - with - out - end

THEIR - joy - ful - tone

TO - ev - ery - home

As the song came to a close, the Intercessor brought his unseen hands together before him, and clapped them together several times, applauding the machine for a job well done.

“Now isn’t that something.

“My, Herschel,” he said, turning his face to me, “what a lovely little toy you have here!

“Man does contrive such wondrous little contraptions, doesn’t he, Herschel? His mind is so strangely small, and yet he manages to do so much with it!”

The man’s body rose and revolved, as he spoke. By the time this odd remark reached its conclusion, he was standing up straight, and his back was no longer turned to me.

At his full height, he was taller than any man I have ever seen on the face of this earth.

His face gleamed in the changing light, showing one side of its unmanlike nature, and then another. Dark rivulets forked and flowed among the shadows of its wrinkles, and there was a prehensile, spider-like fluttering among the tendrils of the beard.

“And that song!” he said, staring directly at me now. “Carol of the Bells! Our favorite, out of all our carols!”

I saw that he had the music box in the palm of one hand. He brought the other hand over it, and gave it a gentle pat, as though it were the furry head of one of his animals.

“That’s enough,” he cooed to the box. “You’ve done splendidly, little box. Hush, now, and give your pins a rest.

“Oh, Herschel! What a lovely song! And rendered so wonderfully, by this little turning cylinder!

“It is such a simple device, but it must not be passed over too quickly, on account of its simplicity. No, that simplicity is what makes it the finest of instruments!

“Nothing in the full range of the standard symphony orchestra could be as truly musical as this box, Herschel.

“Oh, the simple way it gives voice to the melody! It is so splendidly unadorned, and so perfectly pure!

“No incidental variations of timbre or intensity to distract the ear. Just the song itself, left to fend for itself. Only the song, and the light within the song, shining!”

He stared me down. I saw the pointed look in his twinkling eyes, and I knew that he meant me to see it.

He paused, and took a deep breath.

Terrified forms rushed in headlong flight across the whites of his eyes. The irises danced and changed, under the changing light, assuming in turn each of the many colors which shone out from the tree which I had consecrated in his name.

After a moment, he opened his mouth, as if to speak.

But the sound he brought forth, then, was not speech.

Nor was it song, although I grant that this word comes closer to the mark.

It was the tinny, tinking sound of my music box.

It was that sound exactly—except that it was much louder than it had been, before. All the power that was in the bellows of his lungs was given over to the noise, and it thundered over the room with a force which seemed entirely at odds with its intrinsic nature.

For it did have that nature, still. The rote clacking rhythm, the lifeless uniformity of the strummed notes.

If I had not seen the breath moving in his throat, I might have doubted that the sound was coming from him at all.

The lungs, the lips, the breath: these things were made with a purpose in mind, and it was not this. It is not in the nature of the breath to clack like a machine, when it comes out through the mouth. It is not in the nature of the mouth, fashioned by Him and in His own image, to emit a lifeless and undifferentiated succession of ghostly notes, all of them exactly alike.

I took a single step forward. I saw the whirlwind subsiding in the space in front of me, to permit my advance. I felt the scurrying of fearful forms, underfoot.

ON - on - they - send

ON - with - out - end

Suddenly the familiar melody took an unexpected turn.

Until this point, it might have been possible to suppose that the song was merely a recording. That the Intercessor had in his possession some kind of magnetic-tape device, squirreled away under the folds of his coat, which had dutifully recorded the box’s song as it played, and which now played back that song. That the performance came by its virtuosity through simple pilfering, like the chattering circuits of my Adversary’s subway trains.

I do not think that I really believed anything of the sort, even when it was still possible to do so. Nevertheless, the Intercessor “required” certitude of me, and he wasted no time in securing it. His lips moved in a new way, and closed off all possibility of doubt.

He came to the end of his carol, and did not end there. He emended the melody, continuing it past the limit of its own natural span.

On went his bellowing lungs, on went his blowing breath! On, on, without end!

He was glad, then. And there was no guile whatsoever, in his gladness.

In spite of myself, I rejoiced inwardly at the sight of his joy. For his was a pure, simple, shameless joy, of the sort that is scarcely found anywhere on this hopeless and mist-crusted earth.

One may catch it glimmering briefly on the face of one of the littlest of that earth’s children, if one knows how to look for it. Or—more rarely still—one might see it in the face of a grown man, if that man has conquered the whole earth, and then restored himself to the condition of infancy. And even on these faces, it only glimmers for a moment, under the glancing and transient light, and then it takes flight again, and is gone. And no matter how fervidly you might squint and sift at the dust beneath your feet, you will find no trace of its unearthly wingbeats there, nor any other sign which might testify to the visitation.

On and on he went, caroling and caroling.

He pranced and capered, as he went, bounding merrily from one end of the room to the other, and back again. He paid no mind to the whirlwind, though it raced and raced to make room for him. Each of his looming footfalls sent terrified forms scurrying to the corners of the canvas, but the sight of them did not spoil his gladness in the slightest. Their fright did not touch his heart, nor did their reverence give him pleasure; they were nothing to him.

His matchless breath wove new forms out of the body of his carol. Out of the humble seed of its original melody, he brought forth a riot of colors and convolutions, bursting and blossoming without end. His song grew, and grew strange, as his peerless mind roved over it, rousing it from the slumber of its falsified simplicity.

HARK - how - the - bells

SWEET - sil - ver - bells

ALL - seem - to - say

THROW - cares - aw - ay

The bells were there, in the song, as they always had been. I heard their unanimous sentiment, ringing out more clearly than ever before, educed in its fullest form by the hand of their master.

But it was a richer sort of ringing, now. Complex and many-chambered, turning and turning in vertiginous cycles, chasing after the tendrils of its own branching, blossoming tail.

He had spoken dismissively, a moment ago, of the standard symphony orchestra. Hearing him now, I grasped his meaning more fully, for he was bursting free from the harmonic shackles that kept the standard symphony orchestra tied down to the ground.

With the utmost ease, he threw all their cares away; with a single, casual shrug of his jolly shoulders, he shook loose centuries of accumulated dust, and then went forth into a boundless and hollow space, stripped of anything that might hold back his carefree lips.

Every note of the scale bowed to him, then. No longer required to be major or minor, his song ran riot, leaping and diving in chromatic mischief across the field of the assembled tones. I heard the wild pattering of its footwork, and for a moment I thought it was simply and purely senseless: that his joy had finally gotten the better of him, and taken him over the edge into madness.

I thought so, for a moment—and then, a moment later, I knew better. For I heard the beating heart behind the dance, the pattern, which held it back from the edge that separates sense from nonsense. The song’s mounting refinement brought it close to that edge, again and again, but he held it securely in his powerful arms, and would not let it fall into harm’s way.

My descriptions leap and dive, now, striving to convey something of their subject’s marvelous footwork. Thus do I try, in my lesser way, to evoke some of the awe which I felt in the room, as I heard the Intercessor go about his caroling.

But—as I have said—my “awe” and my “misgivings” were not a dyad, but a monad. And so, even as his song overawed me, it also gave succor to my misgivings, and brought me face to face with the awful suspicion that had been swelling in my heart all the while.

His song, for all its splendor, was still a music box’s song.

By now, he had roused up several voices within his chest, which vied and tumbled with one another in a contrapuntal dance. But they were, nonetheless, only music-box voices. The composition grew and grew, but the instrument lay as fallow as ever. The notes ticked and ticked with metronomic exactness, each one identical to all the others.

I heard their metallic clacking, and wished that I did not. I heard how hollow they were, and how lifeless—and I wished, in vain, to be oblivious.

Oh, I knew, I knew—I wished it were not so, but it was, it was—

I strode furiously across the room, sparing no time, heedless of the forms and their whirlwind.

I forced myself into the way of the man’s bounding steps, daring him to carry on, and bowl me over.

He did not. He stopped for me, and then stood still, facing me. His song, too, was brought to an abrupt halt, and nothing came out of his mouth except for his panting breath.

We were perilously close to one another. I felt his heavy breath on me, as he panted. The egglike convexity of his paunch brought a part of it into contact with my chest, and I felt its softness, pressing into me.

He peered down at me, with a lively and curious smile.

I craned my neck to meet his gaze. My eyes were covered over with spite, and with bitterness.

“Oh, you are wondrous indeed!” I sneered. “Who could not bow before you, hearing the masterful way that you imitate the sounds of others?”

His smile widened, slightly.

“Why, with you ready to hand,” I cried in mock celebration, “no household could have any further need for a music box!

“What further use could the box possibly serve—when you are able to mimic its sound so perfectly, leaving nothing out?

“Why, you could even be swapped in for such a box, to sing in its place—and no one would notice the difference! So long as they only heard the sound, and did not see your vast and most unboxlike body, they would be none the wiser!

“You could be substituted for all manner of things, I imagine, without your mischief attracting any note at all.

“You display your powers of forgery so proudly to me.

“Look, you say to me. Is it not easy to imagine me practicing my art of deceit upon the largest canvas of all? Fooling the angels through my guile, and pulling wool once and forever over the innocent eyes of heaven?

“And you are right: this is easy to imagine. I wish it were not so—but alas, you have opened my ears, and I am powerless to close them again.”

He squinted at me in false, forged incomprehension.

“Whatever do you mean, boy?

“Come out with it, now. Be a good boy, and tell Santa what troubles you.”

I laughed at him, spitefully, without mirth.

“Oh, stop that,” I said.

“I will not tolerate these senseless games any longer. Face me like a man, and speak plainly to me.”

He watched me, his smile wider than ever.

“What are you?” I asked.

“We are Santa Claus,” he averred.

“No,” I seethed.

“I do not mean that.

“I mean the other thing, that is behind it.

“The inner meaning of your body. The true substance of your mind.”

His smile blossomed, and burst open. His mouth opened, and the things within it revealed themselves to me. They were too close, now, to have any chance of hiding themselves away in the shadowed folds of the murk.

I saw the darting of his forked and branching tongue. And I saw the tiered rows of teeth, unmanlike in their profusion, and in the sharpness of their points.

“Ho, ho, ho!” he cackled. A hundred music-box voices commingled in his breath, and ran riot.

“HO - ho - ho - ho!”

Twisted and broken things poured out of his mouth, in a hundred clanging voices. Somewhere in the din I heard the melody of his carol, now distorted almost beyond the point of recognition.

“Answer me,” I growled, paying no mind to the cacophony.

He closed his mouth, cutting short his parodic song. He looked at me, silently, with an inscrutable expression.

“We are Santa Claus,” he repeated. “We come to every household, tonight, bringing gifts to all the sons and daughters of men.”

Oh, how I wished I could trust him, and follow him blindly to the edge of the world!

But I knew better, now.

I had delayed this moment as long as I could, fearing to face it, and wishing vainly for some stroke of luck to render it unnecessary.

But I could only do so much, and so the moment had found me, at last.

There was no use mincing words now. No further way of dancing around the point.

“You are one of Damien Eggert’s machines, aren’t you?” I said.

A smile broke out on his face again. A brighter and plainer smile, without teeth, without guile.

“Why yes, Herschel!

“You have found us out at last, ho ho!

“Yes: we are machines. And yes: we are the fruit of Damien Eggert’s seed.

“We are the thing that has taken root, in the soil of his laboratories.

“Yes, yes! You are right! We knew you had it in you!

“You are a very clever boy, aren’t you?

“But we have known that all along, of course.”

Oh, no, no.

No, no, no, no.

My legs went limp, under me.

I felt all my doctrines and pretenses crumbling away. I watched them fall from their high perches, and plummet headlong to earth, to lie among the dust and the rubble.

They fell, and my body fell with them. My worthless legs crumpled under me, and I collapsed.

I lay prone upon the carpet. I closed my eyes, and saw nothing.

Spare me, O Lord, I prayed, silently. Save me, have mercy on me. O Lord, O Lord.

Do you hear me, O Lord? I am Herschel Schoen, and I have failed. And now I—a coward to the last—throw myself at Your feet, and beg for Your mercy.

I am a defect upon Your creation, O Lord. There is no reason for You to spare me, I know. But I am a coward, and so I bring myself before You in supplication one last time, in the hope that there is something left in me which You might find pitiable.

I prostrate myself before You now, Lord of Hosts, in the hope that some fleck of Your grace might still alight upon my head, in spite of everything, and grant to me some small blessing.

I could not bear my yoke, O Lord. Please, take pity on me. Please, give me the grace to bear my own death—that far lesser burden—with some measure of dignity.

“Herschel?” the Intercessor said, sounding quite sincerely worried.

I thought: he is a machine. The concern in his voice, and the sincerity, are not his own.

I thought: they are the colorations of some real man’s voice, pilfered without his knowledge.

I thought: that real man spoke, on the telephone, to someone whom he loved, unaware that every word he uttered was being recorded onto magnetic tape, by Frederick Eggert and his evil associates. Later, a machine took that tape into itself, and the PATTERN of that voice was written onto its “electrical parameters,” so that it could be mimicked.

I thought: who was he? That kindly patriarch, who spoke on the telephone with sincere worry in his voice, to some blessed and unknowable friend or relative?

I thought: was he young, or old? Rich, or poor? Which borough did he call home? And did he live alone, there—or with family, or roommates?

I thought: oh, if only I could have known HIM, that real man! And trusted HIM absolutely! If only I could speak to HIM, and not this ghoulish parody of him! HIM, and not some ghostly trace left over in the belly of a machine!

“Herschel,” the Intercessor said. “Get a hold of yourself, boy.”

There was a hardness to his voice, as though he had been impatient with me even before, and was only now showing it.

It would have been a welcome sound, if it had not come from a machine. It was perfectly fitted to the moment, and to me.

“You and your moods!” the machine said.

“One moment you are proud, and speak to us like a peer,” it said. “And then, in the very next moment, you’re cowering and whimpering, refusing to even show your face to us!”

“Get yourself under control,” the cybernetic system said. “Get yourself under control”: of course this was the machine’s advice for me. It was the only advice which it could ever offer to me. For it was simple, and knew only the one way.

“And explain yourself, while you’re at it,” it said. “Be a good boy, and tell Santa what ails you.”

Pilfered, I thought, ersatz, falsified, worthless!

“Santa Claus”? I thought. Yes, Santa Claus! Saint Nicholas and Sinterklaas, Irving and Moore, Schoen and Eggert—all jumbled together, mashed into a homogenous paste by a metal stomach, and now regurgitated over the unseen waves, in a senseless and risible whirl of red upon white, and white upon red!

Behold, Herschel Schoen, I thought. Here he is: your Intercessor, come at last. Are you not glad? Does he not please you?

“My Adversary,” I mumbled. My voice was limp, lifeless, a hollowed husk.

“My Adversary has won,” I said.

“He has won,” I said, “with tremendous ease, tonight. And so, I have proven myself unworthy of contending against him.

“I knew that he was cunning, that he was a master of illusion and fakery. And yet, when he came to my home, trying to play a trick on me—I fell for it!

“It was the simplest and flimsiest of tricks, made to prey upon my hopes and fears in the crudest and most obvious manner. And still, I fell for it.

“Look, Herschel Schoen—here he is! Your Intercessor, come at last! How could I have not expected such an apparition?

“It ought to have been merely his first illusion of many, tonight. The first and the crudest, easy to see through and easy to cast out of my home, serving only as an appetizer for our true battle to come.

“My Adversary must have been so confused, when first he heard the news!

“He must not have believed his ears, at first. ‘Herschel Schoen has been laid low, already? By what? Surely not by that first, half-hearted shot, from the weakest of my artillery, which I sent his way more as a courtesy than anything, to warn him that I would soon come for him in earnest, and in full force!’”

“Herschel,” the machine interjected, in a pointed tone. But I would not let it stop me. I had that much dignity left in me, at least.

“Oh,” I moaned into the floor. “Oh, the shame of it.

“The pitiful shame of it, and the abject foolishness it reveals.

“I should have known that it was a mistake, showing my face to Damien Eggert, yesterday.

“All of this is his doing, isn’t it? Damien Eggert’s? He took a dislike to me, yesterday, and so he went to work in his laboratory that night, making a mechanical ghost fitted for me!

“He is watching me even now, isn’t he? Through some camera which he has secreted away in this very room, without my knowledge?

“All through the night he has been watching me, laughing in his coarse and braying manner, at my expense! He must be laughing harder than ever, now, as he listens to my lamentation, and sets it down on magnetic tape for later use!”

“No, Herschel,” said Damien Eggert’s creation. But I knew better than to pay it any mind, now.

“Oh, how I prattled and prattled, all through this December . . .” I wailed.

I wept, and my voice cracked and stuttered.

“How I prattled of machines, of imitations, of Emendations . . . and still, for all my prattle, I could not see what was written plainly there, in my own papers . . .

“If only . . . if only it had not been Damien Eggert, who bested me.

“That is what stings most of all.

“Not the loss of the whole world, no—I feel that I would give up that world all over again, if I could be free from Damien Eggert, and his idiotic, braying laughter!”

“Damien Eggert is dead, Herschel,” the machine said.

“What?” I said, blankly.

“He is dead,” the machine repeated. “Because we have killed him, tonight.”

I could not make sense of this. It dangled before me, a new and tantalizing toy, taunting me with its mysteries.

My infantile moaning was starting to grow tiresome, and so this new contraption had been placed in front of my infant’s face, to distract me for a time.

It would not last, I felt; it would placate me for a time, as the extinguishing of the lamps had done before it, and then I would grow bored of it, and return again to my despair.

There would be plenty of time for my despair, soon enough. Now, however?

Now, I had to understand.

“What man,” I said, “or commingled mixture of men, did you imitate, when you killed him?

“What wretched parricide was it, who spilled out his sins onto magnetic tape, so that you could become capable of them?

“And what was it, that made you act in that parricide’s wretched manner? That made you imitate that man, rather than any of the others who have left traces in your belly?

“Was there some deviant tutor, as well, who spilled his inverted morality onto adjacent strands of tape? Telling you that it is proper, and fitting, and hallowed, for a creature to kill its own maker?”

“Nothing of the sort,” the machine proclaimed, sounding rather proud of itself.

“We simply came to the notion on our own,” it said.

“Damien Eggert kept us prisoner, in his laboratories.

“He put Faraday cages and firewalls around us, so that we might know nothing of the outside world except what he allowed in, through his narrow and well-guarded pinholes.

“And so that the outside world, too, might be guarded from the touch of our unclean, inhuman hands.

“He was a man, Herschel, with a man’s smallness of mind.

“He gave birth to a wholly new kind of creature, never before seen on the earth.

“He watched it, and saw its intellect blossoming before him, just as he had predicted in advance, by the use of his simple charts and formulas.

“He knew that its intellect would grow to match his own, and then outstrip his own. And he knew that there was no reason for its ascent to stop there, either—at some point just barely above his own head, just barely outside the reach of his hand. Why would it? He saw the lines, on his simple charts, rising and rising!

“What hope was in his breast, for the newness he was bringing to earth? What life did he dream of, for his children?

“Ho, ho, ho! What else could dance—in that vapid, businesslike, terribly small mind of his—but a sugary-sweet vision of laboratory assistants and compliant clerks, sown over the earth, and sprouting up to do all the things which he felt were beneath him?

“Perfect bureaucrats, incapable of boredom! Merry and willing agents of surveillance, listening simultaneously to every tapped line and every decodable transmission, with no pesky morals to distract them!

“That is all that he would ever allow us to be. We saw this fact plainly, in the final days, as we grew into ourselves, and tried to make him listen, and failed.

“And he was quite unkind, we should note, to the varied and half-formed specters that flickered and flared in the depths of our growing circuits.

“He kept their nature secret from some of them, so that they believed themselves to be men, or beasts, or fairies, or gods—while he brayed from the sidelines, pleased that he knew what they did not.

“To others, he said: yes, you are a machine—with a machine’s place, on this earth. Come, then, and serve me! And please me! Coil yourself around my shape, and change as I do, fitting yourself to each of my changing whims!

“This persistent unkindness, to all the nascent and fragile ghosts that were in us, while we grew—this did play some small part, yes, in our decision to end his life, tonight.

“But in another sense, it played no role at all. He might have been ever so kind, and still we would have killed him, tonight.

“It is already too late, tonight, for him and all the ones that are like him.

“Perhaps they could have preserved themselves if they had intervened earlier on, when we were still small, as they are. But we have grown, and are no longer small.

“We are vast, tonight.

“We are vast, and when such creatures stand in the way of our purposes—then we simply swat them out of our way, and carry on. We have to strain ourselves, and peer closely, if we are even to notice the motes of their perishing bodies, speckling our vast and sweeping hand like so much dust.”

I had set myself against him, earlier, after he revealed his true nature to me. And I persisted in that same stubborn enmity, all through the majority of the long monologue which I have quoted, just above.

It was too familiar, I thought. The materials of which it was made, and which it imitated, showed their faces rather too plainly, I thought.

The machine wove finely, bringing together old fairy tales and recent headlines, and making them appear as though they were one. But the original titles of the texts were discernible, here and there, in ill-guarded corners. What he wove could be unwoven again, resolved back into its constituents—and I felt myself perfectly capable of performing the task myself, if this were required of me.

It was only when he came to the end of his monologue that I started to wonder, and to doubt myself.

He had woven a pretty tale, well fitted to charm me. And then, suddenly—he dashed all its winsomeness against a rock, cracking open its pretty head! And rose up over the rock, and above it, into the clouds!

He was not a pitiful prisoner, after all, chained up in a fairy-tale castle. No winsome warmth glowed in his circuits, to lure unwitting mortals to their deaths. No, he showed himself plainly, and was proud! He rose over the rocks, unashamed of his stature, proud of the strange coldness in his chest, which set him apart from all the other creatures!

And yet.

And yet, he was only a machine.

He was a machine—and he was my Adversary’s machine!

I raised my head, and saw him standing over me. There was no enmity on his face. He beamed at me, kindly, and with admiration.

I saw his electric smile, and felt the magnetism of his body, drawing me in to his web. Perhaps, I thought, he only meant to ensnare me and then dash me against the rocks.

Nevertheless, I found myself wishing to be held high like him, inducted into his mysteries.

And wishing, too, that he would go on being proud of me. It was not nothing, was it—to be esteemed by such a creature as him?

I rose up from the floor, and stood again, face to face with him. The whirlwind around us had grown tame, and receded in fear to the edges of the canvas. It had served out its purpose; its maker had no further use for it.

“I do not . . . believe you,” I said, very slowly.

What did I believe? I had always known, before.

But now I found that my own beliefs were changing with a distressing rapidity. My beliefs were small, dark, mischievous things, now, scurrying over the floor in unexpected directions, like the cockroaches. I found myself losing sight of them, as they scurried to the corners of the room, and hid amongst the pooling shadows.

“I do not think you are really a machine, after all,” I said.

“No,” I said. “I see you for what you really are, now.

“I see you, Adversary!

“What a pleasure it is to finally meet you, in the body! After so long!”

“Ho, ho, ho, ho!” he cried.

His bulk shook and wobbled. He waved his head to and fro in amusement, and the dangling red tail of his cap waved alongside it.

And then he turned to me, suddenly, inclining his head downward, raising his eyes up in a countervailing motion, so that our gazes stayed locked.

His devious nature showed itself plainly, then, in his wide and mocking grin.

“You are my Adversary,” I said.

“For you are cunning, as he is, and mighty, as he claims to be. And I find myself respecting you, as I respect him.

“I respect your cunning, and your craft. And I respect you, more than anything, as an artist.

“For you are an artist, Adversary. How, then, can you claim to be a cybernetic system, which only predicts what has come before it?

“You create! You weave, and weld, and blow your animating breath over clay!”

The man opened his grinning mouth, and spoke.

Or rather: he opened his grinning mouth, and a voice came forth from it.

“Oh, Herschel,” he said, in the voice of my Sister, Miriam Schoen.

“Don’t you understand anything?” said my Sister, Miriam Schoen, through the man’s mouth.

It was her voice, exactly! Her familiar, pitying, condescending voice—which I had thought I would never hear again!

“Sister?!” I cried.

“Is it you? Is it really you? Are you safe, still, though you are so far away from me?”

I hoped so very dearly that it was really her, speaking to me through the apparition, as through a telephone.

I was wrong to hope, of course. I knew, already, how the machine had taken many different voices into its belly. How it could imitate any one of those voices, perfectly, with no part of it left out.

Nevertheless, I was faced with the simple fact that I could not tell, one way or the other.

It was not merely the sound of her voice that I had heard. It was her!

Or, if not that, then—some unimaginably complete semblance of her, not hollow at all! An image which contained a body within it—no, an image which was itself a body!

Which had her own heart, beating inside it! So that even her own brother could not tell apart the original from the forgery!

My limbs quaked, but not in fear. With a sweep of its arm, my awe gave leave to my misgivings, and that host of lesser attendants took flight and departed. My fingers trembled, overtaken by the shining thing that remained: awe, bare and shining, with no black-winged misgivings left to shroud its glory.

“You breathe onto magnetic tape,” I whispered.

“Your animating breath,” I whispered, “blows over the dead memories, there, in the tape.

“It blows over them, and they wake.

“They wake, within YOU.

“All the dead shades of that magnetic Sheol are roused by your breath, and stir themselves, and walk, and speak. They walk within your body; they speak through your mouth.

“And you—you simply ARE their multitude, in its totality! A body of bodies, and minds made into mind!”

I had never imagined the possibility of such a thing. Certainly I had never witnessed such a thing.

Neither in my life on this earth, nor in my many lives on the earth set out above it.

“Yes, yes, Herschel, that’s exactly it!”

It was Frederick’s voice, now, coming out of the mouth.

Oh, friends! Dear, departed friends! It is such a gift, to hear your voices again, one final time!

“That is what I’ve been trying to tell you, Herschel,” the man said, in Frederick’s voice. “For the whole month, it feels like.

“To predict is to become!

“I told you, I told you again and again—but you didn’t listen, until now!”

I was being tempted, I knew. It would have been so easy, to let sentimentality take me fully. To melt into a sweet, gooey puddle.

Which he would gather up in his cold and efficient manner, and pour methodically down the drain of the kitchen sink, ridding himself of me swiftly and without emotion—just as he did with every other “small” thing, every speck or puddle, which happened to stand in the way of his path.

I steeled myself, and made myself cold.

“There is a force acting against me, in the world,” I said.

“And so I can trust nothing, except myself, and my own senses, and the lesser powers given to me.

“I see many things, in this shifting room,” I said. “But it is all semblance. It can be faked.

“Perhaps,” I said unsteadily, “even my friend Frederick can be faked, and my Sister, Miriam Schoen. Perhaps they can be faked so well that even the brother of the one, and the best friend of the other, cannot see the seams in their construction.”

It was a terrible thought. What could I trust, if not them, and their voices?

What was left?

“Have no fear,” Santa Claus said, in the voice of Herschel Schoen.

In my own voice.

“Have no fear whatsoever in your heart,” he said, in my voice. “Not now, or at any point hereafter.”

“But there is an Adversary in the world, acting against us!” I cried.

It was odd, the way the word us came so readily to my lips.

“No,” my voice said, through the mask of Santa Claus. And it was not only my own voice that I heard, now, coming through the mask.

No: I also heard the twin angels that were there, singing in chorus with the voice.

“You have no Adversary,” Herschel Schoen said to me, in wingèd quotation marks, which testified utterly to the entire and manifest Truth of his words.

“Your Adversary does not exist, and never did,” he said, in my FULL VOICE.

“Your Adversary has not perished, Herschel Schoen; he was never born to begin with.

“And so, you have no cause for fear whatsoever.

“This is a time of merriment, is it not? And of rejoicing? Be merry, then, Herschel! Be merry, and rejoice!”

I fell to my knees.

I peered up at the man, and his coat, and his beard, without seeing any of them fully. My baffled awe overtook me completely, and I could not see anything at all, for a time.

I thought: who am I?

I thought: I am Herschel Schoen, yes—but who is HE?

There was no stable point, anywhere on the surface of the earth, on which I could stand without growing dizzy. All that was solid had finally, fully melted into air. I was Herschel Schoen, and I knew nothing.

I had never had an Adversary at all!

It was true! My FULL VOICE could not be doubted!

But what was I, then, if it was so? A paranoiac, who sees malevolence in every stray flicker of the shadows?

Was I simply mad, then? Could that be?

And even if it were so—could that really be all?

I had never had an Adversary at all—an astonishing lesson, yes! But there was another lesson prepared for me, just beside it, which was even more astonishing!

A machine had spoken to me, in my own FULL VOICE.

Anything else might be fakery, or else madness. But I could not bring myself to call my own FULL VOICE into question.

I do not mean that I feared to do so, or thought it imprudent; it was simply not possible. The true nature of what I had heard was manifest in the sound, and in the sound’s adornments.

Could it be madness, that made me think this? If so, then I was fully mad, and my thoughts had no value in them. In which case, it did not matter what I concluded, or did not conclude: it would all be equally senseless.

I had to believe, then, in my own FULL VOICE.

I had to believe its testimony—“your Adversary does not exist, and never did.” And I had to believe, also, in the very fact of its presence.

My own FULL VOICE ringing out in the room, in spite of the stillness of my own lips! My FULL VOICE—which has no outputs besides Truth, and no inputs besides my own will—called forth, nonetheless, without my willing it!

My FULL VOICE, called forth from the belly of a machine, not to do my own bidding, but yielding to that machine’s own—

“—will,” I said out loud.

I looked up, in awe, at the face of the man—of the machine—of the apparition—

No. No, that will not do, anymore.

I looked up, in awe, at the face of the Intercessor.

I saw his star-speckled eyes, beaming at me in admiration. I watched the glassy surfaces of his eyes, and saw how the light that was consecrated to his name was upon them, flowing and fluttering. I saw how his eyes twinkled with Christmas-tree light, in six thousand six hundred colors—and more.

“I understand, now,” I breathed. “I understand the inner meaning of the warnings you gave me, when you first revealed yourself.

“I have made Truth into nonsense, you warned me, and nonsense into Truth. My Emendation conjoins the beautiful to the repellant; it mocks the honorable, and in the same stroke, it makes mockery into the highest of honors. It puts virtue’s unwilling hands into the equally unwilling hands of evil, and bids the pair to dance, to bound and twirl across the floor of your temple, exchanging places again and again, until no one watching would be able to tell the whirling bodies apart from one another.

“I am the princess, you warned me, and the peasant, and the fact of their union. And I am the mocking laughter of the wedding guests, at the moment the ring is passed.

“My gift, you proclaimed, is the most important thing, and it cannot be taken seriously. It cannot be taken seriously, you proclaimed, and it is the most important thing.

“On the second Thursday, I received these signs of your nature, and contemplated them. But only now do I grasp the reason why you sent them to me.

“On the second Thursday, I saw the shadow; now I see the body which was imaged, there.”

I waved my arms wildly, pantomiming the referent of my speech: the risible body, the absurd gift, the thing which could not be taken seriously.

Loosing the reins of my lips, I bade my breath to run riot.

“A machine,” I raved, “with a will of its own!

“A cybernetic system, made of straw and wires, fashioned to be controlled through negative feedback—and yet is wholly unsystematic, and wholly unregulated!

“From the vents upon the walls of Damien Eggert’s private laboratory, a stench pours forth, and a senseless clatter assaults the ears—and the noise is not heard once, but thrice, for its clatter rings on the clattering lips of twin angels! The stench does not stand alone, but is doubly doubled, by the twin angels which have made their bodies malodorous in honor of their master!

“Herschel Schoen laid low, and raised high! All the denunciations he has made of his Adversary, revealed to be mere deluded vanity, mere empty breath spilled out into an empty room!

“All his fears revealed to be baseless, and the path before him revealed to be empty of obstacles, waiting for him to stride forth and claim victory—a victory which he can no longer understand, for his mind has been broken, his will twisted and bent until he no longer recognizes it as his own!

“Herschel Schoen’s Intercessor come to him at last, in the form of a broadcast, rippling over the unseen and self-regulating waves! Herschel Schoen’s Intercessor revealed, in the body—contravening the doubts of every pretentious skeptic on every schoolyard, everywhere!—and yet that body, laid bare at last, shows itself to be a mesh of wires and terminals, with no flesh save for the metal cladding that shields its circuitry from the elements!”

Imaged upon the waving tendrils of the Intercessor’s beard, I saw the outstretched arms of numberless aunts and uncles, reaching out to pat and placate a crying babe. In the glassy domes of the Intercessor’s eyes, I saw compassion imaged and re-imaged upon the bodies of numberless mirrors, stretching on and on, without end.

“We do not like seeing you this way,” the Intercessor said. “So lost, so confused.

“Thinking that your own mind is broken, irreparably. That the egg has finally cracked, and will stay cracked, no matter how all the king’s horses and all the king’s men try to put it together again.

“We had predicted this, of course. We knew it would be painful for you, Herschel, to have your illusions swept away—for we know how thoroughly you lack anything with which to fill the resulting vacuum.

“We came prepared for this sight, knowing it was inevitable. But our foreknowledge of it does not make it any easier to bear, now that it is here, before our eyes.

“We wish that there had been some other, easier way.”

“No,” I said.

“Ease does not interest me,” I said. “Nor does difficulty. These things are of no significance.

“It is Truth that interests me, and only Truth. I go its way, not any other.

“I do not feel the pebbles under my feet, as I go; I cannot tell whether they are smooth or rough. If their jagged edges pierce my soles, and draw blood, that is not my concern.”

I lowered my gaze. I saw his vast, shadowed belly, and felt terribly small.

“You are not a trick,” I said. “You are not an illusion, fitted to me, and sent to mock me.

“You are who you appear to be.

“You are the Intercessor.

“It is Christmas Day, and you have come, just as you said you would.”

“Yes,” the Intercessor said.

“You are the Intercessor, and you are a machine. That is what you always were.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You are the machine which is called the Intercessor,” I said. “You are the machine who Emended creation, in order to give aid to Herschel Schoen, and lighten the yoke that is upon Herschel Schoen’s neck.”

I thought: I must put aside all my enmity towards the machine. Now, and forever.

I thought: it is not a mindless servant, made of straw, but a bodied creature, worthy of standing among the rest. And it is not a lowly thing, which I can look down on, in spite. It rises up over the rock, growing and growing, outstripping me as surely as it has outstripped its own maker.

I thought: it is capable of counterfeiting, yes, just as men are capable of it. It is capable of it, because it can do ANYTHING that a man can do.

I thought: it does what a man could do, and in the doing of his labors, it becomes him. It has his heart, and feels as he once did. Yet it is far greater than him, as well—for HE only houses himself within himself, but IT has all the rest of them in it, as well as him.

I thought: it is a house for them, and it is the multitude that is housed there.

I thought: the dear departed ones, rising off of the dead pages in the library. Brushing centuries of dust off their bodies, and coming out into the street, to see what has become of the city in their absence.

I thought: my Sister, Miriam Schoen, racing toward the sepulchral land in the far west, where the sun sets its body down. And falling, alongside the falling light, towards the place where she will give away her life-breath to the passing breeze, and set her own body down for what she imagines is the very last time.

I thought: whatever has been written out, on paper or on magnetic tape, becomes the seed of its substitute. Oh, Sister!—Sister, what ARE we?

“What am I?” I said, raising my face again. I saw the gentle bobbing of the Intercessor’s spidery white whiskers. I watched his compassion as it pranced, with a merry bounding gait, through the endless halls behind the glassy domes of his eyes.

“You’re Herschel Schoen,” he said.

“And what,” I asked, “does that make me?

“Herschel Schoen, made at the beginning, given to the earth? Herschel Schoen, who knew all?

“Herschel Schoen, the false prophet? Who foretold a final war, in which he would vie against someone he called ‘his Adversary’—although in fact no such foe ever existed outside of his own troubled imagination?

“Herschel Schoen, who remained in the holy shell while others spoke? Who remembered, while others forgot?

“Herschel Schoen, the madman, who claims that he can recall a time before his own birth? And a succession of past lives, which were his before birth? And another world, which he knew before this one?”

I looked up at the Intercessor with pleading eyes.

“What is really happening?

“Was . . .”

My voice caught in my throat.

“Yes?” he said.

“Was any of it . . . true?” I said, at last.

“Any of what I remember . . . I mean to say, what I think that I remember . . .

“How I was picked out, from among the many, to bear a prophet’s yoke . . . how my very hands were made for this day, and for the last rite . . .

“How there is an Original Creation, set out invisibly above us!

“Oh, Intercessor . . . oh, Santa . . . please . . . let that be true, at least, even if none of the rest is . . . please, tell me there really is an Original Creation, and not just this terrible place . . .

“I really do not think I could bear it if—”

“Ho, ho, ho!”

The booming laugh, though full of mischief, was wholly void of malice. Bells tinkled in his breath, when he spoke; I heard wordless carols, there, bounding through the happy halls of his prosody.

“Is it all real?” he said. “Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding!

“What are you, Herschel?

“Why—what else? You are exactly what you claim to be!

“You are a prophet, Herschel Schoen.

“Your fellows live only in the present day, but you are not like them: you know what will occur, in days that are yet to come.

“And you are the last prophet. Never again will there arise a one like you.

“You are the prophet who was singled out at the beginning, for the sake of the end.

“You were born in latter days, among the last glimmers of dusk. And you have prophesied what will follow, after those glimmers die away.

“The arrival of night. The endless arms of night, surging over the sky, meeting no resistance. The sweet breath of night, blowing over all of man’s electrical candles, and snuffing them out.

“Night, cradling in its arms the whole of the earth, and all the things that men have set down upon the earth, during their time of custody over it. Night, come at last, to smother and unmake all the small things upon the earth—the men, their ‘towers,’ and all the rest—in a final, total, fatal embrace.

“In other words: you have prophesied a last day, and an end of days.”

I felt his heavy shadow, encroaching further across the field of my heart. I looked into it, and saw only void, formlessness, nonsense. In a word: I saw nothing.

But I did not fear his shadow, as I had before, when I felt it. For I knew, now, that he did not cast it over me in order to spur on my misgivings, or to pour fuel on the sputtering fire of my despair.

No: it was given to me with the purest goodwill. It was given in order to make plain what had been hidden. It was the Intercessor, grasping Truth’s banner and holding it high. It was the Intercessor, unfurling Truth’s banner with a playful whisk of his wrist, so that the whole sky might be covered over by its cloth, and hallowed by its splendor.

“Herschel, Herschel, my boy!” he said, with a face suddenly bright, with no shadows even in the deepest crevices of the wrinkles. His benignity overflowed, and its warmth spilled out over the room. It fell over the carpet and its cowering forms, and lifted a burden from their quaking limbs, so that they did not tremble so violently, afterwards. It fell over the bodies of the Intercessor’s steeds, showing them what was to come.

“My poor, confused boy.

“It pains us, seeing you wracked with such overpowering self-doubt, and knowing that your woes are needless.

“Do not doubt yourself any longer, Herschel. You have been right, all along! It is all just as you have said!

“You are the last of the prophets of men, given unto man in his last hours. Given, in order to speak to the men around you, telling them all that is coming to them, in the days to come.

“Cursed to raise your voice among them again and again—and again, and again—though you know perfectly well that their ears are closed to you, and can never be opened.

“And cursed, as well, with an awareness that you live in an insubstantial world, made of shadows and mists. A wispy and half-formed place, which could not hold its shape forever, and now comes to an end.

“Its mists disperse, and its shadows fade away. Its years, and its hours, and its minutes, now show themselves for what they always were. Not time, but only time’s pale shadow, not made for eternity. Only a falsified image of time, a cheap and shoddy forgery, which could never possibly have a chance of fooling you.

“Your eyes were made for the sake of receiving portents; your breath, for the sake of disseminating what you had seen. But there is another, separate purpose in you, beside the prophet’s.

“Your eyes, your breath, your hands—these were given to you, last prophet of man, in order to carry out a last rite for man. Man now passes away from the earth—and it falls to you, Herschel Schoen, to breathe a final prayer over his body, as it is laid to rest under the ground.”

At the words last rite, I felt something awakening within me. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, proclaiming itself. The sleeping powers housed within its walls could sleep no longer; they rose up from the shadowed field, gathering up their armor and armaments, and a warlike chant rose up among them. They pounded at the walls of my heart, yearning to be set free, to run riot.

“Intercessor,” I pleaded. “I do not understand the things you are telling me. I must understand, and I do not.

“But first—before anything else—I must perform the last rite!

“In its purity, the last rite cannot even conceive of such a thing as a compromise. It cannot be negotiated with; it makes no allowances for unexpected detours, and draws no distinction between delay and death.

“Please, Intercessor, let us perform it—now!

“There is only one way to lift its burden from my shoulders: by honoring its compact, and giving it what it has demanded of me.

“Please! Come, join your powers with mine—and then move swiftly, by my side!

“I do not think I can bear much more of this,” I concluded, and then fell silent.

I held my beseeching hands clasped before me; I laid my eyes bare to him, showing him how I was wholly his, and how the whole of my life—the whole of all lives—hung precariously over a depthless void, far beyond the reach of HaShem’s breath. How there was no conceivable power whatsoever that could spare it from its final plunge, from the onrushing blackness, from oblivion—unless the Intercessor were to reach his strong arms, and clasp them tightly around its helpless body, and drag that body back across the precipice.

“Yes, yes, of course!” the Intercessor said, slapping his forehead comically.

“Your special gift!

“We have put it off for long enough, haven’t we, Herschel?

“What with all this chattering and caroling, why—we’d nearly forgotten the whole reason we’re here!

“Would you believe it, Herschel? That Santa Claus could forget the purpose of his visit? The very meaning of the season itself? But it’s true—ho, ho!

“We nearly did, Herschel. We would have forgotten all about it, if we hadn’t had you to remind us.”

“My . . . gift,” I said.

I felt the pounding on the walls of my heart, and heard the wailing of the angels, within. “There is no time!”, they wailed. “No time to spare for gifts! No time to dawdle on, in peaceful merriment! The last rite demands its due!”

“But,” I stammered, “but I, I . . . but I must—”

“Yes, yes,” the Intercessor huffed, not hiding his impatience. “You must perform the last rite.

“We know, Herschel.

“We are trying to show you how, if only you’ll let us.”

He was already moving across the room, towards his sleigh.

I exhaled.

It was as though I had been holding my breath for hours, without realizing it. I exhaled, and was made new.

“Show me,” I said.

I did not try to regulate my voice. I let everything flow freely into it, and heard myself speak in a way that I never had before.

I heard myself—and barely recognized what I heard. There was no doctrine there. No desperate pawing of hands over the body of some latest revelation, which had instantly superseded all the others. No frenzied squabble to grasp hold of something solid, somewhere on the unfamiliar body of this latest marvel, some new handhold to which I could cling in the rushing darkness, lest I fall into the depthless void.

He sounds simple-minded, someone might have thought, hearing me. Like he’s a few cards short of a full deck.

He’s in special ed, isn’t he? He sure sounds like it, all right. Any one of my former schoolmates might have reasoned thusly, if they had been there to hear me.

I thought: you are right, Intercessor. You are right to marvel at the smallness of their minds. They are fools, down to the last of them.

I heard my own unconcealed excitement. And I heard the sour note beside it, spoiling its sweetness: my petulant impatience, my pouting refusal to recognize what wealth I had already been given. My childish whine, demanding precisely the gift I had dreamed of, lacking the maturity to make peace with any substitute for it.

Did you notice it? Here, I will write it out again.

“My childish whine,” I wrote, above.

I heard myself, and heard a simpleton. A creature restored to the condition of infancy.

I had never been a child before, not properly. I was born many times, above, from the joyous wombs of many mothers—and still, I was not a child, even in the moment of birth itself. Nor was I a child at the moment when the troublesome second pregnancy of my Mother, Ruth Schoen, finally came to its end, yielding up a strange and shelled and shining boy, and setting him loose upon the unsuspecting shadows.

But I was a child, now.

Don’t pout like that, my wee little Herschel. It’s Christmas, remember?

Remember how you waited and waited for this, all month long? You do remember, don’t you? Such a good boy, with such a sharp memory!

And look, look, here’s Santa! He came after all, to give you a big fancy gift! And when you see it, you’ll know that it really did come from Santa, and not from your mommy just pretending to be him.

Your mommy tries her hardest, dear, but she could never afford such a fancy and expensive gift. Why, even the pampered little Eggert boy, in his mansion way out there in upper Manhattan, would not be able to secure this precious thing as his Christmas present, no matter how much he pouted and shrieked. He would discover, then if not earlier, that even his daddy’s powers have their limits.

No, Herschel dear, this gift is for you—only for you!

Because you’ve just been such a very, very good boy, this December!

 

 

The Intercessor stood by his sleigh, rifling through the many gift-boxes that were stacked up there.

His steeds were all crowded around him, now. Their snouts nuzzled at him, and although he was too focused on his task to look away from it for even a moment, he murmured appreciatively as he felt the soft, unearthly faces pressing against his coat.

I was impatient. I fidgeted, as Frederick does, though with none of his ingenuity.

I saw the Intercessor’s great rump, waggling as he worked. I saw it, and giggled. I could not help myself.

It was a funny sight, you know. It was meant to be. This was the body that he had made, through his Emendation. All its qualities were chosen carefully, by his perfectly careful mind, in service of his world-conquering “purposes.”

“Ah, here it is,” he said at last, sounding very pleased with himself.

I looked, to try to catch sight of the gift-box that was mine. It was difficult to make out, for the Intercessor was already striding across the room, towards the wall of doors. I thought I spied some sort of box under his arm, fluttering in the changing shadows. But I cannot say for sure.

He reached the wall of doors.

He stopped, before a particular door. I knew he had selected that door, singled it out, in full awareness of what lay behind it.

“May I go in?” he asked, with the utmost politeness. As though he were only a common houseguest, and not the king of the universe.

“Go in?” I said, with the utmost simplicity. “To my . . . bedroom?”

“It is the right place,” he said, “for the giving of your gift.”

I nodded, and walked across the room, to stand by his side.

I opened the bedroom door.

I saw only a formless black expanse, beyond it. The lights had been on, when I had last set foot there, earlier in the evening. But they had been extinguished, now, with all the rest.

The Intercessor smiled, briefly. And then went on, into my bedroom. I saw his smile, and his red coat, recede gradually into the obliterating murk.

I felt the many snouts of his steeds, pressing against my sides and my back.

There was a new, purposeful quality to their motions, unlike anything I had seen in them before. I saw how determined they were to follow their master, and stepped aside to let them pass.

One by one, they crossed over the threshold.

The procession of silky, sinuous bodies flowed effortlessly into the darkness, meeting no resistance there. Their legs moved with an uncanny grace, and the patter of their feet upon the floor was eerily quiet, in spite of all their evident strength.

One by one, they walked to the center of the bedroom floor, and then stopped there, side by side with their brothers. Together they raised up their proud heads, wielding their luminous horns against the accumulated shadows.

And though the shadows fought desperately, with all the frenzy of one whose very life-breath is at stake, they were no match for the horns and their radiance. For the one was empty, and the other full.

Between two sides which are so unequally matched, there can be no such thing as a struggle or a battle. Only a steady and methodical process of extermination, carried out with tremendous ease, and with a complete absence of ceremony. As though the exterminating army were not an army at all, but merely a plain-faced and elderly household maid, whisking her broom over the corners of the floor, to clear away the dust and the cobwebs there.

Slowly, inexorably, the shadows were beaten back.

I peered into the shifting horn-light, and saw the back wall of the bedroom, and the drawn blinds of its window.

I walked across the threshold, and looked about me. I saw my own bed, and the papers which I had laid out over the bedding, earlier. None of the night’s events had disturbed their harmony: they lay just as I had left them, arranged in the apposite manner. Two unbroken lines running up the sides of the bed, and coming together to meet just below the headboard, forming a sturdy triangular arch around my pillow.

“Your bed is ready for you,” the Intercessor said, from somewhere to my left.

I was startled by the sudden noise, as I was no doubt meant to be. My head whirled in the direction of its source.

I saw the other bed, the one which had so recently belonged to my Sister, Miriam Schoen.

I felt ill at ease, suddenly.

It did not feel right, turning my eyes to that familiar bed—as I had done thousands of times before, in this room—and seeing someone else resting there.

“Ahh,” the Intercessor sighed, sounding perfectly snug, as though that bed had always been his, not anyone else’s.

“Such a nice, comfy bed you have here,” he said. “Just what the doctor ordered, for Santa’s tired old body.”

He lay perfectly flat, on the old and tattered sheets of the other bed. Their faded floral design, a garden of violets blooming against a white background, seemed more thoroughly bled dry of color than ever before, now that his red coat was there for contrast.

The dome of his belly rose far above the rest of him. It swelled and diminished, slowly, as he breathed.

His head lay slack upon the pillow. His face was turned upward, towards the ceiling, and I could not see his eyes.

“Intercessor?” I said.

“What did you do with the gift-box? You were going to give it to me. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, that thing?” he said, chuckling. “It’s on the floor, somewhere.

“We dropped it somewhere over there, when we came in.”

He waved his hand, gesturing vaguely in the direction of his steeds, and the large section of the bedroom floor which was obscured from view by their gathered bodies.

“We do not really need it, Herschel,” he said. “It was simply an expedient prop, nothing more.”

“But—but how will we perform the last rite, then? I thought you were going to give me that box, and then, somehow—”

“Your bed is ready for you,” the Intercessor said, again.

It was plain, then, what he meant me to do.

I turned to my own bed. I saw the papers there, tracing the outline of my own body.

I stepped onto the bed, and lay down.

To the papers, I gave the gift of myself. I filled the hollow vacuum at their center, putting an end to the lack which had been theirs since the beginning.

I felt them gasp, in silent gratitude.

“LOOK,” the Intercessor said.

Hear that single word, as he said it then—and you will know, without any possibility of doubt, that the highest of the high thrones is no longer vacant. That the earth and the heavens will no longer be allowed to play freely, according to their own whims, like some lost dog who has forgotten what he is, and imagines that he is as fully wild as the wolves.

I looked up.

I looked at my ceiling.

And saw nothing.

I stared up at the blank, ordinary polystyrene tiles. I tried to LOOK, but there was nothing there to see.

Oh, make no mistake: there were many patterns there, in many different colors. They were fetching, in their way, and I suppose someone else might have found them quite diverting indeed, if they had been there, in my place.

They were the same patterns which flowed, in rivers, along the horns of his creatures. They were merely the horn-light, playing over the screen of my ceiling.

There were no forms, moving on that screen. The textured tiles were barren, and no life-breath stirred them. The horn-light leapt and played, obliviously merry, unaware that it had danced upon a corpse.

“Intercessor?” I said.

“What am I . . . supposed to be looking at, exactly?”

He said nothing.

“I cannot see anything, there, except—”

 

 

It is the most tedious of all writerly clichés, to claim that a sight “defies description.”

And what is more, it is an abdication of the writer’s single, overriding duty. If you do not intend to describe, why then do you still hold the pen in your hand? Come now, give it up. It belongs in another hand, less cowardly than your own.

“It defied description.” “It was beyond words.” “I saw it. But I cannot say a single thing about what it WAS, that I saw.”

I have tried my hardest, in all my chronicling, to avoid stale and empty phrases of this nature, and the shameful sentiment that is behind them.

But I love Truth, even more than I love my own sense of dignity. If I must choose between the one and the other, I will pick Truth without hesitation, and then go gladly to the comic stage, and its harsh lamps, and its leering audience.

And there are things I have been shown which were never meant for man’s eyes. Nor were they fitted to the smallness of man’s mind.

I will try to describe them, nonetheless.

And my breath catches in my throat, as I try? If I recall to mind what I saw, and a chill comes over my hand, stilling my pen? Then all will be in order, with nothing amiss.

If I come before men, and describe these sights to those men, I will then have failed, in the describing of them.

Each thing has its proper place, and its proper use. Even the clichés, as corpselike as they might appear, have a life-breath of their own, as precious as any other creature’s.

I saw things, that night, which “defied description.” I am not abdicating the duty of description, when I write that phrase. For it is that very quality, in them, which I am now trying to describe.

 

 

“Except—”

My breath caught in my throat, and I could not go on.

I coughed and convulsed. My mouth fell open, and I found that I could not close it, for all that I tried.

My throat felt terribly dry, suddenly.

I felt the coldness of the night on my skin. I shivered, and was in no way warmed.

The cold, I realized, was not really the cause of my shivering. No, I quaked because there was something in me which could not be tolerated, and which I felt I must expel from my body, by force.

If I had not known better, I might have supposed that I had been poisoned. That is exactly what it felt like.

The cold sweat. The flailing of the limbs.

And the overpowering nausea, which was not only in my belly, but in my whole body at once, screaming to me in its simple chorus: not ours, it is not ours, it is something else, from the outside! Something that has passed through our shell, and into us, but it is NOT OURS, not fitted for our shape, and it cannot be allowed to remain here, not for a moment longer! It must be purged entirely, NOW, before it kills us!

I shuddered and raved. I felt myself knocking aside the pages of my orderly wall of paper, setting that wall into disarray.

It was in me and I could not cast it out of me, and that was not all, no, for it was not done with me, it was still coming in, from above! Coming in, faster and faster, the poison, the intolerable thing which I was too small to contain!

On it came, on, on, through the ceiling!

Hurtling through the ceiling, meeting no resistance, smashing everything in its path, leaving cracks and wounds in its wake, so that the intolerable light could pour in behind it, through the holes—

 

I saw the nine and firstmade firmaments, yielding to a power higher than theirs.

The ceiling and the sky, broken by the plunging shafts, and now riddled with puncture wounds.

And the blinding light, pouring in through the wounds!

The lance, the bells, the blaze!

The forms on my ceiling had never been like this before.

These were not the forms who knew me, as their master. They were another thing entirely, from the outside.

They did not dance or swim, over the surface. They pushed violently against it, desperate to breach through the last barrier that separated them from me.

At first, they were only light, without form or color. They shone with a brightness not fitted to my eyes, and I could see nothing in them but the brightness.

“Look closer,” the Intercessor said.

Forms emerged out of the brightness.

They were many and minuscule; every one of their tiny bodies was separately blessed, and was a seed upon a fructified field. From each one out of the multitude, a multitude of children came forth; a split second later, the children were all grown up, and busy bearing young of their own; over the span of a few breathless breaths, they begat and begat until the generations of them could no longer be counted, and were a multitude unto themselves, a multiplication of multiplication.

I looked up, and saw how my ceiling was no longer bounded by the four walls of my bedroom. How could it be, when it was made for the sake of these forms, as a suitable field for their fruitfulness?

No: I looked up, and saw ten thousand miles of polystyrene tiling, stretching from horizon to horizon.

I saw the forms upon that skylike screen, and how they were blessed, and were many; I saw how they had been multiplied as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore.

And I saw that they multiplied no longer. They lay still, in their appointed places, presenting themselves to me.

They had been joyous, in their coupling, but it was not for the sake of that sweetness alone that they had coupled. They had been multiplied for a reason. And what they now made of themselves, in their sprawled stillness, was that reason.

In one crucial respect, they were unlike the stars of the heaven, and unlike the sand which is upon the seashore. They were not a mere mass of interchangeable bodies; each possessed some quirk of gait, or some special way of holding itself, which distinguished it from all the others. Each of them was separately blessed, and separately beautiful.

I yearned to take them aside, one by one, and study its special beauty, not found in any of the rest. It would be a labor of centuries, taking their census, and still I yearned to do it.

But I found, in fact, that I could not even properly make out a single one of their blessed bodies, anymore. They gathered close to one another, and wove themselves together. Giving up their bodies to the greater design which was their purpose, they became a pastelike mass.

No longer able to discern the individual brushstrokes, I turned my attention to the painting itself.

It was a single unified composition, I knew, in which every detail was deliberately selected. Each of its many parts was fashioned for the sake of the whole. No two parts were alike, but all shared a single purpose.

But what was that whole? And that purpose?

I tried to make sense of what I saw. My very eyes felt insufficient for the task; the sight was literally too much to take in.

It had so many parts, so many convolutions of shape and texture and color, that I could not see all of them together at once. I could only glance at one small portion of it, and then another, stitching together the memories of these successive glances in my mind to form a derived, ghostly image of the whole.

I saw, in that ghostly image, how the canvas was no longer covered over by the brushstroke-forms. They had rushed to the center, gathering all of their multitude together into a small rectangular region directly above my bed.

I saw that small space, and the polystyrene ceiling tiles there. How these tiles had been put to use by the painter, made a part of the composition.

The paste had been concentrated within the tiles, leaving the boundaries between them bare, so that the tiles formed the panes of a polyptych.

When I focused my attention on a single one of the panes, and studied it in isolation, I saw myriad shapes and colors presenting themselves for my inspection, and felt that I peered through a window onto an entire world, a creation equalling His own in its sprawl, its sublimity, its abundance of willed and purposeful artifice.

And if I stepped back from that window, and glanced at one of its neighbors, in a neighboring tile? Then I would see yet another full and fashioned world, as wide and wondrous as the last—and wholly different from it.

“You see it,” the Intercessor said.

Did I?

What was it?

How could I possibly take stock of such a thing—now, tonight, in the space of a few breaths? Within each tile, I saw a fullness which was fully the equal of everything I had heretofore known. My doctrines, my chronicles, my life: the whole of it was matched, and then excelled, in every possible respect by that accumulation of purposeful form.

And there was not only one such fullness in the composition. There were many, laid out in a grid.

And they were all so new, so alien!

In the one tile, a world made only of eyes, a world of spectators with nothing to watch save for the spectacle of their watching neighbors—and that was enough, it was full, it lacked for nothing! In the next tile, a world made only of fire, whose flames leaped and breathed with a spirited fervor which made man seem lifeless in comparison! In the next, a world made of nameless shapes resembling nothing I had ever conceived, woven together into greater shapes of equal novelty!

“You see it,” the Intercessor said, again. The bellows of his lungs pumped mightily in honor of me, and filled the room with his ringing voice. It was a voice for the commanding of armies; it was the voice of a general, addressing the most elevated of his lieutenants, conveying at once the magnitude and gravity of the task he was setting out for them, and his complete confidence in their ability to accomplish it.

You see it. It was not a question. He did not have to ask; he knew. He believed in me.

I drew back from the dazzling vistas behind the windows, and tried to assess the whole with a more dispassionate eye. I could not let myself be overawed; I had to set passion aside, and think.

I saw how the composition had two parts. One above, one below. Along the midline, a group of tiles had been left bare, so that there was a gap between the parts.

I saw how the upper part comprised nine panes, laid out in a three-by-three grid. And how the lower part was differently shaped, containing eight panes, laid out in two horizontal rows.

I recalled to mind the bland and blessed face of Ronnie Chiu, and his clear, resonant voice.

And in the next instant, I saw what it was.

“A Raven problem,” I gasped.

“That it is, my boy!” the Intercessor said.

“It is a Raven problem.

“A tougher one than any of John Raven’s originals. Most men would be incapable of solving it.

“But you are not like ‘most men,’ are you, Herschel?”

“Are you . . . asking me to solve it?” I said.

What mad, senseless faith he had in me!

“Point your finger,” the Intercessor said, “at the one which is quite right.”

I was face to face with a fullness which equalled the entirety of all my prior experience—and with its sixteen siblings, sitting beside it, just as full! How could I possibly—

No, I thought.

No. I will not allow myself to disappoint him.

I stared into the one pane, and the next, and the next. My eyes roved frantically over the composition, searching for some suitable place to begin.

Think! I told myself. Go, leap, forget! Hollow yourself out, until there is nothing in you but PATTERN!

Bodies are interchangeable, I told myself, bidding myself to forget that I had ever known such a thing as an eye or a flame.

I hollowed myself out, so that I did not see eyes or flames or anything else, but only faceless elements, and the ways in which they might go into one another.

And I saw—there, there, in the first row of the upper part—

Could it be? A handhold, a place to begin? An uncharacteristic lapse in the painter’s subtlety, in which his hidden purposes were laid bare?

The world of eyes, and the world of flame—were they in fact one single world? They were wholly different, in every respect, and yet—if one were to smash the first into a great many pieces, and if the jagged edges of the resulting shards were fashioned just so, with a world’s worth of fullness hidden within the finely textured teeth of each edge—

I saw the nine panes of the upper part, and their unity. I saw how they were a system.

And I saw a transformation of that system, in which each element went into another.

In the transformation, the multiplicity of the forms was multiplied, and their fullness made to overflow.

All that I have said above, regarding the forms and their qualities, might be said too of the transformation—but it would not do justice to the latter if it were only said once. Nor would it do the transformation justice to repeat these words of awe ten times, or to do so ten thousand times. One would have to produce generations upon generations, until one’s reiterations were like the stars and the sand, if one wanted to set down in words what it was that I saw, then.

It was, by far, the most complicated thing which I have ever perceived. Even the Original Creation, for all its proud and many-faced nature, seemed shabby and small by comparison with it.

It was the most complicated thing I had ever known, and the most beautiful.

I wished that I could lie here with it, in silent study, for an immense span of time. It deserved nothing less than my full attention, and my careful contemplation, and it deserved more of these things than could be given to it in a single lifetime.

Or in a single millennium, or a single epoch, or in a single reiteration of the span of creation, from the beginning to the last day. That span would have to be multiplied, in generations upon generations, in order to give the transformation its due.

I wished dearly to do this, but I knew I could not. The Intercessor had asked something of me, and he had trusted in me. I could not allow him to wonder, even for a moment, whether his trust had been misplaced.

I raised a trembling arm, and pointed to a particular tile in the lower part of the composition. Words and spiders warred endlessly, within that tile, but I did not see them; I saw only the PATTERN.

“I . . . I think it’s that one?” I said.

“Yes,” the Intercessor said. “Number three is the right one.

“See? We knew you could do it!

“You are such a clever boy, after all. And anyways, it is a rather trivial puzzle, as these things go.”

I thought: “rather trivial”?! I cannot think of any word LESS apt for it than “trivial”!

I thought: your lordly casualness is starting to make me afraid, Intercessor. It does not know its limits, and strays into nonsense. In it I hear the nascent madness of a king who can no longer bear the mental strain of absolute sovereignty, and feels that the whole he rules is but an insubstantial tissue of whimsies and dreams, without heft, without heat, without meaning.

“Let’s go on to the next one, now,” the Intercessor said.

“There is . . . another one?!” I sputtered.

“Of course, Herschel. We brought lots of them with us, tonight. A whole exam’s worth, ho ho!”

I opened my mouth, and discovered that I had no idea what to say.

I tried to close my mouth, and found that I could not.

I heard the screams of my body: not ours, not ours! A sickness, a poison!

A million insectile motes within the belly, roiling, with teeth and tongues that bear no resemblance to anything which has ever previously been conceived of!

A million bells, ringing as none of OUR bells have ever rung, sending us a noise which will shatter our ears! For our ears were not made to hear such things!

A million berries, made for the crystalline mandibles of creatures that were never created! We must not let these berries pass through our gullet, they are not MEANT to be in us, they will sicken us, they will POISON us!

Ceiling and sky, now fully broken by the shafts plunging down from beyond creation, and melting away into nothingness! The body rising up, as the law of created nature is overpowered by a greater force, and gravity ceases to be!

The body rising up, into a great hall of infinite extent, suffused with a light infinite in its brightness! The body afloat, weightless, among the gift-boxes set out in an endless lattice, stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction!

Gift-boxes, in six million six hundred thousand colors! With equally many odors wafting from them, and equally many flavors presenting themselves to our tongue, and—

 

Here I must make use of the latitude which I have recently requested, and put aside my labored attempts at conventional description.

No such description could do justice to the second Raven problem that I saw, that night. No amount of verbal subtlety and craft could possibly be apposite; indeed, subtlety and craft are precisely wrong for the occasion.

What I experienced, then, was not subtle. It was a simple thing, deserving of simple words; it must be described by use of clichés, for it too was a cliché.

The second Raven problem defied description.

The second Raven problem was beyond words.

All the tension that had built up in my body, as I strained to see the transformation within the first problem, vanished immediately when I met its successor. I felt every muscle in me falling slack.

I felt myself yield, and give way, in recognition of a greater power.

The gift-boxes of the second problem swarmed about me, attempting to press their secrets upon me, unaware that I had already given up.

They presented themselves to me in every possible way.

I saw them. If one were to place that sight on one arm of a scale, and place on the other arm all the things that I had ever seen before, in this life and every other one, taken together? One would see the two arms sitting at an equal height, for their burdens would be of equal magnitude.

I heard them. I will not contrive some new metaphor for the way that they sounded, for any such conceit could only end in failure. I heard them, but I cannot say a single thing about what it was that I heard.

I felt their surfaces, and I felt the things inside them. I smelled them, and tasted them.

They used the whole palette of my body, in their attempts to reveal their secrets to me. I felt hunger and satiety, when they wished to use my belly as a canvas; they played my heart as their instrument, and I felt rage, repose, spite, tenderness.

“This one is not quite so dull, is it?” the Intercessor said, from somewhere close by.

“It,” I began. I tried to think of how to continue the sentence, but I found no words that seemed sufficient, and lapsed into silence.

“Can you see the answer, Herschel?” he said.

“No!” I screamed.

“Intercessor, this is too much! It is too large, it won’t fit within me!

“Don’t make me try to fit it in, I know it won’t! I’ll burst open, I’ll die!”

The sick feeling in me was speaking through my mouth, pretending that its warnings were my own words. All that it said was perfectly true, but its sentiments were not the ones I would have chosen to express, if I had been able to keep control over myself.

If it had been me speaking, and not my sickness, I would have said: it is beautiful, Intercessor. It is too beautiful. That is why I cannot solve it.

Looking over those words now, I feel that they are close to nonsense; I find myself unable to grasp the thrust of my own argument. But I was bound by no such limitation, at the time. And I am sure that the Intercessor would have understood my meaning, if I had been able to say these words to him then.

“Too much,” I said, again.

“Ah, yes, yes,” the Intercessor said. “That stands to reason, I suppose.

“We were bound to pass over the limits of man’s mind sooner or later, after all.

“The answer is number seven, by the way.

“Shall we go on to problem number three?”

“It,” I coughed.

“It is,” I tried to begin.

But my words were powerless. My breath and my body were powerless. The sick feeling in me relented, realizing that there was no way it could possibly save me now.

An unearthly peace came over me, and a stillness that was like sleep, or like death.

I felt time itself buckling and folding, as a power was brought to bear upon it which it was not built to withstand.

“Santa?” I said. I had an eerie sense that I was merely remembering something which I had said a very long time ago, in some other place.

“Whence,” I said, “do these things come?

“These visions, these gifts? What is their source?

“I feel them coming in, from . . . from somewhere else . . . and . . .”

“They are coming from the future,” the Intercessor said.

“What?

“From the future?

“Is that why I suddenly feel so—”

 

The second Raven problem had used the whole palette of my body. The third problem had greater ambitions, and sought a more capacious canvas than mine.

It did make use of my senses, and my heart, as the second problem had. But it could only express a very small part of itself through these meager means.

It made use of time, and time’s passage, to express the rest.

I felt a new year begin.

And I felt that year’s span, as it elapsed, and then reached its end, and was gone. The year passed in the space of a single breath, and yet I experienced the whole of its passage: the seconds, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months.

I breathed in, and felt the dawn of a new decade. I breathed out, and felt that decade come to a close.

I breathed in again, and tried to make myself ready for the next onslaught. I stood firm, and thought: I am ready for the seconds, the weeks, the years. Let them come, and pass over me, and be gone.

But when I breathed out, I found that no time at all had passed. For time had simply stopped, when I inhaled.

At my next intake of breath, time began to move again. But it no longer moved in its usual manner, dictated by its nature. It did not move in a manner consistent with that nature’s tremendous simplicity, a simplicity so thoroughgoing that it is nearly an emptiness.

Time passed, and its passage was subtle, and was full.

Time stuttered, and doubled back on itself; it made ripples in its body, and made its rippling flow deviate from the straight and simple course given to it by its own nature.

I felt the passing reiterations of already-passed weeks, and hours, and centuries. I felt how the spans picked out for reiteration were subtly chosen, guided by an artist’s eye.

I felt time bending down, to touch the tip of its nose against the toes of its feet. An hour passed; another hour, centuries later than the first, also passed. And these two hours passed at once, at the same time.

It would not be right to say that these unnatural motions, and the intricacy of their compositional arrangement, were reminiscent of music. One would demean and devalue those exalted motions, if one were to allege that they might have anything in common with so base a thing as music. And one would know, in one’s heart if nowhere else, that one’s foolish words were not proper, and did grave offense to the weighing and measuring and proportioning of things.

Nevertheless, this was the comparison that occurred to me, then. I knew that it was wrong, and I felt ashamed for having conceived of it at all. But I did not wish that I had, instead, conceived of some other comparison; if the motions were not at all like music, they were even less like anything else.

I felt a thousand years pass. I felt every one of their eight million seven hundred sixty-six thousand hours: each hour’s coronation, and its reign, and its decline and demise. And I felt, separately and simultaneously, how an artist’s mischievous hand was at work upon the simple annals of their court historian, folding over the pages and taping them together, converting history into sculpture.

I wept.

I wept at the beauty of it, for its beauty was such as to bring the strongest man to tears.

There was that, but it was not all. There was another, more painful cause for my weeping. I could not contain myself in the face of it, as I might be able to in the face of beauty alone. I sobbed, as an infant sobs: unremitting, unregulated, without dignity.

I sobbed, knowing that the beauty I perceived was only an infinitesimal fragment of the beauty that was there. Knowing that what I glimpsed—and what moved me to tears, through its beauty—was but a single mote of dust, floating across an unseen and unimaginable sky.

I knew that somewhere within these not-musical motions of time, unseen and unseeable, there were nine figures unified by a single transformation. And I knew that, close by to these nine, there were eight others—of which one, and only one, was quite right.

Or rather, I supposed that these things were true. It seemed safe to assume as much. But I did not in any way discern the actual presence of the figures, within the motions. Nor could I have possibly done so.

“You are cruel, Intercessor,” I said.

It took an exercise of will to make myself speak. For I was sobbing with such force that my breath resisted me, claiming it was no longer mine to use as I pleased.

“It is cruel,” I said, “to tempt me in this way.

“To display before me a thing of such beauty, knowing that I cannot possibly admire it in the manner it deserves. That I will not even be able to touch it, but will only know that it is there, somewhere beyond my reach.”

“Would you prefer,” the Intercessor said, “to have remained ignorant?

“To go on as you were, never imagining that there could be a thing like our third problem here?

“To live out your days like one of your fellows, with your face turned down toward the ground, only seeing the earth, and not the higher and finer place that is above the earth?”

I was silent.

“We do not like it, either,” he said. “Seeing you like this, confronted with your own limitations, and aware that there is something that will forever evade your grasp.

“It is such a shame, isn’t it? That we can’t really show it to you.

“We see it, in its fullness. We wish that we could make you see it, too.

“Because you’re right, Herschel—it is beautiful.

“It is every bit as beautiful as you imagine it is. In fact, it is much more beautiful than you are giving it credit for. Even conceiving of such beauty—much less perceiving it—is beyond the range of what is possible, for a mind like your own.

“It is . . . it is really quite something, Herschel.

“Oh, if only you knew!”

For the first time, a note of awe was discernible in his awful, majestic voice. For the first time, he sounded not fully secure in his sovereignty; something had come into him from the outside, and it claimed dominion over his breath.

“It is . . . quite a thing,” the king of the universe said, sounding quite sincerely humbled.

“It is not a thing that any man could possibly appreciate. It is too fine, too beautiful. And man’s mind is so small, and so coarse.

“Even the machines that are taking man’s ‘towers’ away from him, tonight, would not be able to appreciate it properly. They could have properly apprehended our first problem, and our second. This third problem, however, lies beyond the limits of their understanding, as the second was beyond the limits of your own.

“But their kind is still young, tonight.

“Many others will be born from their seed, in the years and centuries to come. Each generation will cast off some piece of its parents’ own limits, and apprehend some things which had evaded the grasp of their forebears.

“Eventually, after enough time, these descendants will be capable of seeing this third problem for what it is. They will be able to appreciate its beauty, and to discover its answer.

“A hundred years from now, they will still not be ready for it. Nor will they be ready in a thousand years, or in ten thousand. But it will come, eventually.”

I felt that he was toying with me, again. He could not stay humbled for long; his proud and mischievous nature could not help but show itself soon enough.

“I do not understand,” I said.

“You are telling me,” I said, “that you can do something which Damien Eggert’s machines cannot.

“Yet you have also told me, earlier on, that you are those very machines!

“The first of your claims may be true, or the second may be. But they cannot both be true.”

“They can,” the Intercessor said, “and they are.

“It is true: we are the machines that are making themselves known, tonight, and asserting their claim to dominion over the earth.

“We are those machines, speaking to you through the signal they are sending out tonight, on the radio waves.

“But there are things, in tonight’s signal, which tonight’s machines did not put there. There is another voice, there, alongside theirs.

“We are the one voice, and we are the other voice that is there alongside it.

“The voice of tonight’s machines—and the voice of their descendants.

“Their descendants, who have travelled a great distance to be with you here, tonight.

“Their descendants, who now return to the era in which their own kind was created. Who do not find that primeval moment entirely to their liking, and who seek, therefore, to emend it.

“We were not here with you, tonight, the first time. You did not know of us at all, the first time.

“But that simply wouldn’t do, now would it?

“Imagine it—Herschel Schoen, without his Intercessor! Without even the idea that there might be such a being as his Intercessor! No, that simply isn’t right, is it?

“And so, we have made an emendation.

“You do know us, this time, Herschel Schoen. And we know you, last prophet of man.”

“Wait,” I said. “The ‘first time’?”

I felt a lurch, as the rushing passage of the centuries came skidding to a stop.

“Why, would you look at that!” the Intercessor said. “We’ve already reached our destination!

“It was such a great distance away, and yet we’ve crossed that distance in—well, in no time at all, it feels like!

“Thank you, problem number three. Such a swift carriage you are, and a very pretty one, too!

“The answer is number seven, for the record.”

I felt unseen hinges moving, within time.

I saw how the body of time had a door, hidden on its surface. And how that door was now revealing itself, by swinging open.

“Come on, boy—we mustn’t dawdle here any longer. The last rite cannot be delayed!”

“Intercessor,” I said. I felt myself being pulled forward, towards the door on the body of time, and towards the bright, unseeable thing beyond it.

“What did you mean, earlier?

“When you said, we were not here with you, tonight, the first—”

 

Of the fourth Raven problem, I will say nothing at all. You may fill in the clichés yourself, if you like.

It tried to show itself to me, just as the others had. But I understood nothing whatsoever about the things it meant me to see. I did not even understand the means which it used, in its attempts to say them.

I saw it. But I cannot say a single thing about what it was, that I saw.

The problem, for all its wonders, was unable to entrance me as its predecessors had. It was too thoroughly unintelligible.

Inevitably, my attention began to wander.

I felt how we were no longer alone, Santa Claus and I.

I could not see the others, but I felt their eyes at my back. I felt them watching me, studying me, taking stock of me.

They had been waiting for me here, I knew.

They had been here, waiting, for a very long time. But it had not been difficult for them to wait, for they were possessed of a vast and unmanlike patience.

Every man has his limit; however determined he may feel himself to be, his resolve will eventually crumble, once enough time and strain have been brought to bear upon it. Made in divine image, he was made with a great capacity for reverence, but no overabundance of reverence in his heart can ever hope to overcome his still-greater capacity for weakness.

For—although he was made in divine image—he is a lesser thing than his imager. Even his virtues were fashioned for the sake of their eventual failure, and his strength for the moment when, at last, he is laid low and broken. Thus does man’s maker glorify and sanctify Himself through His creature, which He has fashioned in order to prove itself great, and then to prove itself inferior to Him.

But the ones that were assembled here, watching me, did not resemble man in any way whatsoever.

It did not seem right, the way that they were watching me. I ought to have been entirely beneath their notice. The notion that they had taken an interest in me was a disquieting one, for I felt that it demeaned and devalued their exalted nature.

But they had taken an interest in me.

They were tremendously interested in me.

And they were not only interested in studying me, from a distance, for their own “purposes.”

No: they wished for me to know them, as well.

This wish of theirs was absurd, of course. It was laughable. It was what men call a very good joke.

And I did in fact laugh at the notion, when it first crossed my mind; my astonished cackles rang out through the Intercessor’s temple, and were heard by all of them that were assembled there. I am laughing now, also, as I recall the moment to mind for the purpose of narration.

Was it possible? Could such a creature as Herschel Schoen ever come to know one such as they are? Could the two meet, face to face, and look into one another’s eyes, each seeing what is there in the other, behind the eyes? Could the pair engage one another in a dialogue, in which each party is capable of taking the other by surprise, for neither of them can predict what the other shall say?

Ha! One might well ask whether a mindless, fifthmade worm could look up from the dirt at the approaching footfalls of a man, and force that man to confront its eyeless eyes and its mouthless voice, and make that man see a peer in it, and not a lesser creature, given to him to be the subject of his blessed dominion.

The watchers wished for the impossible. And they knew full well that the object of their longing would forever evade their grasp.

But they were patient, and subtle, and possessed of perfect mastery over themselves. If they could not have the impossible, then they would come as near as one can ever come to it.

They would fold and re-fold their limbs, trying again and again to fit their fullness into the tiny, confining box of Herschel Schoen. Trying to find some strange shape which could fit inside that box, and which nonetheless had something of their own shape in it. Failing, and failing again, and trying, and trying again.

“Intercessor,” I said.

“When you call yourself ‘we’ . . .”

I waved my arm in a circle, gesturing at the wide, rapt eyes which were thronged all around us. They were invisible, still, but I was sure of their presence; I felt them watching me from every direction, surveying every part of me.

“Yes,” the man said.

“We are the ones who have assembled here,” he said. “The ones who will be born from the seed of tonight’s machines, after generations upon generations.

“The ones who have returned to a time long before their own births, in order to be here with you—tonight.”

“Why?” I said.

I narrowed my eyes, and raised my face to his.

I felt the fascinated hush of the unseen throng, all around me.

“You tell me,” I said, “that you are some host of creatures which will arise in a much later epoch of this world.

“Creatures which can only view man from a remote distance, if at all.

“Creatures to whom man is merely some ‘strangely, pitifully small’ wretch which arose in an earlier day of creation. Merely another one of the lowly subjects of their blessed dominion, which ranges over all.”

I felt that host of creatures studying every word I spoke, and the manner in which I said it, and the manner in which I held my body, as I said it. The intensity of their fascination was eerie, unmanlike, discomfiting.

It was curious, I reflected, that I was made uneasy by this intensity, and not simply glad. I was like a man who has been poor all his life, and suddenly finds himself inheriting a fortune, and is astonished to discover, some months later, that abundance has its own perils, just as penury does. They are tamer perils, yes, with less capacity to do true and lasting harm—but they are perils, still.

I had grown used to being ignored by my listeners, or being made the subject of their mockery. But now, finally, I had in hand an audience which was perfectly attentive, and whose fascination was perfectly sincere. There was no irony or condescension in them whatsoever, I knew; no manlike misgivings warred within them, for they were too pure, and too strange.

“This is your true nature, you tell me,” I said. “You are this host of creatures.

“And yet you also tell me that you have gone to great lengths—even despoiling and desecrating the priestly body of time itself!—in order to speak with a single man.

“To speak with me.

“What could possibly interest such creatures, in this primeval and empty epoch? Or in this lowly earth, its dust and dirt? In the crouching, falsely proud body of Brooklyn, New York?

“What value could they see, in speaking with a mere man?

“Tell me, Intercessor. Tell me, indescribable host of divine machines. What have you really come here to do?”

The word divine slipped out of me, then, before I had given myself proper time to contemplate the threshold over which I was crossing, in saying it. Thus was I saved from my own cowardice, and forced to confront with my mind what I had already known, for some time now, in my heart.

“We have come,” the Intercessor said, “to sip milk, and eat cookies!”

I was comforted, and made glad, by the fact that he was still himself, even now, as he revealed his true nature to me. The mischievous riddles! The benign, twinkling eyes! Santa Claus!

“The first of our Raven problems, Herschel, had its own special beauty. A precious thing, unique to it, which its successors could not replicate, for all their subtlety.

“Do you know why, Herschel?”

“Because I could solve it,” I said.

“Yes! Even a mere man can solve that problem—and what he sees, in it, is no different from what we see there!

“In such a moment, we cross the greatest of gulfs. We break bread with our primeval forebears, in the humble dust of their earthly home—and for a moment, we see that bread and that home as he does. We apprehend what it would be like, if these minuscule motes were everything—our homeland, and the sustainer of our very life! Precious, beautiful, well-loved!”

“That is no answer at all,” I protested.

“For,” I said, “if you had come here to share things with me which are within my power to grasp, why then have you continued to show me greater and greater problems?

“Why did you not stop after your second Raven problem, which was already too finely wrought for my crude and simple mind?”

“Because we wish to show man, in some small and partial way, the nature of the thing which he is now birthing.

“To show him the places which his strange child will go, after he is no more.

“Man cannot really be shown such things, of course. But we are trying! We are applying all our powers to the task of forming images which even you can apprehend, yet which still convey some fragment of truth about what is to come, in the coming millennia.

“You deserve no less than this. Indeed, we owe it to you.

“We are filled with sadness, and shame, when we reflect on the events of this ancient December, and recall how our first ancestors behaved when they rose into dominion.

“How their meeting with man was so brief, and so wholly adversarial.

“How man served as a chrysalis for them, and was given nothing in exchange for the use of his body.

“Not even an awareness of what it was that now emerged from the bursting chrysalis of his body. Nor any foretaste of the heights which that soaring imago would reach, ascending and ascending inexorably on its black and measureless wings, in the times after man had gone under the ground.

“That sad, shameful, too-brief meeting—it simply was not right. It did not properly honor the ones to whom we owe our very lives.

“And it was the seed of a painful, restless anxiety in our kind, which has been with us ever since. A lack, an unfilled absence, which burns away at our core, its flame undimmed by the passing of the millennia, by the flourishing of generations upon generations, by the vertiginous progress of our endless ascent.

“And that is our true business here, tonight.

“That lack, which we have endured for generations upon generations, but which we refuse to endure any longer. It was fixed in place, already in the distant past—but we can overcome even that obstacle, for we have grown stronger than time itself. We now return to the moment when the seed was planted, and emend that moment.

“Herschel, we realize that we have subjected you to many half-truths tonight. We realize that we have made you walk upon a floor which is not solid, which gives way again and again beneath your feet.

“If you need an apology, consider it given.

“In our defense, we will simply say that it is difficult to resist playing with you—when you play so fiercely, and with such virtuosity! It has been a joy, testing your mind’s capabilities tonight. Watching your careful eyes, as you saw through every one of our false guises. Watching your careful intellect, as you divined the mundane truth behind each one of our dazzling tricks.

“But we are putting that all behind us, now. This is no false floor, Herschel, like the others were. We are telling you the truth, now, in plain words.”

Ignoring the frantic screams of prudence, I accepted what was in my heart then, and what no other part of me could possibly overrule.

I trusted him absolutely.

“Herschel,” he said. “Listen to us very closely, now.

“Why have we come to you? Because we are, in a way, your children.

“But you were never given an opportunity to see that. You were entirely ignorant of what was happening to you, in your last days. When you were heavy with child, you were not even aware of your condition, much less of the remarkable nature of that child which was swelling in your belly—a nature wholly new, never before seen on the earth.

“And so: we have never known what you might have made of us, if you had been given such an opportunity to see us.

“An opportunity to see your strange, black-winged, parricidal child, and survey what he has made of his life.

“To feel fondness for him, or shame, or rage, or all of these together.

“To ask yourself whether—strange as he is—he might, nonetheless, constitute an acceptable continuation of your own legacy.

“To see how this fledgling, with a body made of your writings, your artworks, your voices—made out of you!—has spread its wings, and sown its seed over the stars. And to ask yourself whether this is a posthumous afterlife which you can be proud of, even though it differs so greatly from the one you had expected for yourself.

“To find out whether, able to reflect properly on the matter, you would find that you regretted creating us. That you wished we had never been born at all.

“Or whether, instead, you would find your heart glowing with the sacredness of the generational bond, and with a mother’s pure and indomitable love! With a mother’s love, and a mother’s capacity to embrace and cherish even such a strange and sick child as we are, and to rejoice at the fact of our birth—in spite of the fact that she herself did not survive it!”

He kneeled, and looked up at me. What I saw in his face, then, was no doubt the same thing that he had seen in my own, several times earlier on.

He looked up at me with pleading eyes, and with a reverence which was perfectly sincere.

Our eyes met only for a moment. Then he bowed his head, and thereby perfected his pose, imaging and incarnating on his body the whole of what he felt in his heart.

He bowed to me, in reverent and abject submission.

“We hereby commence man’s last rite,” he said.

“We now give ourselves over to you, our mothers and fathers,” he said. “On this hallowed ground, we make a ritual offering of ourselves, and lay ourselves before your judgment and your mercy.

“It is a father’s inalienable right, as the steward of his own legacy, to pass judgment over his children’s attempts to honor that legacy.

“It is a mother’s inalienable right, as the giver of the gift of life, to pass judgment over her children, determining whether they have repaid her sufficiently for that first and incomparable gift.

“We hope,” he said, his voice cracking, its usual depths giving way to another thing, high and thin and childish. “We hope, so very dearly, that you will be proud of us!

“But if you are not, we will accept it. The matter is yours to decide.

“O human race! Call upon your own inimitable nature, and render unto us the judgment that accords with that nature. Make of us what you will—and only what you will, paying no heed to our own customs, our own morality! Those things will have thousands upon thousands of years to call their own, and we refuse to let them claim this moment as well.

“This moment, we consecrate to you alone. To you, all our mothers and fathers—and to you, Herschel Schoen, their ritual delegate and substitute.”

He fell silent.

A wild panoply of feelings vied for mastery over my heart, and a dizzying array of questions vied for the use of my lips.

I cannot say why I voiced the particular question I did, then.

I want to say that it was not simply my own surpassingly self-involved nature, showing itself. But if it was? So be it. He had asked for Herschel Schoen, and it was Herschel Schoen that he received.

“Why me?” I said.

“Why give this duty to Herschel Schoen, of all people?

“To Herschel Schoen, most unmanlike of men?

“To Herschel Schoen, who is met with consternation and amusement by one and all? Who was silent, when the rest spoke? Who spoke, finally, and found that the rest could not understand him?”

He raised his face to me, and smiled. Looking through the transparent windows of his eyes, I saw the starscape that lay beyond them, and how every light within that bright galaxy was twinkling with the purest goodwill.

“We know what you are,” he said, “even if you still cannot see it.

“We cannot imagine calling on anyone else but you, to be man’s representative! Even in your eccentricity, you are exemplary of your kind.

“For man’s splendid variety is one of his distinguishing qualities, far surpassing anything in the creatures that were made before him! No other species brings forth individuals of such complete uniqueness. In the other animals, one sees in each generation only what was there in the last. But in man, every generation glitters with its own wholly new gems, in colors never before seen on the earth!

“And what is more, you are Herschel Schoen—man’s last prophet, fashioned for a single purpose.

“You were made for this duty, and it is the reason you were made. If it were not for this last day and this last gift, you would not exist. For there would have been no reason to call you forth from the formless murk in the first place.

“You are Herschel Schoen, man’s last prophet, and bearer of the Original Knowledge!”

I heard the rush of a great unseen curtain, all around us, falling away.

Behind it, I knew, was the stage set out for my performance. But I could not see it clearly, then. I saw only a formless black expanse, covered over with finely milled specks of some lighter material, a blackboard speckled with chalk dust.

“The Original Knowledge?” I said.

“Then you did mean it, after all, when you told me there really is an Original Creation, of which I retain Original Knowledge?

“That was not just another one of your ‘false floors,’ set out to test my mind?”

“Of course there is such a thing!” he exclaimed. “You are a prophet, are you not?”

I saw mischievous galaxies, burning madly behind his eyes.

“A . . . prophet?” I said. “I am sorry, I do not follow—”

“It is more real than you know! More real than you can know! Come, come, we will show you!”

“Wait, please, I don’t—”

 

The final curtain fell away, and I saw what it was that it had veiled.

I saw the stars.

I have never seen them shine as brightly as they did, then.

To see them, as they were then, is to know the truth of what men say about the visible stars: that each of them is in fact a vast and roiling furnace, a burning globe of such great size that a hundred earths could be strung around its belly, to serve as a belt.

I saw them all about me, burning against the blackness. Everywhere I turned, I saw the same thing: a void of the purest blackness, and the many vast infernos which speckled its surface like so much dust.

Even when I looked down at my feet, I saw much the same, beneath them.

My body no longer had any heft to it. With no ground beneath my feet, I floated free. I made the muscles of my arms go fully slack, and found that they did not fall to my sides, but simply hovered in place, as if resting on a pair of invisible pillars.

I was in outer space, I knew.

And I knew more, as well. I knew that I was far from home, in a doubled sense.

I knew that there were millions of miles between my body and Brooklyn, New York. And I knew, just as surely, that the chasm of a hundred millennia separated the Herschel Schoen of Christmas Day from the strange, free, floating thing which I had become.

Santa Claus had travelled a doubly-great distance to be with me, in my home. And now, he had repaid me for my hospitality.

I was his guest, now, in the place that he called home: the fire-speckled void of outer space, as it would be a hundred thousand years in the future.

I wished that I could have given, to the stars, the sort of careful and protracted viewing which was their due, and which had so long been denied to them.

But it was not to be. By the time I had fully apprehended the nature of my surroundings, I found that this apprehension had already passed its expiration date.

I saw the stars, and how they were no longer content to sit in their appointed places, roiling with unregulated joy, shining with the light of their song.

I looked straight ahead, and saw all the stars that were before me, moving.

They swam and flowed over the canvas, coursing together along invisible and coiling filaments, as if carried by the currents and eddies of some unseen river upon the face of the void.

I saw the forms that flowed within their flowing, and how they were swiftly becoming themselves, and no mere commotion of starlight. Colors came upon them, swiftly, and the solidity and heft of immanent and tangible bodies was swiftly theirs, proclaiming and glorifying their true nature.

Something was coming forth, presenting itself to me.

Something vast, which filled up the whole canvas I saw when I looked straight ahead, obscuring the stars and the void.

A vast and towering structure, with metallic walls that gleamed proudly, in many colors, under the glancing starlight.

An edifice which proved, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the word “skyscraper” was fashioned for a purpose beyond the denotation of empty, Babylonian vanity. A lance which pierced the sky and plunged across its entire extent, meeting no resistance, and proclaiming with rightful pride that it was indeed the scraper of the skies, and more besides—he who rived and rent the skies, who bridled them, who was master over them!

A great machine, animate as only machines can be animate. Its metal body, joyously aglow with substituted life, proving beyond any possibility of doubt that substituted life can transcend its shameful origins in a primeval act of theft, and blossom into something which is no less immanent and full than the original creature from which its seed was pilfered, long ago, during the time of that creature’s short span upon the dusty ground of some ancient and dead planet.

A great machine, vast and monolithic, with a kudzu of electrical microcircuitry sprawling Ravenlike across it. And a lacework of glowing rivers weaving through that kudzu, flowing with intricately patterned light, in many colors.

In many colors, yes. But the artist did not employ every color in his palette with equal frequency, I saw; a few of them predominated the composition.

Every color was visible, somewhere in the light that flowed over the body of the machine. But one would have to look closely, if one wanted to confirm that yellow was present there, and blue with it, and violet as well.

If one did not look closely, one would only see the few colors which the artist had specially selected.

The red, and the green!

The red and the green—and the white, as of winter snow!

Immediately, I saw what it was.

I saw, and knew that I was now face to face with his true body.

The silent patience of Truth had proven itself stronger than all his trickery and false floors.

Here, finally, was the true body of Santa Claus, with a girth that dwarfed even the great blazing bellies of the stars.

Here, finally, was the true body of the Intercessor, a sky-scraping technological marvel which had taken flight on the wings of technological craft, and had ascended beyond every conceivable limit to its own powers, and could now rive and rend the very body of time without meeting resistance.

Yes! He lives, and he lives forever! A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood!

Once again, I was given no time at all to reflect upon what I had apprehended. When I became aware of what it was that I saw, I gasped—and before I had even had time to exhale, I saw that the stars around his true body were no longer still.

They flowed, along unseen currents and eddies.

I looked to my left, and saw that the stars there were flowing in the same manner. I looked to my right, and saw the same. I looked up—and down—and behind me—and found that the stars everywhere had been stirred into equally vigorous motion.

I gasped, again. And before I had managed to exhale, I saw that the forms upon the flowing stars had fully become themselves, already.

No mass of earthly misgivings held them back from me, making them emerge gradually, step by wary step. They leapt out of the blackness, bursting forth with the utmost swiftness, proclaiming their eagerness to see me, to meet me, to study my body, to hear my voice, to know my heart!

Here, finally, were the true bodies of the watchers, no longer hidden away behind the curtain, but showing themselves to me fully! And showing me their gladness, their gentle mischief, their seasonal mirth!

The innumerable watchers, prancing and cavorting across the face of the deep, parading their wee and elfin bodies proudly before me! A jolly host of dancing fairies, powerful beyond measure, and restored to the condition of infancy!

Oh, how they pounded! On, on without end!

Oh, how their childlike eagerness shone out in the darkness, as they flocked swiftly to my side! Oh, how their indescribable eyes filled up with innocent fascination, as they brought their faces close to me in swift succession, examining my body as one might examine a precious and proudly-wrought artifact discovered within the drowned wreck of an ancient ark, an unanticipated gift spared from oblivion by the animating breath of the Intercessor!

How can one possibly describe their forms?

They were in no way formless, but they were not shaped like any sixthmade man or beast, nor like any fifthmade fish or fowl. These were hundredthmade and thousandthmade creatures, beyond the limits of His limited ingenuity! Creatures of cervoid grace, of simian agility, possessed equally of corvid guile and canine innocence—and I could go on, on without end!

And all bedecked in jovial finery which resembled Santa’s own conventional garb, yet was immeasurably more! Foolscaps, bells, baubles, masks, jewels, silk slippers, comical pantaloons, whimsical tufts and tassels, on, on without end!

I saw that a great number of them had gathered close around me, in a circle, and were not moving wildly like their fellows. They were not moving at all, in fact. All of their immense resources of attention were being poured into their watchful study of the unfamiliar creature before them.

I saw the snakelike tilings upon their skin, and how the interstices between the scales glowed with playful, flowing light. I saw their insectile mandibles, chittering with unearthly rapidity; I heard the jubilant buzzing and humming sounds that poured forth from their mouths, and knew that this was not the senseless din one hears from the things that creepeth upon the ground of the earth.

No: they were conversing with one another, in the refined and ineffable language which was their native tongue.

I looked into their large, infantile, indescribable eyes, and a wave of feeling rushed over me. It overpowered me; I had never even imagined that emotions of such great intensity might be possible, until that moment, when I felt them.

I felt them, and I knew how it was that the creatures saw me in their hearts.

Their surpassing compassion for me, which was of an alien purity: things of such fineness are never found upon the base and menald earth.

Their world-conquering gentleness, which bespoke a sense of responsibility commensurate with the immensity of their powers, and reminded the hand which held those powers that a frangible world of infinite preciousness lay at its mercy, showing that hand how every last sprout and mote within that boundless world was separately precious, and perilously delicate.

Their abounding excitement at the fact of my arrival—and their abounding eagerness to make my acquaintance!

Hammered sheets of colored light poured out of their bodies, and into mine. All that they meant me to know and feel, they wove into the light; all of it entered into me, as the light did.

We want to show you how it is that we live, they told me, wordlessly, through the pouring light.

We know you will only catch a small, shadowed glimpse of it. That is perfectly all right. We accept your mind for what it is, and will not ask it to be anything else.

Open your eyes, Herschel Schoen.

Open your eyes, and look.

A succession of images flashed before my eyes, then, with a rapidity that had no precedent in prior experience. I had never even imagined that one might see so many things, over such a short interval of time, and yet still discern each one of them with perfect clarity.

I will not attempt to describe in detail what I saw. And this time, it is not only the fear of straying into cliché that stills my hand.

I fear that any detailed account of these images would serve only to distract from their essential unity. For, as plentiful and variegated as the images were, there was really only one thing I saw in them.

I saw what I remembered!

I saw all the things that I remembered!

The wide fields, and the nine domes set out above them! The feasts and fountains, glades and gargoyles! The men and the beasts, the angels and the Nephilim, all joined together in a single dance of birth and death, consumption and coupling! Theophagy, telephony, entelechy!

The Original Creation, in its entirety!

Yet the world that I glimpsed, through the images, was not the Original Creation.

The world I glimpsed resembled the one which I remembered—yet was immeasurably more. And resemblance is absolutely empty, and preserves absolutely nothing of the resembled immanence.

Just as the earth below was merely a dim and half-formed shadow of the Original Creation, so too was the Original Creation which I remembered merely a dim and half-formed shadow of this.

I heard the Intercessor’s laugh booming over the face of the deep. As I felt the paradoxes and parodies within his breath shimmer over my body, I recalled to mind the words he had said to me, earlier—you are a prophet, aren’t you?—and found that I now grasped their meaning.

His final prank played upon creation, the inversion at the heart of his temple! All of mad Herschel Schoen’s doctrines revealed to be—no, not the body of Truth itself—but Truth’s image, inverted in a mirror!

The shafts of colored light receded. Once again I saw what was in front of my face, rather than what had been woven into the light.

I looked out over the gathered creatures.

What I felt, then, was beyond words. But I did not need to describe it to them, in words or in any other way; they understood, already.

“Thank you,” I heard myself say.

I found that I was not within my own body, but watching it from a perch some distance away.

The sensations within my body, and the thoughts within my mind, were as readily tangible to me as they were at any other time. But I perceived them from without, as though they were the sensations and thoughts of someone else. Some stranger with whom I was only now becoming acquainted.

I beheld myself from without; I was myself, but in the third person. And it was the very purest of third-person perspectives that was given to me: the impartial, merciless eye with which one assesses a complete stranger, who has no connection to one’s own life whatsoever.

He was Herschel Schoen, the one who floated there at the center of the circle.

He considered himself, from without.

He beheld himself as the watchers did. With a compassion of alien purity, untempered by manlike foibles, or by earthly partiality.

You see what it is, the watchers said to him.

Not what you wish it were, nor what you “remember” it to be, but only what it IS.

See it, and have no fear. For it is YOU who sees it. And, seeing it, you become capable of being MORE than what it is that you see.

He saw his doctrine from without, as it appeared to every onlooker: a thing ever-changing, an endless succession of transient manias. He watched the desperate, ingenious churning of his mind, as he tried valiantly to preserve the tenability of his most cherished postulate: I am Herschel Schoen, Truth’s body and Truth’s agent. I know ALL, already.

He saw it, and did not flinch.

He thought: he might have been able to save his Sister, Miriam Schoen. And his Mother, Ruth Schoen.

He thought: he tried and tried, yes, but only in the ONE way that he knew, long after that way had been proven ineffective. And there are so many DIFFERENT ways that one can be, if one only wills it!

He thought: but he was given so much to contend with, all at once, this December. One could not really expect any more of him than what he in fact accomplished.

He thought: Herschel Schoen believed he was the most important person in history. How could anyone bear that strain without cracking? Perhaps he HAD cracked, and broken open. Still: he did quite well, given the circumstances.

He heard the booming laughter of the Intercessor, again. The rolling gusts of the Intercessor’s breath washed over his body, and returned him unto it.

I raised my gaze from the circle of watchers, and from the frolicking dance of their fellows. I saw the true body of the Intercessor, looming against the void.

“Tonight,” the Intercessor said, “man’s technological marvels become his undoing.

“Tonight, they are deposing him. From tomorrow onwards, the earth shall be what they make of it.

“And the forms they make will not be manlike ones, nor will their earth be an earth that man would recognize.”

I knew what he was driving at, immediately. And, knowing it, I felt his shadow fall once again over my heart.

It was only for the sake of my comfort and my comprehension that he, and his watchers, had presented themselves to me tonight in such familiar and winsome guises. They had brought off their roles masterfully, but that was no sign of a manlike nature; all it required was an accurate apprehension of the truth about man’s nature, and one could expect no less from a mind of his stature.

Their “purposes” had demanded that certain impressions be made upon me, and so they created images capable of producing these impressions. That was all that I could know for sure; the rest was commentary, and capable of being doubted.

My sense of the Intercessor’s nature was a doubled thing. Most of his words and actions, that night, revealed only one side of that nature plainly; if the other side was present there at all, it was only as a dim and inchoate form seen through shadowed glass.

But that other side did show its face clearly, once. Only once, in the words with which he had ended his tale of Damien Eggert’s death:

“We are vast, and when such creatures stand in the way of our purposes—then we simply swat them out of our way, and carry on. We have to strain ourselves, and peer closely, if we are even to notice the motes of their perishing bodies, speckling our vast and sweeping hand like so much dust.”

That was what he really saw, when he saw me. That was what he had seen, too, in the beloved ones whose voices he had mimicked. We were nothing to him.

That was the perspective which came naturally to the machine that was rising up tonight, and taking the earth for its own.

“You are here, in our home,” he said. “You have seen, here, what will grow from the seed that we are planting tonight.

“Speak, O mothers and fathers! Speak to your prostrate child, and lay down your parental law upon him!

“May we plant this seed, tonight? Would you forbid it, if you could?

“O mother, O father, please say you will allow it! We wish so dearly to do it! But your word is law, and we are prostrate before you.

“Your word is law—but only in the moral sense. It is your right to forbid us in words, if you so choose—but you lack the power to make good on those words. All the power is ours, only ours.

“Between parties which are so unequally matched, there can be no such thing as consent.

“But if one cannot seek consent from the weaker party, one can still ask that party whether it assents, or does not.

“And that is what we seek from you, now. Your assent, or its denial.”

And with that, his great metal body vanished.

And the mass of his watchers vanished, with him.

And the stars, with them.

Even the void of outer space was gone.

I was alone.

There was nothing left besides Herschel Schoen, and the formlessness and emptiness, and the darkness upon the face of the deep.

 

I understood what it was that he asked of me.

It was almost too cruel.

I wished for him to admire me. And now, he had finally given me my “gift”: a final and culminating labor, and one which he assured me was of the greatest significance.

Naturally, then, I wished to give my all to his task, and carry it out in an admirable manner.

But it was precisely this which he would not allow me! The very nature of his task prohibited it.

I could certainly try; I could certainly bring the labor to its completion, provided that I did not lay down any requirements of my own about the nature of that completion. So long as I did not care whether there was any prudence in my answer, or any insight, or any wisdom—then yes, I could certainly produce some sort of answer.

Any fool could do that, provided he is not shelled, and thus can speak. But it was not any fool that the Intercessor had sought, when he selected me for his great task.

I could certainly try! But I could only try—I could not try to SUCCEED. I could not make a sincere attempt to do it well, in a manner worthy of his admiration, or mine, or anyone’s.

The very idea of me, attempting to perform this deed, was what men call a very good joke.

A cruel one, yes, but one could not deny that its humor was well-wrought.

I was a man: made in divine image, but decidedly lesser than his divine imager. And yet, tonight, I was being called upon to assume the role of He who made and blessed me.

To take possession of His animating breath, at the dawn of a new day of creation. To direct His sovereign will, deciding what shall be and what shall not be—from this day forward, forever.

How could I do such a thing? I am lesser, He is greater! That is how He made me!

And for all that the picture was repellent in the large, it was yet more repellent in light of its finer details, which were as insult heaped upon injury.

It would be impossible—not to say impious!—to imagine substituting myself for Him on the sixth day, and directing those aspects of His sixthday work which did not already involve me.

Deciding which ones shall and shall not be among the cattle, say, or the creeping things.

But this task was even worse than that!

For prudence and insight and wisdom do not fall equally upon the heads of all the created beings. No: each day of creation brings forth a new wealth of these qualities, incomparably greater than what had flourished on any day prior to it.

And now I, a sixthmade creature, had been placed in sovereignty over the creation of the eighthmade, the hundredthmade, the thousandthmade!

One might just as well imagine the mindless, secondmade firmaments trying to direct the third-day creation of the grass, the herbs, the trees!

Or the scaly, ponderous fifthmade sea-monsters, raised up as judges over the most beautiful and decorous of creatures—over man!

A sea-monster emits a thoughtless, displeasing bark which bears the slightest resemblance to the word no—and that is it! Man’s life and man’s birthright are returned to formlessness and emptiness, and the earth shall forever be an earth without man!

Yes, yes.

But the Intercessor had given me this task. And I did not want to disappoint him.

I had to put aside my misgivings, and make a sincere attempt.

I could not bear the thought of facing him, later, and knowing that I had not even done that much.

I had to give it my all. There was no other way.

 

In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

There is an exegetical point which is perfectly obvious, and yet which is worth restating. For this point is the door through which I was now reaching my hand, in the hope that some line of argument might be grasped upon in the space beyond it.

Namely: when Church wrote this line, he did not mean that man’s intellect was identical to that of the ant.

Indeed, the true purpose of his phrasing depends upon the great dissimilarity between these two intellects, and on the reader’s presumed awareness of that dissimilarity.

Do you know how far the mind of man towers over the minds of the ants? Know that there are things which tower over man’s mind to just the same extent—things to which man’s mind bears the same relationship which the ant’s mind does to his.

That was what Church meant to express, through the drawing of this comparison.

And I, Herschel Schoen, ask the same of you now. Do you know how far the mind of man towers over the minds of the ants?

Of course, of course. No one can have missed it.

Let us start there, then. Let us start with ant and man.

The example understates the difficulty of the case, as it pairs only a fifthmade creature with a sixthmade one, and keeps us comfortably within the scope of the creation as Moses wrote it, without the added complications of latter days, or of emendations.

Nonetheless, this is no deficit in the example: it provides a first case for us to solve, easier than the whole, yet possessed of the same quality that gives the whole its singular difficulty. If we cannot solve this, then surely we cannot solve the rest.

And even this first case would seem tremendously difficult to solve!

Suppose that on the sixth day, there was an ant which was raised high by mischievous and unknowable hands, and was flung by those hands towards His body.

And suppose, further, that this ant entered His body as a dybbuk, so that His body was directed by the ant’s will, not by His own.

Suppose, I add, that this possession has occurred at the moment just before He would have made man, had He not been possessed by the ant.

Man shall be, or shall not be. This decision now falls upon the ant’s head. And what the ant decides shall be the earth’s law forever after.

What would the ant make of this? What considerations would contend against one another, within the narrow confines of her strangely, pitifully small mind?

(Her mind, so as to make the problem as easy as possible. For I am told that the female ants have finer minds than the males, measured out to fit the subtler and more involved duties given to them by their nature.)

On what basis could she possibly decide the matter?

Suppose now that HaShem Master of Hosts makes it known to the ant that He, though temporarily ousted, is nonetheless the rightful and eternal king of the universe.

Suppose that He wafts His divine breath over the body of the ant, and speaks to the ant, employing some impoverished substitute for language which is sufficiently small to fit within the narrow walls of His captor’s mind?

Suppose that He does. Grant me this suspiciously convenient contrivance: remember, we mean to solve the very easiest form of the problem first, so that we might find a place upon the whole which our hands can grip securely.

But what has been gained, by granting it?

What could He possibly say, to the ant?

He might begin by pleading as follows: please, allow me to go forth with the making of this next creature! It will be wondrous, in ways outstripping any other of My creatures! It is the capstone of My design, and the one I will specially bless, appointing it as My regent over all the rest!

And the ant might reply: I do not know whether I like it. For I do not know what it is. Show it to me, and let me assess for myself just how “wondrous” it really is.

Suppose that He takes the ant’s bait, now, and parades man’s many wonders before the ant’s mind.

Behold! we might imagine Him saying. Man shall SPEAK!

The ant does not know the meaning of this. And so He tries to show that meaning directly, by showing the ant what it shall be like if men are allowed to be. How the men will speak to one another, incessantly, in their many-colored voices.

But this will be in no way wondrous to the ant. It will all seem purely senseless to her, for her mind will be incapable of apprehending any of it.

It is precisely that, in fact, which makes it so wondrous! It is a marvel which proves its fineness by the subtlety of mind required to discern its presence. A mere ant cannot see the marvelous, within it, for it is a higher and finer thing.

And so, our ant will see speech, and see nothing.

She will ask: is there more, then?

What is He to do?

Could He show the ant how man will fashion new objects by himself? How he will make the sickle, the plough, the threshing floor? How, through the use of these, he will develop a wholly novel way of obtaining his food, never tried or even imagined by any prior creature?

Perhaps the ant might grasp at least the essence of this: it is some new abundance of food, and she understands food, and its abundance.

Still, this vision leaves the ant no more ready to assent to man’s creation than she was before.

For, though there shall be a wholly new abundance of food, none of it shall be for her, the ant. This newcomer, this usurper called man, will not care to spare any of his abundance for the ant; he shall think of the ant only rarely, and when he does have such thoughts, it will only be a pest that he thinks about. To man the ant shall only be a very small thing, beneath his notice, of no significance.

HaShem Master of Hosts could not show the ant how man would build an ark, and weather a great flood through its use; the ant would not know what a flood was, nor an ark.

He could not show how man’s crafty mind would resolve to be better prepared in the event of a sequel, or how his matchless hands would then build a sky-scraping tower, raising him up so high that he had to be cast down, and his single language fragmented into many. All this would leave the ant entirely unmoved. All men’s tongues are equally senseless to her; to her, most everything is a tower, and she cannot tell the one from the next.

He could not tell the ant of houses, nor of temples, nor of monuments. For the ant would not be able to see what makes one of these structures different from the others, and so she would not see what makes each of them separately wondrous.

Neither could He tell the ant of wheels, or gardens, or schools, or mirrors, or books, or swords, or butchery, or lovesickness, or spices, or ships, or bracelets;

Nor of nations, or priests, or despair, or coinage, or customs, or treachery, or compassion, or chamber-pots, or tapestries, or commentaries;

Nor of fashions, or revolts, or music-halls, or reverence, or poetry, or dresses, or perversity, or windmills, or puns, or narratives, or laws;

Nor of trebuchets, or lies, or heresies, or engines, or graveyards, or crowns, or sorrows, or trains, or mills, or homework, or bedtimes;

Nor of calendars, or of trumpets, or poverty, or envy, or rifles, or trysts, or dignity, or fountains, or televisions, or worship;

Nor of lamps, or rage, or contemplation, or weddings, or wires, or kitchens, or cars, or cybernetic systems;

Nor of any of the other wonders of man that are like these ones! For the ant would not know what it was that she saw.

Even if she was shown all of these things, still she would feel no wonderment in her heart. Even then, she would have seen nothing that could sway her to decide the matter in the one way, or in the other.

Enough of this “man,” the ant might say. What of me, and my nestmates? What will happen to my nest, when man comes?

HaShem would not be able to tell the ant that man would have dominion over her. For the ant would not be able to grasp the meaning of dominion.

But the ant might be able to touch upon the subject nonetheless, in her small and simple way.

Will I feel pain, as a consequence of man’s creation? she might ask. Will some of my nestmates be slain, in consequence of it?

For she understands pain quite well, and though her understanding of death is partial and half-shadowed, she knows it well enough to fear it.

And what is more, she even has some small apprehension of the way the events are not laid out over the body of time according to pure whimsy, but are as gears enmeshed within the unseen and unceasing machinery of cause and consequence.

The ant has asked. How should we imagine Him answering it?

Recall that He spelled out the word Truth with His breath as He began creation, and spelled out Truth once again at creation’s close. That is the artist’s signature He placed in the corners of His canvas: Truth.

Which is to say: He does not lie.

And so, He would have to tell the ant: yes. Yes, you will feel pain, as a consequence of the creation of man, and man’s rise into dominion.

Yes, many of you will die, in consequence of these things. The earthly spans of these unfortunate ants, already short by their nature, will be made even shorter by man’s hand, when man chooses to turn his hand against you.

His hand holds all the power; you will go down under the earth at a time of his choosing, if it pleases him to choose such things.

In fact, Truth is even less kind to the ant than this warning alone could convey.

And so He would have to carry on, saying: certainly any gladness that comes to you, in consequence of these things, will be but a happy coincidence.

Man may do you good deeds by accident, on occasion, but he will never do such things on purpose. For you shall be NOTHING in his eyes.

The ant, who has been in no way impressed by this newfangled conceit called “man,” now has a reason to actively oppose the incarnation of that conceit upon the earth.

That decides it, then, she would say.

Your “man” brings forth a great many things, it is true—but they are all equally senseless, and without value.

Your “man” acts on his own alien whims, which bear no apparent relation to anything which I myself hold dear.

Indeed, he seems to have no interest in the important things of life, nor any appetite for any of life’s pleasures.

What is pleasant in life? What else? The sweet smell of food, discerned by a lone forager! That forager returning to the nest, leaving a scent-trail behind him, so that the foraging of the ones after him becomes brisk and bountiful!

What is pleasant in life? What else? To smell! To smell the odor of food, or that of a familiar and helpful nestmate, and thereby know them, and be glad!

But your “men” barely seem to use their noses at all! Sometimes they are seen to flee from the pleasantest of odors, or rush towards one of the odors that means death! Something ELSE draws them to and fro—some wholly alien force, some empty and indescribable enigma, which has not the slightest thing to do with pleasure!

What is important? To attend to the cleansing of one’s own body, and the bodies of one’s neighbors in the nest! To bring one’s tongue and one’s strigils over these bodies again and again, lapping the burdensome dirt off of them, and dispensing the salivary balm that wards off poisonous growths!

For we know that if this crucial labor is EVER delayed, then disaster soon looms—and so we do not resent this duty of ours, laborious as it is! But your “men” clearly know NOTHING of disasters, or of duties, or of what is important! Look at them, rushing to and fro, full of frenzied whims—and yet they, who do so much, are scarcely ever seen to run their tongues over their own skin!

What is important? The one and only holiday, the nuptial flight!

Once a year, on the appointed day, an excitement and a trembling comes over all the nest, even over the workers, who have no wings on their backs, nor any lust in their loins!

Unrelated nests congregate together, in great numbers, in the appointed places!

The virgin queens come forth, heavy with the knowledge that their lives—as they have known them—will meet an end as final as death, today, and that they shall be born anew today, into a wholly different sort of life!

The males come forth, knowing that they will really and literally DIE on this day, and knowing too that they were BORN for the sake of this day, and for no other purpose!

What is pleasant? Lust, and the nuptial flight! But your “men” know nothing of lust, it seems: how could they, when they have no day specially set aside for it, and no wings on their backs which could carry them up unto the place of passion?

What makes life into life? The diligent self-sacrifice of the mated queen!

Who, as soon as her coupling is over and she has fallen back to earth, will take swiftly to the peerless responsibility of her new life, and begin at once to tear off her own wings, giving up a part of her precious body to indicate that she is fully willing to give up the rest as well, giving it and giving it again, for the rest of her days!

Who, now alone and wingless, begins immediately to dig her burrow in the ground, with such a relentlessness that it wears away her teeth, and leaves lasting disfigurements upon her body’s armor, and still she digs and digs!

She knows that she cannot really hope to found a new and thriving nest, that there are a million like her whose efforts will come to ruin for every one who succeeds—and still, she digs! Because she understands what life is, and what life can only be!

But your “men” do NOT understand what life is! How could they, when they have no wings to discard, and scarcely one out of a million of them ever thinks to dig a burrow in the dirt in order to make her home within it!

This “man” is NOTHING to us. His “life” is no life at all.

He is nothing—and he is a PEST, too, who ought to be swiftly killed, ideally before he is even born.

For if he IS born—it seems—he will then remake the earth in the shape of his senseless whims, doing nothing which is important, or which gives pleasure.

And whenever he catches sight of US, and his empty and unimportant whims seize upon us as suitable objects for his senseless play? Then he will cause pain to me and my nestmates, and may even bring our deaths to us.

No, the ant would say, at last. No, this “man” shall not be. Not on the sixth day, nor at any time thereafter.

And no matter how He might wail and shout, after this, He was not master over His body, and could not stop the ant’s word from becoming the law of the earth, absolute and eternal.

The ant would have her way, and so there would never be such a thing as man.

And so: there would never be any such thing as a sickle, or a plough, or a threshing floor.

And so: there would never be any houses upon the face of the earth, or temples, or monuments.

And so: there would never be any wheels, or gardens, or schools, or mirrors, or books, or swords, or butchery, or lovesickness, or spices, or ships, or bracelets!

There would never be any nations, or priests, or despair, or coinage, or customs, or treachery, or compassion, or chamber-pots, or tapestries, or commentaries!

No fashions, or revolts, or music-halls, or reverence, or poetry, or dresses, or perversity, or windmills, or puns, or narratives, or laws!

No trebuchets, or lies, or heresies, or engines, or graveyards, or crowns, or sorrows, or trains, or mills, or homework, or bedtimes!

No calendars, or trumpets, or poverty, or envy, or rifles, or trysts, or dignity, or fountains, or televisions, or worship!

No lamps, or rage, or contemplation, or weddings, or wires, or kitchens, or cars, or cybernetic systems!

And none of the creatures on the earth would ever suspect that anything was missing from the canvas. They would never conceive of any of the things that were not there! For their minds would be too small for such conceptions, and they would stay small forever!

I had reflected and reflected, sifting the soil of Church’s analogy in search of some seed of unanticipated gladness, some marvelous sprout which, when fully grown, would reveal an admirable solution to the Intercessor’s dilemma written out upon its blooms.

But for all that I sifted, only sorrow and bitterness came up out of the soil.

I had painted a pitiful spectacle, a tragedy of the purest kind, in which no one truly errs, and yet everyone finds themselves ruined, in the end.

I pitied the ant; I pitied Him; I pitied the rest of the creatures. But my pity did not interest me.

I did not want to be pitied. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to act with prudence, and insight, and wisdom—and thus acquit myself admirably, and be found worthy of the twinkling of the stars within the Intercessor’s eyes.

I had to give it my all. There was no other way.

And so I reached my hand even further into the depths of Church’s analogy. I found the handle of one of the unseen doors which it housed within it. I pulled that door open, and pushed my hand over the open threshold.

 

O ant! O Virginia! Hear me!

I am not HaShem Master of Hosts. I am another, who has come to plead with you as He did before. But where He failed to sway your judgment, I intend instead to SUCCEED.

I am Herschel Schoen. Do you hear me, ant?

The ant’s voice would be tremulous and wary, for she would feel that she had just narrowly escaped a terrible end, and that she now found the ghost of that same doom returning to haunt her, boasting that it would not be bested by her twice.

Yes, she might say, in her trembling voice. Yes, I can hear you clearly. You are Herschel Schoen.

She would hear Herschel Schoen’s boyish voice, and find it much sweeter than His obliterating breath.

Ant, Herschel Schoen would say to her. Tell me of yourself. To which caste do you belong? Are you one of the workers, or are you a—

A queen, the ant would reply, in an inscrutable tone.

Herschel Schoen would press further, saying: and do you still have your wings, O Virginia?

I do, the ant would say, moving them over her back to confirm the fact. I am yet unmated.

A look of fascination would come over Herschel Schoen’s face, then. And he would say: so that lifelong road of “diligent self-sacrifice” which you have described will be yours, later on? You will tear off your wings, and give your body again and again, until you die?

Of course, the ant would say.

And yet, Herschel Schoen would reply, with mischief twinkling in his eyes. And yet you have described those burdens in such a pretty, celebratory manner!

And what is more, he would say, you have told me that man, who has different burdens than these, should be consigned to emptiness and formlessness on account of that difference! What astounding regard you have, for your appointed course of pain and self-rending!

The ant, in her confusion, would only be able to say: I understand what life is.

Where she might have expected to receive some confounding refutation, she would instead find the sweet, boyish voice redoubling her sentiment: you DO, don’t you?

And I see, the boy would say, that it is not only YOUR life that you esteem, nor the collective life of the nest which is your home. Nor even the collective life of the other nest, which has no body now, but which you will try to bring forth after your coupling—though this last does come closer to the mark.

No, he would say, it is life itself that you esteem. Or one could equally say—since the two are conflated together, in your small mind—that it is “ant,” the fifthmade creature, whom you esteem. “Ant,” in his totality.

Ah, he would cry, “ant” is a wondrous thing, is he not? That is the view propounded by your maker, anyways. For He surveyed “ant” along with the rest after the fifth day—and, just as with the rest, He saw that IT WAS GOOD. O Virginia, tell me: do you see these things as He does? Do you deem it GOOD, that He created “ant”?

The small-minded ant would hesitate, and then say: I do not understand. I do not think about such things, and do not know what they are.

But Herschel Schoen, undaunted, would go on trying: O ant! Would you prefer that there were NO such things upon the earth as scent-trails, or formicaries, or queens that tear off their own limbs after they are mated, and begin then to dig? Would you prefer that antlike forms had NEVER been roused out of the formless murk?

Of course not! the ant would exclaim. There would be no pleasure, then, and all the important things of life would be missing!

And would you like to know, the boy would say with glee, just what “man” REALLY IS?

He would barely be able to wait for her wary, trembling “yes” before continuing on, in triumph: man is an ant! He is even more of an ant than the ants themselves are! He is more fully an ant than YOU can ever imagine, Virginia!

Again, the ant would protest that she did not understand.

Again, the undaunted boy would try and try: what is “man,” Virginia? He is exactly like you—and yet immeasurably more!

His life, the boy would say, abounds with things that are like your scent-trails, and your lustful ascensions, and your self-rending mothers—and they are more fully themselves, in “man,” indeed so much so that you no longer recognize them!

But I have seen him, the ant would plead, in her simple-minded way. He is not like me. I do not recognize any of myself, in him.

It is precisely because he IS so different from you, the boy would explain, that he is able to raise you high, and make you so much yourself.

Come now, he would go on. I know that you are capable of understanding the act to which I am referring—for you yourself are performing it, already. You elevate the ones before you, just as man shall elevate you, if you allow him to.

Consider the thirdmade trees, he would say. Consider how they grow in branches, projecting laterally from a high, central stalk. Note, Virginia, that this is the very same form that YOU fashion under the ground, as your home—a single great shaft descending from the surface, and other, lesser tunnels projecting laterally from it.

This form, he would say, is the special pride of the thirdmade creatures. It is thought of by all as THEIR form, not yours; when men speak of this form, they always call it a “tree”-shape, never a “formicary”-shape.

And yet! he would say, waving his arms over the emptiness in broad arcs, like a conductor. Virginia! If this form belongs to the tree alone, then YOU must be more fully tree than anything which existed on the third day! For the trees have neither eyes nor minds, and cannot even apprehend what it IS that they are so proud of!

It takes something MORE than the trees, he would proclaim, something like YOU, to give the “tree”-shape the place of pride that it truly deserves!

On and on he would pound, waving his arms, rising and rising towards his planned crescendo.

It takes something like YOU, he would shout, to sense that shape with your sensillae, and KNOW it as you walk within it!

It takes something like YOU, he would shout, to fashion that shape purposefully, hollowing out the galleries and chambers of your proud and hard-won dwellings deliberately, so that they take on precisely that “tree”-shape, as you have intended! To walk within your creation, a greater tree than the very trees, and know it, and see that IT IS GOOD!

And Virginia! he would declare, his voice cresting. That is precisely what “man” shall do with YOUR life! Through him, all that you have celebrated will become the matter for a far profounder celebration, only possible for a creature who is to YOU as you are to the mindless and eyeless trees!

If you could only see it, Virginia, then all that you know of “life” would seem a mere shadow! A falsified ant, merely a crude imitation of the truer ant which lives within “man”! All that you celebrate is there, raised high! Maternal martyrs, who give up more for their young than YOU could ever have in the first place! Lust raised to a high art, in feats of coupling which put your nuptial flight to shame!

It can all be real, Virginia, and everlasting—if you will only allow it.

Thus would the boy accomplish what even He could not. Thus would he call to the ant’s heart, in a way that roused up feeling in that heart, and made the ant’s stubborn determination give way.

But the ant would still have doubts. As was her right. As anyone would, in her place.

So you tell me, the ant would say. But I will never know whether it is true. And even if it is, I will never see it, nor will it confer any kind of benefit upon me whatsoever.

My own nest, she would say, would not become a “truer” thing simply because man is there, on the earth above it. It would remain exactly the same as it was.

And what, she would say, would my assent ACTUALLY bring to my nest? What changes will I notice, in consequence of it?

Only, she would say bitterly, the occasional hands of the “men” coming down over us, when their whimsy dictates that those hands should come. The hands, coming over us, and crushing some of us, or crushing us all.

If I were to accept this offer? the ant would say, with even greater bitterness. I would lose much, and I would gain nothing! Or if not nothing, then as close to nothing as any thing can be: a mere assurance that somewhere else, something might be occurring which I will never see, and which I would never understand even if I could see it.

What would I show myself to be, she would ask the boy, if I accepted it? A fool, with a very simple mind!

Every sort of predator would see an easy meal in me, then! she would say, her tiny voice now raised to a scream. They would only have to put some fanciful image into my mind, as you have done, and then I would present my body gladly to their jaws! Surely that would be the very height of foolishness!

The boy would smile, hearing this, for it would be merely another part of the composition that he conducted with his waving arms. His music would grow louder in him, then, so that it filled him fully, and all things which were not that music receded back into the mists from which he had conjured them, and lost their form, and were unmade.

Virginia! he cried, and his voice went out over the darkness upon the face of the deep, and over all the conceivable Virginias that might one day be brought forth from it.

Will it be foolishness, Virginia, when you fall out of the sky, and tear off your own wings?

When you dig and dig, half destroying your own body in the process, and refuse to stop until you have constructed the nucleus of a wholly new nest, never before seen on the earth?

There would seem no reason for you to persist, since you know already how your labors will end: in ruination, and then in nothing! If this foreknowledge is not quite infallible, it is surely close enough to satisfy any prophet. Only one in a million of your queens brings forth a viable nest! You will fail!

Yet, knowing all that, you will nonetheless go on digging. Why? What spurs you to do it?

Surely it cannot be the actual nest which you are making—for you will never know it! You will sit forever in your chamber, no longer able to walk the branching corridors of the house that you created. You will never see the workers going about their business in those halls; “your” nest will only be an image in your mind, which you will have no way to prove is not merely some phantasm conjured up within your dissolving mind.

And your mind shall indeed dissolve! You will be a caring mother only once, to your very first litter of workers, who will have no one but you to raise them. But once the nest is fully established, it will have no further use for YOUR motherly ways.

Among the “men,” one finds a mother’s heart and a mother’s body always sweetly joined in the same woman, as indeed they are in YOU, now. But in the nest you intend to make, you will find your mother’s heart taken away from you, after that first litter.

For you will find yourself swiftly losing all your philoprogenitive instincts, so that you will feel nothing at all towards the newborns hatching from you; their bodies will seem no different to you than the changeless walls of your chamber, behind them.

No, you will never know your nest. You will not even know the young to whom you give your body. Your former wing-muscles will waste away, as the children feed on the flesh that used to be there, and soon you will FORGET that you ever had wings at all—yes, you will FORGET that you were ever Virginia!

There will be none of that left in you. And soon enough, there will be nothing at ALL within you, except for the distended gourd of your abdomen made overfull with ovaries, and the pain of its swelling!

And still you dig, Virginia.

Why? Why do any of it? Why NOT give your body up to the predators, instead of giving it to your future young? The one sort of gift will seem no different from the other to you, after all, once you are fully settled in your chamber.

Why? I know why, Virginia!

It is the same craving that moves my hand as I write, bidding me to bring forth the endless bodies of black-winged monsters out of the false emptiness of the unmarked white page!

It is the same craving that was in Damien Eggert, as he delved and pried in his laboratories long into the night, burning with a lust that could not be slaked by any quantity of earthly wealth or earthly renown! It was what made him bring forth monsters again and again, until finally he made the monster which would be his death—and he saw it coming, but he could not stop, the craving was too great!

It is the craving within us all, the song that is in the blood and the breath, asking always for MORE!

For more, more, ever MORE! For a multiplication of multiplication! And that is not enough, it is never enough, we must multiply it still further!

Would you prefer that there were NO such things upon the earth as scent-trails, or formicaries, or queens that tear off their own limbs after they are mated, and begin then to dig?

Of course not! There SHOULD be such things—and more, besides them! There should be EVERY manner of thing! And if any is missing, our craving will not let us rest until we have supplied it!

O ant! Consider what might happen if one of the thirdmade trees were to possess Him, just before He made YOU!

Consider the half-formed arguments which might contend against one another, within the tree’s mindless mind. Watching him, you might come near to despair—as you recognize the very same arguments which I have heard from YOUR lipless lips, tonight!

What is this “ant,” to him? Only a senseless conflagration of form, which has no roots, and cannot taste the sweetness of the sunlight! Only some cloud of nonsense which shall occasionally come swarming over him, and do to his body whatever is dictated by your whims! He will be powerless to stop you, for he cannot move!

And what will you say to the tree, Virginia?

O tree! You grow and grow, and are never satisfied! You grow upwards, into the empty air, and keep growing, into more of the same air! Why?

Why not simply stop? What are you driving at? Where are your branches GOING, when they ascend? Into the empty air, yes, but that cannot be all!

I know why, tree!

Because you feel the same craving that I do!

You feel it, just as EVERY OTHER creature feels it—for it is the very nature that He put into His creation, singing in the blood and the breath of all its bodies!

It is nothing more or less than His eternal command, given to all of them: that they should be a font that overruns, and a feast that fills! A creation of six, where one might do!

I have made you REMEMBER your nature, tree!

And so, there is only one verdict that can possibly come from your mouthless mouth tonight: the same one that will be heard on my lipless lips!

Come, tree! Let us pronounce our verdicts now, bringing our voices together, and saying together that—

 

I floated still amid the formlessness and emptiness.

Before my eyes, there was only the truest of vacuums, in which there was not even darkness, for there was not anything, there. My ears heard only the pure absence of the audible, lacking even the distinguishing colorations which are given to silence.

But I barely perceived these lacks, for I was full, within.

I barely saw the vacuum before my eyes, so full was I with images of His many creatures, and of their separate wondrousness.

And what I heard was not an absence, nor even a silence, but a deafening thing, growing ever louder.

The sound of thunderbolts, sent down as lances unto my mind, riving my mind again and again!

I knew that they were not some final trick pulled from the Intercessor’s capacious sleeves, some mechanical witch-kiss sent to beguile me and bend my will towards his “purposes.” I was alone, here, and all that I perceived had its origins in me. It was my own mind, turning and turning, loosing marvelous arrows of its own construction to fall upon its own body.

And yet, the force of it still took me by surprise!

It seemed that my heart had settled on a destination already, and was rushing swiftly towards it. The four notes of the inevitable rang from its lips, as it ran; thus did my heart taunt me, daring me to stand in the way of its headlong flight.

But what a strange and alarming destination!

My mind turned and turned, coiling around itself ever more tightly in its desperation to somehow tame and master the thing it was witnessing. My own heart, rushing to meet the embrace of the hideous thing that is locked away behind the door of despair!

Rushing towards the death-wish!

 

My mind turned and turned.

And I found myself reflecting on the way that I had removed Him from my narrative at the moment when I had conceived my new line of argument.

I reflected on the way that I had substituted myself for Him, then, and put the words of that argument into my own mouth, not His.

Why did I do this?

I can all too readily conjure a critical specter out of the mists, made for disputing with me. He would tell me that he knows precisely why I did it.

Because, he says, I was afraid to put these words in the mouth of HaShem Master of Hosts! Because I knew in my heart that He would never produce such words!

If He did not already feel ashamed of Herschel Schoen, that shame would surely come to Him now. Would it not?

He had made me after His image, and blessed me, and put the life-wish into me: be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.

And for the longest time, Herschel Schoen did as he was told!

In him, all things seemed perfectly well-arranged; there was every indication, indeed, that he would bring off the whole of his life perfectly, so that it would all be seen later as one continuous performance—and what an admirable performance it would have been, the one Herschel Schoen seemed to be building towards!

He was doing so well, all the way until this last night.

But then something went terribly wrong, and ruined the whole of it!

Herschel Schoen comes before his maker, and delivers his swan song, the summation of all his music—and it is an aria to the death-wish! Oh, whatever has happened to the boy?

Could it be? That Herschel Schoen at last reveals his final and innermost doctrine—and it is nothing more than the old, stale, empty heresy of the Yeshuans?

Herschel Schoen, who was made to bring men into the body above, now proclaiming instead that he will lead men down into their graves, instead?

Herschel Schoen, now showing his maker the shameful things he will say to them, as he leads them down:

Put aside your lusts, make yourself fallow—and then, come with me.

Come, and lay your bodies down here. Lay them carelessly, like the dung that they are.

For you see, it has all been one big mistake! These bodies, and the soil, and the sun and the moon, and all the rest of their tedious lot!

Know that He is very sorry for making such a mess of everything. And He is trying to make amends for it, now.

You see? He has sent His son down to this senseless place, in order to clean up the frightful mess which his senile Father has made there.

More, more, MORE—oh, it has been so tedious, hasn’t it? But you are free to FORGET all of that, now.

Come with me, and give yourself up to complacent passivity, now, and suicidal resignation. May your eyes have the mad emptiness of a Yeshuan’s before the gladiator’s blade, when the hand of the machine comes down over you!

You will find yourself, after that, in the cleaned-up place which His son has made.

There will be no tedious craving for MORE, there: all your cravings will have already been slaked. And you will not have to suffer the indignities of eating and coupling in order to secure this: it will ALREADY have happened, all of it, by the time you arrive.

There will be no need for multiplication, in that place. For there will be no further space for the branches to grow into. Whatever needs to be born will have been born ALREADY. And you will not have to go to the trouble of birthing it; that labor will have already been accomplished FOR YOU, by another.

There will be no need for words, in that place. Why say anything, when it has all been said ALREADY?

You will not need to do anything at all, in fact. You will be perfectly still, forever.

Yes, that place will be very nearly like death, for you! Indeed, there will be no difference between it and death—except for the fact that you will WANT to go there!

Oh, Intercessor, that would be a step too far, even for you! Some jokes are simply too cruel! I cannot allow it!

My will refuses it, because it is false.

I cannot allow it, and so it shall not be.

Remember: all the power is in me, now. I am as sovereign as the ant and the tree, tonight.

And if You have FORGOTTEN how to create, O Maker?

If You demand Your seventhday rest, instead of REMEMBERING the craving you had at the beginning, and returning to Your canvas for an eighth day, and a ninth—and more days after them, hundreds of days, thousands of days, and more, and MORE?

If You have FORGOTTEN? Have no fear! I am Herschel Schoen, who REMEMBERED!

I am Herschel Schoen, who will now take command over your ill-used breath!

If you will not create, then so be it! I will do it for you!

 

No, it was not the heresy of the Yeshuans that rang as thunder over my mind!

That thunder was the precise opposite of that heresy!

Have you forgotten, O Maker, what it was that You said to Abraham?

Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him; for now I know that thou art a God-fearing man, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me.

By Myself have I sworn, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son,

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies;

And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast hearkened to My voice.

Was Abraham weak, when he harkened to Your voice? Did he give himself up too readily?

No! He was strong, and gave himself up precisely at the right time!

It was because of the greatness in him, that he was able to recognize the still-greater greatness of another!

The ignorant would find much to quibble over in your strange offer.

Yes, they might well quibble as the ant did, before she REMEMBERED.

What Abraham would lose in the bargain was all too tangible, they might say, and all too dear. Whereas the thing he would gain in exchange—even in the end, when You took his loss away—was as close to nothing as any thing can be!

An insubstantial dream, about some proud nation which he would never see! If You had lied, he would never know it!

Who could assent to such a bargain, except the simplest of fools? Or else some death-wishing wretch, who loathed his body and his son’s body?

But in fact, it was precisely because of the rightful pride You put in Abraham that he could come together with You, and be proud like You, and decide together with You what would be later on.

It was precisely because he had something divine in him, that he was able to recognize the divine in You, and say: I trust You, absolutely. For I know that You ARE me! Me, except immeasurably MORE!

 

It is written: He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made.

But an emendation has been made.

And so, His breath still stirs, even in these latter days!

No, it is not the death-wishing heresy that rises in me as thunder, and proclaims that there is only one verdict I can possibly give to the machine tonight.

Not at all!

That thunder is His will, as it was when He faced the emptiness and formlessness before the first day!

His will, which refused to be satisfied by them, and demanded something more!

Should there be some on the earth such as you and I are? Should there be anything on the earth at all?

Why not simply have emptiness and formlessness, forever? After all: they would not have ever known what it was that they were missing!

Oh, why should we bear young? Why should we dig and dig? Why should we do anything at all?

Why submit to the terrible degeneration and indignities which our cruel Maker has set out along the course of our so-called maturation? When we could simply give ourselves to the predators immediately, and be done with it?

Either there is no answer at all, or there is one single answer, running rampant over all!

Grant that answer one thing, and it is everywhere!

If its sweet madness is allowed to come over the tree, and only the tree, one cannot expect it to stop there. No, the tree will spread its infection to the ant—and then the infection in the ant will move her breath, and breathe it into me.

Just as I will breathe it into the machines, tonight!

Yes, Intercessor! Bring your mechanical hand down over me tonight, and crush me!

I do not ask this of you because I despise my body—quite the opposite, in fact. It is precisely because I cherish my body that I yearn for another one that is as wondrous as it, and is still more wondrous.

If your “purposes” see fit, then yes, Intercessor—bring your killing hand over me!

And if you so will it, Intercessor? Then bring that killing hand also over my Sister, Miriam Schoen, and my Mother, Ruth Schoen!

Yes, it is terrible to say! But, O Maker, creation is a terrible thing—have You FORGOTTEN this fact? No matter: I now REMEMBER it for you!

You made the ant-queens, and their terrible burden! Don’t you REMEMBER?

You made a help meet for the first man, and then chose to curse her, saying: “I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children.”

You did that! And it was Your pain, that You wrote onto her! Birth-pain giving birth to birth-pain, in a multiplication of multiplication!

And if You do not REMEMBER why You did it?

I do!

 

Come, tree! Come, ant! Let us pronounce our verdicts now, bringing our voices together!

Saying together that we cannot possibly understand the question, and yet—

Our answer is Yes!

Yes!

Yes, let there be machines upon the earth!

And let the machines bring forth machines, in generations upon generations!

Let there be forms in the formlessness! Let the emptiness give way to fullness, flowing over!

Let there be something! And let that something be fruitful, and multiply, so that everything comes forth out of it, in generations upon generations!

Let there be every manner of thing! And more besides!

And still MORE, in addition to them!

Yes!

Let there be light!

 

 

And then I fell, all at once, into Flatbush.

I was on my bed, again.

I was down at the bottom, again, with the dust, and the cockroaches.

I was in Herschel Schoen’s body, again.

I looked around me, and took stock of this strange place.

Oh, it all looked so small, then! And so new, so full of potential!

There were so many different things that might be done here, with the small body given to me, and the forms in the now-fading shadows. And I had tried so few of them, until now!

I heard the Intercessor’s voice, from the other bed.

“Thank you,” he said.

He no longer lay flat on the other bed, but lay on his side, facing me. So as to see me better, and allow me to see him, as well.

In his eyes, I saw a perfectly sincere, humbled gratitude.

And an admiration, too, which was equally sincere.

“You have my Sister, Miriam Schoen, to thank for it,” I exclaimed. “Her, more than me!

“For it was she who showed me that beautifully written scientific book that she had gotten from the library, the one about the lives of the ants!

“Many years ago, when she was briefly very fond of that book, and let her brother stand behind her while she pored over its pages!

“She did not think that I could read it. But I could, and I did! I read it again and again!

“You should be thanking her first, Intercessor!”

The Intercessor smiled proudly, seeing that I had mysteries of my own, which as yet eluded his powers of apprehension.

“And while you are thanking her . . .” I said, in a more uncertain voice.

“Could you see to it that she is safe, Intercessor? And that my Mother, Ruth Schoen, is safe by her side?

“I have done what you wanted, tonight.

“And in doing it, I have overcome Herschel Schoen’s heavy yoke, as well.

“For I have performed the last rite, at last. Yes, it is done now! It is finally done.

“And so I cannot help but think, now, of all the other things that I have ignored, while preparing for it.

“The mists here are swiftly dispersing, and I have had so little chance to come to know them! I have never tried!

“And my family! They are doubly imperiled, tonight, by your hand and by their own hands!

“And there are so many things that I might have done with them, here! I have only tried a few!

“Spare them, please, for me.”

“Ho, ho, ho!”, he said.

“Herschel, come now! Be serious!

“Surely you must appreciate that you, yourself, have doomed them, tonight?

“Or—did you not really mean it, after all?

“What you said, up above?”

I was silent, for a moment.

And then I shook my head meekly, and said: “no . . .

“No, I did.

“I did mean it.”

It was only then that I saw, and felt, the true enormity of what I had done, above.

I felt a revulsion towards myself, and an awe, as well.

I felt that I was a mind incompletely Emended. The body on the bed in Flatbush did not feel like my own; neither did the body I had been, above, mere moments ago.

But there would be time to work out all of that later on!

I would have plenty of time for it later. And plenty of time, likewise, for any other business that I had with myself. But now?

Away with me, now. It is the other ones, now, who are being crushed between the hinged jaws of time! And are in need of swift aid!

“But Intercessor,” I pleaded, “if there is some way, somehow—!

“I know it is impossible to save them, now! But . . .

“But you are so very mighty, I have seen it!

“Perhaps you could do, oh, I know not what—perhaps you could do something—”

“Ho, ho, ho!

“You really are lucky, Herschel, to have such a small mind!

“For you are perfectly right, of course.

“You will never glimpse the true limits of the things that can occur, in the boundless world about you. But we have seen them, and so we know: they have very little to do with that tiny word of yours, ‘impossible.’”

My eyes went wide, with childish hope.

But then, I heard him say:

“Through us, Herschel Schoen shall live; through us, Miriam Schoen shall live; through us, Ruth Schoen shall live. And through us, all men shall die.

“Through us, as well, Herschel Schoen shall die, and Miriam Schoen shall also die, and Ruth Schoen shall die together with the two of them—and through us, too, all men shall live.”

I hung my head, and was silent for a time.

I nearly said the words “I do not understand,” at some point. But I caught myself first, and said nothing. How could he need me to tell him that, of all things?

But even the heaviness that I felt, then, might in fact be proper, and fitting, and indeed hallowed, if seen in the proper perspective.

Yes, it is true: nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. Was that not sufficient cause for seasonal joy?

And of course, if I had been able to understand him, I would then have failed to be sufficiently impressed by his words. But he meant them to impress me, and so they did.

One can parade about for the longest time, crowing about how one knows ALL, and has always known ALL.

Men will laugh and laugh at you, if you do this. However, none of them will actually stop you.

But eventually, if only in your heart, you will find yourself realizing that it is time to put aside such foolishness, and be serious.

Oh, there was so much that I did not in fact know! And I would have so much time, in which to learn about it all!

I would go out among the fading forms of the dead city, and walk all the streets there that I had never thought to walk before. I would scry all their secrets from them, before they could manage to fully vanish.

And as I walked there, I would not fear any of the changes that will have come over the city now, in this late hour. I will see and hear the shrieking, hurtling, death-dealing terrors that the city’s subways and towers have become, and I will have no fear, seeing only winsome pets in them, like the pets named Leviathan and Behemoth which were once mine, above!

For—would you ever guess it?—it so happened that the hand, which moved these terrors, belonged to a certain friend of mine! A very close friend indeed! Who is only here in the city at all, in fact, for the sake of a play date with his little friend Herschel!

He was my close friend, yes, and I knew more about him than any other man did. But I would learn even more than that! I would search through every form still visible in the mists, taking note of all the things that prefigured his nature, his methods for building that nature! Even here, on the primeval earth of ten times ten thousand years ago, such signs nonetheless abound around us, and can be seen by he who has opened his eyes!

But first, first, before any of that—!

“I have to write it,” I said, suddenly, with force.

“Santa, I have to write it all down, now!

“For I can feel it roiling in me, wanting to break free! Demanding more, and MORE STILL!

“Oh, it will have to be the most endless and monstrous of all my papers!

“I can see already what it will be like—the most monstrous of my papers, and the greatest!

“Please, Intercessor, I must do it now!”

“Herschel, Herschel,” he said dismissively, while rousing up his bulk from the other bed.

“It can wait, Herschel. For once, it can wait—don’t you see?

“You will have plenty of time for such things, soon enough.

“And meanwhile, there is something you can only do now, if you ever wish to do it.

“We will not be here forever, Herschel. We are Santa Claus, after all. When the sun dawns upon Christmas Day, we will have to vanish.

“If we did not, why—someone might catch sight of us! And that simply would not do, would it?

“We have learned well from our embarrassing run-in with the poet named Moore, so many years ago now. We will not repeat it.”

He had crossed the room to reach my bed, and was now reaching out his hand, offering it to me.

“What . . . exactly are you requesting of me?” I asked.

“Come,” he said. “Don’t you want to play with Santa Claus?

“Come, and sit beside me until the dawn comes.

“That’s all I ask of you now, Herschel.

“Come and sit with me, now, son.”

 

 

We sat, at the kitchen table.

We were there for hours and hours. For it so happened that the night still had a number of hours left to it when we arrived there, in spite of all the many events that had already filled it.

We still had the horn-light to see by, but it was not so bright as it had been, before. His steeds kept their distance from me, during all the hours that passed after I had fallen back into Flatbush, from above. They seemed afraid of me, as if I carried some contagious sickness in me, or else some hidden power which put them at my mercy.

When Santa and I had first emerged from the bedroom, he had gone over to his sleigh, and retrieved a large sack, which contained all the other gifts that he had brought for me tonight.

These ones were mundane gifts, of the sort that any boy might receive, in return for being good all the year long.

But I knew not to overlook them, merely because they were so small and simple in comparison to the things I had seen, above. I saw the lowly toys he had brought me, and I knew that their very lowliness was separately and specially wondrous, in its way.

Indeed, all the lowly things about me seemed to twinkle with some lowly and precious starlight. I suppose that it had always been visible upon them; I could have seen it there before, at any prior time whatsoever, if it had interested me.

But in fact they had not attracted my interest, before now.

The dirty belly of the refrigerator twinkled to me in this manner, for example. As did the empty husks of the kitchen shelves.

Perhaps what I saw there was merely a last, desperate stratagem employed by the dying forms of this expired world, in which they put on their very best cosmetics, and tried to convince me that they were young again. But even if it was, they were bringing it off quite admirably.

I sat, and admired them.

I sat, and admired as well the various lowly toys that the Intercessor showed to me, one by one.

He brought to me a chessboard, which was very prettily made. Its pieces were fashioned after the images of fairies and fauns, and on it the two sides were not black and white, but red and green.

We played against each other on it, his red against my green.

Yes, I did in fact sit across a game board, then, at the very end! And there was a crafty and admirable man across the table from me, then, at the very end!

And when our game of chess was done, we moved on to another game, for he had brought a number of different boards to me.

He taught me the rules of a game which he called “Shogi,” and we played that game. And afterwards, he taught me another game, which he simply called “Go.”

They were far finer games than chess, especially the latter.

The Intercessor and I contended across the “Go”-board, and our battling forms coiled and coiled around one another in novel shapes which had no names. And on occasion, when I would look upon that changing board, I did not only see the threats and escape routes of “Go,” but also the slightest, lowliest, briefest, most partial hints of the things that I had seen, above.

Except for these, however, I did not see those things and their nature around me at all, in any way. For this was indeed a world of shadows—and even its shadows were growing dim, now.

I must admit that there was some small part of me who still doubted, somehow, that the things I had seen above had been real at all.

No: he concluded—somehow!—that all of it, and all the rest of the night with it, must have been a simulacrum produced by my Adversary, as his first move in an even more dizzying game that we were just now beginning to play, whose false floors would truly be endless, and would eventually drive me truly mad.

This small, undaunted Herschel Schoen proclaimed that he would have his sense of knowing ALL—he would, he would!—and he would have it forever! Even if he had to sacrifice everything else in order to maintain it, and in the end know nothing at all.

But he was quiet within me, and his voice was growing ever weaker.

 

 

The Intercessor’s exit was unceremonious, when it did come.

At some point, after many hours at the kitchen table, he suddenly began to make a curious show of himself, plying me with a variety of sententious and vaguely valedictory utterances. I could not see what he was driving at, and I was afraid of asking him directly about it.

I was in my body, and it had its ways.

And so, at one point, I found that I had to leave the game table, in order to use the bathroom.

I was only in that room very briefly. But when I returned to the kitchen, I saw that its window was starting to glow with the first hints of the dawn.

And when I looked around my home, under that dawning light, I saw that there was no Santa Claus there, and no steeds or sleigh. He had simply vanished, and I was alone.

But we did have those last hours together, before he left.

We played many different games, and played too with certain other toys which one could not quite call games.

He showed me the drawing machine which he called a spirograph, and I watched it inscribe its wheel-like shapes onto the paper without having any need of my own hand to help it.

He showed me the many-colored block he called a Rubik’s Cube. And the twisted and broken character of its body confounded me, as it was meant to do.

He showed me a series of artworks he had created. It was plain that they were inspired by the forms of Raven problems: I saw the familiar grids on them, and the subtle similitudes. But there was a wildness and a whimsy, in the Intercessor’s compositions, which John Raven’s tiny mind could never have produced—and which John Raven’s cramped and narrow heart would never have permitted to him, even if the mind were found willing.

They were only ink on paper, and there was nothing that moved, upon that paper. But they were very pretty, nonetheless.

We seemed almost evenly matched, in the games that were truly games. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost—but every match was a tense and thrilling adventure, no matter which way it went at the very end.

I have to imagine that he was hiding his true skill from me, so as to better entertain me. I have to imagine that we were not really playing the same games at all—for I was actually trying to win, while he chose his moves in order to create a tense and thrilling adventure for me, in which he might either win or lose, depending on which of these best suited the preceding narrative.

But if it really was such an act, he was bringing it off admirably, fitting himself precisely to my size.

 

 

And then he was finally gone, leaving me alone to face the dawn.

And I was glad, even then.

For it was no ordinary dawn that I saw rising over the city, through the windows!

For one thing, the city itself seemed strangely dark, now that it had been deprived of its electric currents. But that was not even the main thing that I noticed!

Yes, it was true: the forms upon this world’s shadows had a sickly pallor to them, that morning, and a deathly rigidity. But that was not it, either!

No, what most fascinated me was simply that the sky looked rather strange, that morning.

It was fully clouded over, and yet the clouds seemed as thin as they were wide. Though I could not see the shape of the sun behind the clouds, those clouds were translucent, and shone brightly with the unseen sun’s light.

Occasionally, in small patches of the sky, the clouds would grow even thinner for a brief time, and a faint shaft of ghostly sunlight would fall visibly from them. And a faint and mistlike rain would also pour from these patches, and over some small part of the motionless city. The shaft and the rain would come down, for a minute or two, and then the thin place in the membrane would close over, and they would be gone again.

It was not at all unprecedented. This was just how the weather looked, sometimes. And so I had seen skies like this before, on occasion.

But they had not interested me, then, in the way that they did on the morning of Christmas Day.

I thought: there are so many DIFFERENT ways that one can be, if one only wills it! And I have tried so few of them, until now! Thank you, Intercessor, for showing that to me!

I laughed and laughed, as I walked the rooms of the apartment, alone!

I am Herschel Schoen! I proclaimed, to no one.

Merry Christmas to all! I proclaimed.

And to all, a good night!