7
When he was at work on his first novel—it was called The Court of Silk and Blood, about the fearsome Catherine de Médicis and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve—Fellowes Kraft began to understand for the first time certain things that Dr. Pons had set out to teach him long before in the house on the hill. For the book he had written—not this book in particular or anything that was done or said within it, but the fact of it, its coming into existence—was just like the appalling universe that man described.
Except for brief moments of ontological doubt such as anyone could have, Kraft had always known that the physical world—this earth and its universe of stars, its gravity and mass and elements, its living and dying stuff—was the base layer of reality. What we think about it is mere evanescence and spindrift; what we hope dies with each day; we impose our inexistent notions and grids upon it, but earth and the flesh abide.
According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind—Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom—which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the realm Without, utterly out of reach, the realm of the Fullness and God.
What Kraft learned, in his first joyous labors of imagination, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.
All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on—our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses, dogs, stars, stones and roses—in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughter laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality—the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.
They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of the Pleroma of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?
More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang—that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up as a book that is read.
He had laughed aloud in the midnight to think it, wherever he was then (a Paris garret, a rickety table, a kerosene stove), filled with a kind of hilarious pity for them in their pickle. Which was somehow more strait, and more pitiful, because so many of them had once lived in the world Kraft and his fellow humans lived in, out here. Catherine de Médici. Bruno. Nostradamus. Peter Ramus.
In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.
Like Dr. Pons leaning down to him, the tassel on his fez aswing and his hand by his mouth to calclass="underline" wake up.
Of course most of the time authors are busily not noticing these things, and trying to keep readers from noticing them too, just as Ialdabaoth and his gods and demons are supposed to be busily at work to keep us from ever noticing their impositions and frauds. But if his, Kraft's, people could just for once get it. If they could awaken from that dream, the Red King's dream; awaken even from the dream of awakening: arise, and go into the limitless common day, into the spring and the rain and the beating of their hearts. Was that possible?
Yes; yes of course it was. But only in fiction.
Day had reached noon in the Faraways. Kraft thought he would have a whisky soon, not a great drink with ice but only a dram, enough to cover the bottom of a cut-glass tumbler and refract the light. Four Roses. He ought to look into the refrigerator too, get himself something to eat, but at that thought his stomach turned, it actually did, one of those old figures that if you live long enough, or too long, you find aren't figures at all.
He drank the whisky, though: more beautiful and encouraging in the glass than in his mouth or heart. Oh well.
The telephone rang.
"Old friend,” Boney Rasmussen said, sounding almost as far away as he really was, in his big house a couple of miles and more from Kraft's. “I wondered if you were up for a game of chess tonight."
"Ah well."
"I'd be glad to come to your place.” Kraft had nearly ceased to drive. His vanishing competence or what he believed to be its vanishing had begun striking fear into his heart at odd moments, causing him to brake suddenly on the road, nearly causing thereby the awful collisions he envisioned.
"Mon empereur,” Kraft said. “I have a question."
"Anything."
"A question. Not a request."
"All right,” Boney said. “Shoot."
"Suppose I were very suddenly to make an exit. I mean drop dead. I'm afraid I haven't prepared very well for this eventuality."
"No need to hasten things,” Boney said after a funny pause. “Of course we must get all your ducks in a row."
"Ah yes. Ah yes. The very largest duck of course comes first, and that we have really firmly in place."
"You mean the books, the copyrights."
"Yes. They'll be yours. I mean the foundation's. And this house."
"Maybe I should come over,” Boney said. “It's actually a beautiful evening."
"There are masses of things. I have kept diaries. I have covered paper with writing, more with typing. I wouldn't want just any-old-body going through it. Though boredom would no doubt keep person or persons from going far."
Boney was silent for a long moment. The thoughts of age are long, long thoughts.
"You could,” he said at last, “destroy it yourself. Whatever of it you thought was too—too..."
"Somehow I can't do that,” Kraft said. “It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have profound horror of suicide."
More silence.
"Of course they're valueless. They're just mine. I'm like a bum on a park bench, his clothes stuffed with newspapers to keep him warm."
"Is any of it,” Boney asked, “recent?"