"What's your name?" Kline asked.
"I'm Paul," said the man.
"You're not," said Kline.
"We all are," he said.
Kline shook his head. "You can't all be Paul," he said.
"Why not?" said the man. "Is this a teaching?"
"A teaching?" said Kline. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Should I write it down?"
"Write what down?"
"'You can't all be Paul.' And whatever else comes thereafter from your lips."
"No," said Kline, a strange dread starting to grow within him. "I don't want you to write anything down."
"Is that too a teaching?" said Paul. "'Write nothing down'?"
"Nothing's a teaching," said Kline. "Stop saying that."
Kline started into the bacon. As he ate, Paul stared at him, his brow creased in concentration, as if afraid to miss something.
"Am I a prisoner here?" Kline asked.
"A prisoner?" said Paul. "But we're helping you."
"I want to leave," said Kline.
"Why?" asked Paul. "We believe in you, friend Kline," he said. "Why would you want to leave? You're not healed yet."
"You haven't always been called Paul, have you?" Kline said.
Paul looked surprised. "No," he admitted reluctantly.
"What did you used to be called?"
"I'm not allowed to say," said Paul. "It's a dead name. 'You must lose yourself to find yourself.' That's a teaching."
"It's all right to say," said Kline. "You can tell me." Paul looked to either side of him and then leaned forward, whispering into Kline's ear: "Brian."
"Brian?" said Kline.
Paul winced.
"Why Paul?" asked Kline. "Why are you all Paul?"
"Because of the Apostle," said Paul. "And the other one, the philosopher's brother."
"What's this all about?"
"A work," said Paul, his cadence slightly odd as if he were a child reciting something memorized. "A marvelous work and a wonder, such as has never come to pass before in the world of men." He leaned in closer. "We have a relic for you," he whispered.
"A relic?"
"Sshh," said Paul. "They didn't know its value," he said. "But our agent did."
Kline caught a brief movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to the doorway to see another man standing there, one hand missing, hair blond. He was frowning.
"Ah," said Kline. "You must be Paul."
The Paul beside him stiffened. He lifted the breakfast tray and hurried out. The Paul in the doorway moved to let him past, then followed him out, pushing the door shut behind him.
Another Paul came in a few hours later to bring him lunch, then another Paul not long afterward who changed his dressings and massaged his legs and helped him up to the bathroom. Neither were talkative, both answering his questions simply and noncommittally. Yes, they were each called Paul. Yes, they both had had other names, dead names, but both were firm in their refusal to divulge them. No, he was not a prisoner, they claimed, but they both encouraged him so strongly to remain in bed that he felt as if he were a prisoner. To the question "What am I doing here?" and the question "What do you want from me?" — each posed to a different Paul-they just smiled. All, they assured him, would be explained in time. "By whom?" he asked, and was not surprised when they answered, "By Paul."
After the last Paul was gone, he tried to think. Could he make his way out without them stopping him? His shoulder still throbbed when he moved that side of his body. His head hurt too, but the knife was mostly gone from his eye, and when it came was not nearly as severe, as if it were stabbing into a wound whose edges had already been cauterized, was just slightly tearing the fleshy edge of his brain. He was hardly at his best, but he was far from his worst. Was he in good enough shape to leave?
Over the course of the day, the paintings started to feel familiar, no longer so strange. True, they were grotesque, but it became harder and harder to keep that in mind. The screaming or singing man started to seem more and more incidental to the composition of the picture as a whole, and he found himself thinking about the pattern of ochres and blacks and clammy whites, about the cast of light and shadow, in a way he almost found soothing.
A Paul came in, a new one or a repeater, he wasn't sure. They had all started to look alike to him. The Paul held a dinner tray. Kline ate slowly. He was, he told himself, feeling much better.
"Paul," he said.
"Yes?" said Paul.
"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what's going on here?"
"That is not for me to say," said Paul.
"I suppose not," said Kline. "I should wait for Paul then, should I?" Paul beamed, nodded. "Soon," he said. "No need to worry."
After Paul was gone, Kline lay thinking. He could get out of bed and when one of the Pauls came, as long as he was not a large Paul, he could probably feign weakness and then, while the Paul was unsuspecting, overpower him. He would hit him in the throat as hard as he could, or almost: not hard enough to kill him. Would it be hard enough? Would it be too hard? He kept thinking about it, imagining his hand flashing out, how the Paul's throat would feel to the blade of it, of the hand.
But no, he realized, he was now too curious to leave before finding out more about what was going on.
That night he had dreams of conflagration, scattered bits and fragments of burnings that seemed, he reflected later, to be assembled from many moments of smoke or fire, benign or otherwise, that he had experienced in his life. Yet in the midst of the fragments was a single roaring kerneclass="underline" he saw himself, arm missing to the elbow, stumble out of a doorway and shoot a gun-handed guard through the head. This is a dream, he told himself, and was pleased that he could recognize this, though later there came gradually a nagging suspicion that it was not just a dream, had not always been a dream.
He shot the guard through the head and the man fell back gasping, hissing blood through his lips in a fine mist that slowly shadowed the floor beside his face. After a little while, the fellow seemed dead. Kline searched his pockets, found cigarettes, a book of matches. He used the matches to light the dead man's clothing on fire, then stood watching, making sure the flames started feeding up the wall.
Doors near him started to open and then quickly closed again. People were shouting. He stumbled his way down the stairs and shot a guard coming up, a lucky shot this time. A few seconds later he tripped over the man's body and fell the rest of the way down.
When he awoke it was to a man playing the piano, a careful, melancholy piece. He could only see the man from the back but could still tell he was blond and missing a hand. A Paul, certainly. He was playing one-handed but the piece didn't seem to be suffering as a result.
The piece slowed further, wound around itself, slowly died. The man stayed at the instrument, pedal down, letting the last notes resonate. One hand and half his body was hunched over the keyboard. The other arm, the stump, hung loosely at his side, as if each half of his body was controlled by a different brain. It was a curious and startling effect.
Eventually the notes faded utterly and both halves of the man's back finally relaxed to become a single back again. He swiveled around to regard Kline.
"Hindemith," he said. "Wittgenstein commissioned it-not the philosopher but his musical brother, Paul, who'd lost his arm in the war. He commissioned more than half a hundred one-handed piano pieces. He was a visionary."
Not knowing what else to say, Kline said: "Paul, I presume."
"Indeed," said the man, smiling slightly. Standing, he came to Kline's bedside.