“No, I kind of like it,” he says. “You know, we all got to die sometime, and this just helps a fella get used to the idea. Besides, it’s kind of nice here.”
Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end? “I’m luckier than most,” he says. “I got what I wanted, not what I deserved.”
I read the article with slight, barely conscious interest, prodded by my daily habit of reading every article in the newspaper from beginning to end diligently, regardless of the content, but perhaps also prodded by the vaguely familiar tone of the somewhat cryptic remarks attributed to the old man, an assertiveness tempered by a strangely familiar form of personal humility, a kind of matter-of-fact pride and wisdom that I had not heard in many years. There was a small wirephoto of the graybeard above the article, and when I studied the blurred face, I recognized, in spite of the long beard, the hair, the stooped posture and the obvious aging that had taken place, my friend of long, long ago. It was A.
And thus, once again, after a lapse of what seemed an entire lifetime, I began thinking obsessively about the man. “Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end?” I chuckled to myself at the poor, befuddled reporter’s questions and imagined A. frustrating the fellow with half-truths and outright lies, flattery and aggression. The reporter should not have been talking to A., I snorted, but me! He’d never learn the truth from A., not in a million years.
BELIEVING AS I did that each of the above three events, taken separately, could explain A.’s peculiar (to me) absence that Sunday afternoon in February 1975, I had reached a point in my relation to him where almost anything could happen and where whatever did happen would be believable. It would seem “natural,” “right,” consistent with all I had known of him before. In other words, the man had become sufficiently real to me that I could, and therefore should, write a novel about him.
IT WAS ALMOST four o’clock by the time I arrived at my home in Northwood. The sun was setting coldly behind the low hills, dragging a darkening gray blanket across the snowy fields and woods while the temperature tumbled fast toward zero and below. Then, as the sun dropped wholly behind the farthest hill, leaving only a sky fading from red to peach to sooty gray to deep, starry blue, a low cold wind cruised across the snow, from the colder, eastern horizon to the slightly less cold western, as if following the waning light. Then the wind was gone, like a pack of silent dogs, and the night settled motionlessly down to its business of making the icy lakes creak and boom, of making the trees snap, the streams whimper, the hibernating animals underground turn worriedly in their sleep, of making the rocks beneath the snow concentrate their mass.
Inside my house, as soon as I had built the fire to blazing in the library, I sat down at my desk, plucked my pen from the holder, and, opening a blank notebook before me, wrote in large letters on the first page, HAMILTON STARK, A NOVEL. I turned the page, and continued to write.
CHAPTER 2 The Matrix: In Which Certain Geographic, Historic, Economic, and Ethnic Factors Get Described and Thence Enter the Drama; Also Flora, and Fauna, and Other Environmental Marginalia; Some Local Traditions; a Fabled Place and an Early Murder There
matrix (m´triks, ma´), n., pl. ma-tri-ces (m´-tri-sz´, ma´), ma-trix-es. 1. that which gives origin or form to a thing, or which serves to enclose it: Rome was the matrix of Western civilization. 2. Anat. a formative part, as the corium beneath the nail. 3. Biol. the intercellular substance of a tissue. 4. the fine-grained portion of a rock in which coarser crystals or rock fragments are embedded. 5. fine material, as cement, in which coarser material in lumps, as of an aggregate, are embedded. 6. Mining. gangue. 7. Metall. a crystalline phase in an alloy in which other phases are embedded. 8. Print. a model for casting faces. 9. master (def. 18). 10. (in a press or stamping machine) a multiple die or perforated block on which the material to be formed is placed. 11. Math. the rectangular arrangement into rows and columns of the elements of a set or sets. 12. a mold made by electro-forming from a disc recording, from which other discs may be pressed. 13. (on the circuitry of an electronic computer) an array of components, diodes, magnetic storage cores, etc., for translating from one code to another. 14. Archaic. the womb. [
1
How far back in time is it reasonable to push, before one detaches himself from the near bank and poles himself, guiding the drift back downstream, home again, by straddling the current at midstream, stroke over stroke down to the present? Eh? Back there the stream had narrowed, had run with a swiftness that increased geometrically with each mile as one returned to the source. There were rapids, low overhanging trees with dangerous strange beasts residing among the dark foliage; there were hidden shoals, sudden waterfalls, mythical creatures drinking at the edges of eddies and pools, caves along the banks, dawns savagely bright and silent, dusks that fell in seconds and released at their fall the cacophony of nighttime hunts. And the farther back one poled his fragile craft, the closer one came to the source (that high clear spring where a mountain toad bejeweled by sunlight squats upon a thick pelt of moss and sleeps), the more trivial seemed whatever quandary, shame, or project that characterized one’s present.
How, then, to justify the well-known practice of understanding one’s present by going into the past, when the farther into the past one travels, the more trivial seems the present? For if such understanding is available there, its nature at bottom would seem to be that the present is of no special significance. Why stay down there, it (the past) asks you, in that mucky, mosquito-infested, broad delta region where the muddied waters mix turgidly with the green and blue of the sea? Why indeed, when you have seen the flumed waterfalls here inland, the crystalline streambed glittering in noontime sunlight, the exotic beasts and highland orchids where the stream curls farther and farther into the mountains, through the mists to the mossy crags and the lichen-covered high plateaus?
For just look at where we, reader and writer of this book, stand now. Look at our quandary, our shame, our project. A mere crank, questions of his intentionality, of the quality of our love for him and possibilities of his love for us — that’s what’s got us down! A rube! A citizen of the provinces, a man whose life may well be incapable of offering posterity a single slice of cheese more than his particular sociology! How mere. Especially when to speak of love, or of cruelty, or of “demons” and the possession thereby (as indeed we must and shall), we are in all probability speaking solely from our private and peculiar, narrow versions of our very own lives. Worse, of our lives as children! Brats, puling, polymorphously demanding dependencies, social and genetic accidents dropped into an inappropriate time and place. We are so used to our own whining about how we never asked for our parents, their limitations and friends, that we forget how little our parents and their friends had to do with requesting us. We weren’t exactly what was wanted — unteethed, limp-limbed, blind, bawling, caul-wrapped, hungry and without gratitude. What would any poor people, poor and therefore leisureless, in bad health and nasty-tempered, want with children? Or at least with children such as we were? A poor people, if, as a consequence of the quick and cheap pleasure of copulation with sick and tense bodies, it must produce children, wants them to be born fully grown, strong, intelligent, useful and filled with abiding gratitude. No people is in such dire need of a healthy slave population as a poor people in a poor land. But one of life’s great ironies is that all these people get are children, and more of them than anyone else. If the reader does not yet agree, let him read some population statistics. It’s enough to make a sensitive man weep and think longingly of infanticide.