And so it came to pass. And it was good.
He showed me his palm, held open in the shape he made shadows and reflections of animals with on rock and water. Empty. Then, without altering its profile, he showed me the back of his hand. Empty also. Or at least emptyish. Empty if you discount the green fibres that were just visible between his fingers.
Well? He was impatient for my verdict. Well?
I nodded. Miser that I was.
Effective?
Very effective.
I did not add that if he meant to unmake creation, a leaf at a time would be slow going.
He insisted on explaining how it was done. Ungodlike of him.
The leaf is held between the thumb and the first finger. The thumb relaxes — that’s important — allowing the leaf to droop against the backs of the first, second and third fingers. The little finger grips the edge of the leaf between itself and the third finger; the first finger falls away so that the thumb is now gripping the opposite edge of the leaf between itself and the second finger. Now, how does it go?… Yes… the first finger slips down the edge of the leaf and replaces the thumb in gripping the edge of the leaf against the… which is it?… the third, no, the second finger… the second finger, that’s right… which permits the thumb to move away, leaving the leaf firmly gripped, like… like… so, between the first and the second, and the little and the third. Extend and straighten the fingers and, watch! — are you watching this? — the palm of the hand is empty! Now, in order to transfer the leaf from the back of the hand to the front, close the fingers of the palm, grip the…
I held up my own empty palm — empty of leaf, empty of pity — and stopped him. Enough, I said. Don’t spoil the mystery.
All animation fled his face. Light died in his eyes. His shoulders dropped. His hands fell open, inelastic, bleeding green, like discarded vegetable matter.
Right, he said, turning from me. Right.
As he walked away, I thought he didn’t just look defeated, but shabby as well. Run down. Neglected. More the orphan than me.
I knew I shouldn’t have interrupted him. An interruption when you are in full flow is like a blow to the heart. In Adam’s case a blow to the heart and to the soul, a stab in the back, a poisoning of the central nervous system, a torture to the mind, a suffocation and a braining and a garrotting — so dependent was he, for definition and dignity, for the maintenance of the illusion of freedom and authority, for life itself, on this fatuous enthusiasm of his. Stop him in the tracks of his magic and he fell back at once into those craters of original Chaos that were always opening behind him.
It is crueller to be a son than to be a father. A son sees into his father’s terrors. Sits like a bucket under a fractured pipe and catches the drip, drip, drip, of all his shameful secrets. You should look away, if you are a son. You should turn your back and stop your ears. You should up-end your bucket every night, slop out, before the drip, drip, dripping begins again in the morning. At the last there is only one virtue a son must practise, and that is charity.
So where was mine?
Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen, but there is also such a thing as charity to oneself. There were my own feelings to consider, my own illusion of definition and dignity to maintain. And the spectacle of my father — the only father with a small f that I had — expending his time, his energies, his love, his small capacity for conversation and his prodigious allotment of nerve and muscle on the juggling of a bay leaf did nothing to ease the conviction of worthlessness — worthlessness in the very blood — which my mother’s rejection of us both had started in me.
Small wonder she preferred the company of God, who could tell the stars in their infinity and reckon the dust of the earth and count the number of the beast, to my poor father, who considered he did well to number his ten fingers. And small wonder, if in some essential and irrefragable way I was like him, that she turned her breast from me and gave it, with all its spouting papillae…
Stop. This is not an accurate description of what I felt. I must not invent an enmity I never did, and still do not, acknowledge. I did not hate my brother. I am not even certain I got as far as resenting him. If I say that I experienced a clear sensation of opposition and rivalry to him, what have I said that is not true of the relation of all things to all things, whether they be living creatures or inert matter? Opposition is the beginning and the end of us. Out of division — the rivalry order enjoyed with chaos, light with darkness, form with void — we passed from idea to actuality. Blessed art thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, Who hast made a separation between what is holy and profane; between the upper waters and the lower; between an elder brother and a younger… Strife is not merely in our bones, it made our bones. Allow a little for the possibility of unequal contest, the arrogance of victory on one side, the slow seeping dejection of failure on the other, and you have envy. Introduce a third party and you have jealousy.
Undoubtedly I was envious of my brother; undoubtedly I was jealous that what had once been mine had gone to him. But here too, don’t forget, I was in harmony with first causes. A jealous God. A murmuring Satan. Injunctions at every turn against our daring to trespass on privileges never intended for our appropriation. If I cried out against my brother’s putting forth his hand, and taking fruit that was not his to take, and living for all time therefrom in the knowledge of unbroken happiness, the model for my possessiveness was the Lord.
It is not my intention, far from home, to mitigate or apologise. Least of all for covetousness, which is as instinctual to us as thirst. The truth of the matter is not that I wished to deny my brother but that I feared for my own provision. If creation itself had been more generous, then so might I. But wherever I looked about me I saw reason to believe I might go hungry. Not for mere bread. And not for honey to spread on it. But for notice. For valuation. For esteem. I could not be convinced that there was praise enough to go round; that compliment and favour would not suddenly run out. The teeming land sent up more monsters in an afternoon than I could have catalogued in a year, but its store of validating commendation was exhaustible, finite, dwindling.
You are great lovers of growing things, you Shinarites. You plant gardens inside your houses. You festoon your rooms with flowers. You therefore know I am not exaggerating when I say that there can sometimes be a conflict between you and your inhaling foliage. Sleep in a confined space with a plant close to your pillow and the night is witness to a deadly respiratory struggle. Take this figure to be an analogy to my relations with my brother. I believed Abel was breathing my air.
Not fancifully. Actually. Because it was air itself to me to receive my mother’s plaudits for my cleverness, to be congratulated on every antic, worshipped for every word, kissed after every new coinage, as though I were not like any other, truly exceptional — the one and only child upon the planet.
Which is exactly what I had been.
And yes, I will admit it, since I see the accusation in your eyes — which is exactly what I would be still.
We were a sorry pair, my father and I, the unloved magician and his unpraised son, sitting back to back on the highest hardest rock within our compass, putting as much distance as we could arrange between ourselves and the earth which had unaccountably disgorged and then disprized us. We ought to have been more of a consolation to each other. One should have danced and the other should have clapped. There was no one watching who might have jeered. No One. We were sole lords of the silentness.
At the very least I ought not to have discouraged him from explaining how you uncreate a bay leaf, and stopped the only flow of which he was capable.