The Art of Living (11 page)

We take these things for granted, or at any rate for probably true, and though we glance left then right before crossing a street, as if Newton's universe were still in operation, or even Moses' universe (“I know I have sinned, therefore it is likely that I'll be hit by a car”), we know we have no choice but to make do with the universe we're caught in. I could say more on this subject—I'm a voracious reader and, as you'll see, no fool—but as I've said, my time is limited.

My library—
our
library, for the house is in my wife's name as well as my own—gives at first the impression of being nothing but books: books from floor to ceiling on all four walls, more books on the five free-standing stacks, three feet apart, which stretch from the east wall of the room to the west with only a four-foot-wide passageway tunneling through them, like a series of entrances to a crypt. These shelves too rise from floor to ceiling. One ducks one's head, moving to the heart of the library; above the eighth shelf—the roof of the tunnel through the stacks—the shelves run straight across the room. One feels, in our library, buried in books, entombed. It is partly for this reason that I avoid the place.

Yet the impression from the doorway that the room contains nothing but books is an illusion. Beyond the low passage through the free-standing stacks one sees—or, rather, I saw as I came in—that the heart of the library is flooded with moonlight, so that there must be large windows or (as happens to be the fact) French doors. Then one notices a glow in a part of that light, and one deduces (or knows) that in the heart of the library there is a fireplace where not long since there was a roaring fire. Every night around dusk I make a fire in the library fireplace. I never read there—the place makes me uneasy, all that gloomy weight of learning, ton upon ton of contradictory opinion, as if right to the center of things reality is moot—but the truth, I'm afraid, is that if I didn't make a fire there my wife would complain that we need servants. For the same reason I work frantically in the garden, trim the hedges, pick up the droppings from our high enclosing walls of blue spruce…. But enough.

There was not a sound now. I groped for the lightswitch to the right of the door and flicked it three times until finally, as if grudgingly, slightly arcing, it turned the lights on. The room was hardly lighter than before; in fact, it was only the quality of the light that changed. Cautiously, I moved my right slipper forward, then my left, soundlessly heading toward the hearth-lit center of the library. I opened the penknife as I went.

Well, no point making high drama of it. Suddenly, there in front of me—leaping out so quickly from behind the third bookshelf that I hardly knew at first where he'd come from—stood a man with an axe. He was a small man, no more than four feet tall. Why this should be I have no idea, but small he was, a perfectly formed midget with terrified, rolling, somewhat slanted eyes, more terrified of me than I had time to be of him, a ferocious little Russian—a student, I imagined—crazily muttering to himself. Dim as the room was I saw everything with dreadful clarity, like a man about to die. His eyes were sunken, his lips wildly trembled, his coat came almost to his ankles. On the blunt side of the axe there was blood and what might have been gray hair. I tried to speak, but it was as if all the air had gone out of me. My knees banged crazily together. He drew back the axe, blunt side forward, to strike me, but that very instant a young woman in English Victorian dress appeared behind him and cried out, “Lord in heaven! Have you gone loopy?” He turned his head, or, rather, threw it around, to look at her, and his axe waggled downward a little. She too was a midget, though now it was less obvious; something was beginning to happen to my sense of the scale of things. The books on the shelves had grown larger, and the people the same. He looked at the girl with a terrified fixity, as if—in the word's profoundest sense—he'd never seen anyone like her.

With a part of my mind I was so afraid of the little man I could think nothing at all, but with another part, or so it seems to me now, I sensed what he was thinking. Raskolnikov—for of course it was he—had never seen an English schoolgirl and had no way of knowing she was, so to speak, an “outlaw” English schoolgirl; but he knew, it seemed to me, that she was somehow an outlaw, as he was, theoretically; and what had shocked him so badly that he had lowered his axe was philosophical: this girl in dark ringlets, with the slightly puffy eye-sacs, the petulant mouth, the stance he could not judge as obscene or unobscene, not knowing her culture, but knew to be somehow or another defiant and by the standards of her own time and place almost certainly unacceptable, this girl was, like him, a moral outcast, but outcast from a morality so different from his own world's as to cast the idea of “universal human nature” into the trash-heap of ancient
pseudodoxia
. As he dropped the axe and crazily stared at her, she paid attention. He was astonished by this and reached for the axe again but merely touched it with the tips of his fingers then changed his mind and let it lie. It seems pointless to analyze, but it comes to this: his standards of good and evil—the standards by which he defended and condemned himself—were so different from hers, or her society's, that he abandoned all sense and followed her, like a sexually aroused animal, into the dimness beyond the fourth shelf.

I can hardly bear to tell you the trivia that followed. It seemed to me at the time astonishing, even wonderfully interesting, but on reflection I see that it was neither. I could recreate my state of mind for you perhaps, by trickery and rhetoric, but I refuse to descend to such foolishness. Suffice it to say that I saw Ahab, split by lightning from head to toe, who argued with Boswell's Dr. Johnson, boringly—sometimes threatening to hit Dr. Johnson “a good one, right smack in thy face,” to the latter's dismay, of course—about immanence and transcendence; saw Scrooge and Bunyan's Pilgrim, who sounded to my ears remarkably alike; talked with Jane Austen's Emma, who was not at all as pretty as I'd imagined her to be and seemed oddly bigoted on almost everything we touched … etc.

I will leap to the heart of the matter, which is this: when I had been in my library for several hours, arguing with these dreams or apparitions or realities, my wife came to me dressed in her nightgown—she is generally said to be quite beautiful—and said, “Winfred, are you coming to bed?” I knew this was a threat and a proposal. “Soon,” I said, twisting my head around to look at her, “I'm not quite finished.” She stood waiting. By now the beauty of her breasts and flanks, well defined under the nightgown, had become, I thought, slightly comic. If one sits looking long enough at mere actuality it becomes, well, obvious. She pivoted away, swinging her rear end in a way that an actress might call cliché, and disappeared through the low-slung entrances or, in this case, exits. From the door she called back, “Remember, tomorrow is visitors' day at the asylum. I know you're busy, of course….”

At this moment, as if summoned by her words, something came charging from the books, terribly shrieking. It came straight toward me. I couldn't make out what it was, at first. It was brighter than the light from a bursting star, coming straight at me with a clatter and roar like a lightning-ball. At the last instant, I saw the apparition with absolute clarity: the hero of my youth—I was sixteen when I first read a version of his story—Achilles! Without a word, without an instant's hesitation, he raised his sword and struck. In amazement, I watched blood rush down my chest from the deep wound in my neck. I stared at him in horror—more horror than disbelief. It was incredible! He was the hero of absolute justice, God-sent doom, terrible purgation, and I was—I screamed with all my might—“Not guilty!” He stared at me, baffled. Perhaps he spoke no English; or perhaps he was amazed that, wounded as I was, I could still speak. He raised his huge sword to strike again.

My wife cried, from somewhere far away, “Winfred!” And then again, from somewhere nearer, “
Win
fred!”

He turned, listening, more baffled than before. Slowly, carefully, eyes somewhat confused, he raised that huge, gleaming knife.

Now she was behind me. “You were screaming! Have you gone crazy?” she demanded. He stood teetering the knife, as if he imagined I was moving, like a chicken who nervously twists its neck on the block.

“Winfred,” she whispered, “what's come
over
you?”

Achilles, lover of justice and truth, glanced past his shoulder as if for invisible support, then swung again, this time softly, uncertainly, though his blade nonetheless cut the tendon that held my neck to my right shoulder.

“Winfred!” cried my wife. “Say something! What's the
matter
with you?”

I sat hunched forward, hiding my condition as well as possible. Abruptly, seeing that I would not speak or turn, she left me, furiously whispering to herself.

Not to make too much of it, I knew then and there that I was dying.

Though time is running out—each word I write is more shaky than the last—let me pause to discuss this peculiar situation. If my sentence ends in the middle, so it ends. Goodbye, God bless you. So I pray while I still have the strength.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I'm not dying but going mad. (I'm obviously rational, but no one's more rational than a maniac, this I know. My wife, you may say, does not seem to see Achilles; but my wife is no test of reality. She too comes from a long line of lunatics, all people of substance in their day, like myself.) Very well, let us say, for argument's sake, that I am mad. Here sits character
x
, a madman, struck a mortal blow by character
y
, a fiction. What can
x
do, mad as he is, but struggle to maintain justice, normality?

Perhaps my father is unjustly accused. The judge who committed him is afraid of black cats. Even the testimony I myself gave may not have been quite fair, though to the best of my knowledge it was true. My wife also may be unjustly accused, insofar as I accuse her of imbalance. But this much, at least, seems certainly true: if a fictional character, namely Achilles, can make blood run down my chest (if it is indeed running down my chest), then a living character, or two such characters—my father and my wife—can be made to live forever, simply by being put in a fiction.

For this reason—though possibly it makes no sense, possibly I'm making some outlandish mistake—I sit at my desk in this library, writing while the blood runs out of me, the moon hides in clouds, and the fire in the fireplace burns down to ash—Achilles, five feet tall, rather larger than the others, hacking and chopping at my shoulders and spine, while Tom Jones, Gulliver, Hamlet, and many others stand cheering, booing, or complaining in the shadows, taking note of my demise or ignoring it, involved in their own huge affairs. For this reason I construct the following, which I'll pursue as time allows.

“Ah, Greer, what a good, gentle woman you are,” says my father.

She shakes her head, gloomy, and with her long fingers turns the cup handle north. The table runs east and west. “You're babbling,” says my wife.

Her irritation surprises him, and he glances up at her, then down again at his knees. “That's not what I meant,” he says.

She rises suddenly, goes over and opens the icebox door, and, like a child, stands looking inside. “Christ,” she says.

“No cheese?” he asks. He has no idea why he thinks she's looking for cheese.

“
Cheese?
” she asks, more irritable than before. She looks at him. He can see that she thinks he's crazy. He could make a fire in the sink, she wouldn't think it more crazy than his assumption that she's looking for cheese. She comes back to the table with the milk pitcher and a glass.

My father feels pain, a light ticking exactly in the center of his chest. Once, years ago, riding with my mother, he had to stop the car—she'd been bawling him out about his failure to press charges against someone who had robbed him—he had to stop the car and run down the road pell-mell to keep from having a heart attack.

“All I meant …” says my father, and lets it trail off. With enormous effort, he reaches across the table and takes her hand.

Tears burst into my wife's eyes and spill down her cheeks. “Never mind,” she says. “I'm sorry.” She thinks about it, then slowly lowers her head to the tabletop. My father, after carefully thinking about it, raises his crooked, calloused hand and lowers it to touch her soft hair.

“Dear God, if I were Winfred's age,” my father complains. He moves the stiff hand to the side of her face and brushes the barely perceptible fuzz on her cheek. He does not touch the tears.

“You're crazy,” she says, and laughs, half crying. “Has it ever struck you that if you and I were normal people, like Winfred, for instance, in there turning the pages, one, two, three—”

“Now now,” says my father. “When you're my age you've thought about everything, more or less.” His hand moves slowly, gently, over her hair. He's eighty-two. She's thirty. No one would think him insane except that he once backed his truck through the plate-glass window of my bank.

The hair prickles on the back of my neck, as if an ice-cold wind has touched it. Achilles, Lord of Justice, is standing in the doorway, dressed in a drab, neat suit, like a Jehovah's Witness. I see that he has grasped the situation between my wife and my father.

I snatch at his elbow. “No justice,” I plead, “enough of justice!”

None of this is possible, I realize. My father is in the asylum, Achilles does not exist. I focus hard, trying to read what I have written. The desk is all blood.

My head is filled with planets and stars. Achilles moves slowly toward my father, raising his knife.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might, for any good fiction will serve in hard times—I clench my eyes against the tumbling of the planets—“Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might.